Egor G. Kraft
(映治 / Egy)
is an
artist and thinker
whose work
acknowledges
the disrupted modern condition
as a consequence of
radical techno-cultural
planetary reconfiguration.
He lives a mobile life,
splitting his time between
Western Europe and Eastern Asia,
with studios in
Tokyo (東京) and Vienna,
as well as deep ties to
London and Berlin.
Kraft’s multi-award winning work
has exhibited in
museums, galleries and festivals worldwide.
He is a lecturer at
European and Asian universities,
author of publications
and
speaker at international conferences.
His research driven practice
involves
thought-objects,
AI models (人工知能模型),
data-monuments,
films,
essays,
hardware contraptions (機械),
web-based executions,
virtu-real embodiments,
investigative inquiries,
hacktivist interventions,
speculative proposals,
hyper-poetry and
other forms.
These efforts are informed by
speculative philosophies_
Model Collapse Studies
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A text-to-image AI model was given the prompt “A single chair on a white background.” After six iterations of retraining on its own outputs, the autocannibalised model lost ability to produce realistic chair images, but non-figurative digital noise instead. Thus revealing model collapse and its fragility to recursive data feedback loops.
Images of chairs were generated by a Stable Diffusion deep learning model from the prompt 'a single chair on a white background'. The dataset was reused to retrain the model, as if to enhance its understanding of the given prompt. After six iterations, data cannibalism led the figurative chair image to become abstract digital noise, exposing susceptibility to corruption of computational ontology due to data feedback loops within Ai model echo chambers.
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Model Collapse Studies
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The essay explores the parallels between errors in AI image recognition and biases in human visual perception. It illustrates how both AI and humans misinterpret patterns for reasons that are both similar and different.
The essay explores parallels between AI image recognition errors and human visual perception biases. it highlights how both AI and humans misinterpret patterns, though for different reasons: AI due to limited training data and architecture, humans due to innate cognitive pattern-seeking. Modern neural networks improve recognition through layered learning, but both humans and machines depend on the breadth and quality of their “visual experience”.
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Tactical Archiving
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The work examines the longevity of media carriers: text carved in stone vs .jpeg file on Wikipedia. Both reference each other. The first to vanish reveals its fragility.
The work investigates the longevity of media carries by juxtaposing the same information being held by two fundamentally different mediums: a text carved into stone and a .jpeg file hosted on Wikipedia. The investigation is not complete until one of them is lost, thus revealing it’s less durable qualities in site of the other. Which one will be lost first? Only time will tell…
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Tactical Archiving
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Hashd0x is an artist initiated dApp addressing disinformation via on-chain evidence. The work Proof of War uses it to 3D-scan a bombed house in Borodyanka, storing drone images on-chain as an uncensored record of war crimes.
Hashd0x is a tactical software created by an artist, hactivists, and software engineers to combat disinformation through instant, spoof-proof on-chain evidence capture and forensics tools. The video-installation "Proof of War" uses this software to create a 3D model of a shattered house in Borodyanka, Kyiv region, using custom built drone-operated camera. The images and videos are hashed, registered, and stored on-chain via hashd0x's dApp, creating a lasting, uncensored digital record of present-day war crimes.
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Tactical Archiving
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Fact Caching protects investigative journalism. Censored archives are safeguarded against blocking by being hosted as tiny data bits across thousands of nodes on decentralised networks.
Fact Caching provides an infrastructural proposal to protect journalistic data and investigative work from censorship and blocking. Using decentralized blockchain storage infrastructures, simultaneously stored on thousands of nodes, previously banned journalistic archives become safe from censorship and IP-blocking.
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Post Sovereign Scenarios
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A high-end multi-GPU server in a Berlin gallery runs continuously on electricity derived from Russian gas. It mines cryptocurrency directly to Ukraine’s official donation address, converting the energy source of aggression into financial aid for its victim.
A high-end multi-GPU server installed in a Berlin gallery runs 24/7 on electricity supplied by EnBW, known as the Germany’s largest gas power operator and Russian gas importer. It mines cryptocurrency directly to the official Ukrainian donation address, literally converting Russian gas into financial aid for the victim of its aggression. The work exposes the absurd hypocrisy of the German economy in relation to its politics, as it simultaneously finances both sides of the armed conflict.
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Post Sovereign Studies
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The essay proposes the Aura Protocol, a speculative public broadcasting co-op platform that reimagines urban advertising spaces as collectively curated digital commons.
The essay proposes the Aura Protocol, a speculative public broadcasting platform that reimagines urban advertising spaces as collectively curated digital commons. The protocol envisions using web3 technologies - including DAOs, blockchain governance, and token-based economics - to democratise control over billboards and screens in public spaces. The central premise challenges the current advertising monopoly, as well as the politics and aesthetics of public-space curation: if billboard space can be rented commercially, why not collectively fund and govern it through community participation, incentivised by distributed airtime revenue?
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Post Sovereign Studies
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Twelve Nodes addresses the importance of ethical issues in relation to the misuse of personal data and proposes a collective design for the Fair Data standard, inspired by the Twelve Tables – the first written legal code of ancient Rome.
Twelve Nodes addresses urgent questions surrounding the ethical treatment of personal data and the need for stronger regulation in response to its widespread misuse. The work introduces Fair Data, a framework that defines standards for consent, collection, ownership, and the fair economic use of personal data. The twelve frames reference the Twelve Tables of Roman law, the foundation of modern civil law, reimagined here as the basis for a new legal code responsive to contemporary technologies and their ethical implications. Twelve Nodes invites public debate on the design of a future legal framework and a collective, democratic understanding of data rights. Democratic participation and networked cultural production are positioned as central to this process, fostering new forms of digital literacy and civic engagement.
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Post Sovereign Scenarios
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The multi-channel video installation portrays scenes of a future in which governance has largely been outsourced to AI. It is set in a highly automated Moscow in the year 2050.
A film, presented in a form of 5-channel video installation, looking at a near future, where governance has largely been outsourced to Artificial Intelligence in the speculative context of Moscow in 2050 where a high degree of automation is present.
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A modified digital printer is able to continuously perform printing on a looped-back sheet of paper, running for two months, throughout the entire duration of the show, is repeatedly reproducing one line of text: I Print Therefore, I Am.
A modified printer endlessly prints the phrase I print, therefore I am on a looped sheet, sustaining itself throughout the exhibition as a proof of existence through repetition. The work reflects the industrial logic born from printing technology—repeatability as the foundation of mechanical modernity and mass production. Now obsolete, the printer persists blindly, a relic of the typographic trance in an age governed by new media logics.
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Kickback is a series of interventions in global fast-fashion retail stores in which modified goods are returned for resale to offer critical commentary on current consumption–production ethics.
The intervention was carried out in 2014 in St Petersburg, when the artist bought a few plain white T‑shirts from the well-known clothing chain. Without removing any tags from the T‑shirts, the artist used a professional screen‑printing technique to print the T‑shirt with the text: 'Please Ignore This Text - Keep on Shopping', as if they had been originally designed that way. The next day he went back to the store to return and be refunded for his newly modified T‑shirt, telling the store’s cashier that it just didn’t fit him. The store staff member, without suspecting anything, accepted the T‑shirt and refunded him. The following day the artist returned to the store to find that his self‑modified T‑shirt was now on sale again, complete with a reattached magnetic anti‑theft tag. The T‑shirt’s new guise had even prompted the store to display it in a more prominent position on the clothes rack. A series of similar events has since been carried out.
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A three-metre object with LED-illuminated text engraving: 'http://this-is-the.link/between/the/real-and-virtual'is installed in public space, facing a 360-degree camera. The displayed URL leads to a live panoramic stream of the site itself, allowing viewers to inhabit the same moment both online and on location, collapsing the boundary between physical and virtual spaces.
The three-metre-long metal and plexiglass object with LED-illuminated text is intended for display in public spaces. A 360-degree camera on a tripod is positioned in front of it. The text is a URL and a sentence: http://this-is-the.link/between/the/real-and-virtual. The URL suggests the web link is active. Visiting it leads to a webpage with a live, 360-degree panoramic video stream of the object’s display site. By visiting the URL, the spectator effectively re-enacts the link’s text, appearing simultaneously in both the real and virtual situations, or as the artist puts it, in the ‘virtureal’ dimension.
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Emitting the brightest possible cold, white light - the text running across the LED display board repetitively states: “...This very moment, has already become the past – This very mo...”
Emitting the brightest possible cold, white light - the text running across the LED display board repetitively states: “...This very moment, has already become the past – This very mo...”Text placed in a time-based dimension and in a specific spatial context results in the distortion of the original text’s semiotic features - its material permanence (as if it was a painting on a wall) loses its permanence. Now the text is used to express the flow of time, by pointing readers' attention to the very moment of ‘now’. The viewer reads the text - which relentlessly manifests the moment of now – whilst simultaneously experiencing the refraction of his perception of time, since we tend to forget ourselves whilst immersed in the reading process. This reveals the basic hypnotic property of any time-based media and semiotic features of the text. The work could be considered a monument to the irreversibility of the flow of time or maybe even seen as a design proposal for what a media-accelerated mantra should be. Or perhaps instead what it should not be.
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The general human question infinitely sinks in the depths of a sequence of virtual space architecture. Each new mouse click takes us away from an answer and question, just as each following step of the development of media environment and virtualization moves us further away from the understanding of what makes reality real.
As the viewer approaches the video installation consisting of a computer standing on a typical office desk, the screen turns on and starts playing the video: viewer sees computer’s desktop, with the folder called ‘the sense of existence', the cursor moves to the folder and opens it up, a new window opens with another few folders of sub-categories... video continues …’ A question of vital importance to humanity is lost in ordered labyrinths of virtual space. Each new click of the mouse takes us further from issues like the way the development of mass media distracts us from understanding reality. Activity is transformed into a situational spectacle, in which the choice of a particular media as a means of understanding replaces our effort to perceive reality and the meaning of our existence in that reality.
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Simulation Studies
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E-ink screens are set to display moving image streamlined by an AI (GAN) algorithm trained on images of inkblots and set to generate similar images at the rate of thousands a minute. Thousands of inkblots splashed on a cold pressed paper comprise the training data. It is computed via an open frame, high-performance GPU server, its hardware is liquid-cooled with an actual ink containing coolant solution. The work focuses on the ink itself, its material qualities, aesthetic capacities and ontology.
In this installation, e-ink screens are set to display a moving image, generated by an AI system in real-time. The system is trained on images of inkblots and set to render visually alike content at the rate of hundreds of samples per minute. The training data was comprised of a thousand scans of inkblots on cold-pressed paper sheets. The algorithm is computed via the GPU server in an open frame wall-mounted configuration; its hardware is liquid-cooled with the solution containing actual ink mix, that circulates throughout the machine. The installation calls on the traditional Chinese ink wash painting technique, however not so much in relation to its style or iconography, but rather it focuses on the material qualities of the ink, its aesthetic capacities and ontology. Under what guises will this tradition continue to exist through phases of industrial advancements of visual media? Can one still trace subtle details of ink drops soaked into paper on images, computationally derived from original samples? Does it hold up to be called inkblot when each image is unique only in its algorithmic authenticity and is produced via the means of e-ink displays? Unlike conventional screens are engineered to mimic the look of ink on paper by arranging nanosized pigment particles with electromagnetic waves across the display’s surface. The work is a visual meditation on tracing links between traditions, industrial processes, tools, emerging aesthetics & formerly dominant visual languages.
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Simulation Studies
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A generative algorithmic moving image is synchronised to an audio clip. The morphing visuals choreograph explosions and billowing smoke, while the audio - the voices of senior diplomats from autocratic regimes - rationalises their ongoing war crimes.
The moving image generated by an algorithm is synchronised with an audio file, aligning sound with a dynamic visual choreography of explosions, smoke and clouds. Public justification, political rhetoric and weak arguments dissolve into dust, fire and ash in a direct visual allegory. An audio loop plays an out‑take from an interview with Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, in which he defends Russia’s nuclear intentions as being taken out of context and misunderstood. A computational simulation exposes the politician’s words as fragments of fear‑driven politics and veiled threats. The spectator watches morphing flames ravage the screen, their motion governed by the waveform of the speech. Blunt phrases and grievous sentences become metaphorical bombs and explosives, embodying the scale of contemporary information warfare.
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Egor George Kraft
(映治 / Eji)
is an
artist and thinker
whose work
acknowledges
the disrupted modern condition
as a consequence of
radical techno-cultural
planetary reconfiguration.
He lives a mobile life,
splitting time between
studios in
Tokyo (東京) & Vienna,
and deep ties to
London and Berlin.
Kraft’s multi-award winning work
has exhibited internationally.
He is a lecturer at
European & Asian universities,
speaker at conferences,
and
author of publications.
