Egor Kraft: Lies, Half Truths & Propaganda [The Bad, the Worse and the Worst]

About

After 10 years in Kreuzberg, a new chapter begins in this new location; and following more than 50 years in Hamburg and temporary branches in Paris and Madrid, LEVY gallery will now also have a space in Berlin again. Thanks to the new spatial proximity between the father’s and son’s galleries, visitors will have the opportunity to discover the different artistic stances in both programs.

In the exhibition Lies, Half-Truths & Propaganda [The Bad, the Worse, and the Worst] the Russian-Austrian artist Egor Kraft will be presenting new works at alexander levy. As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kraft is unable to complete the work he had originally planned. Nonetheless, he believes that it is absolutely necessary to react to the current acts of war. Kraft will show a series that was already part of his ongoing research. It explores the technological potential for combating the spread of misinformation and propaganda that is at the heart of the continuing warfare in Ukraine. Independent and serverless technologies make it possible to verify the authenticity of still and moving images. With this in mind, he has developed a series of prototypes that provide journalists—including war correspondents—with a blockchain-based toolset to record the extended metadata of their footage. This allows it to be registered and stored in a forgery-proof format as soon as the images are captured. Thus introducing a decentralised public evidence archive and a next generation tool for effective fact-proofing.

By involving serverless technologies for decentralizing a public archive of data storage and in dynamic collaboration with multiple blockchain focused projects and communities the artist suggests a proposal  to further develop solutions that  circumvent censorship—something that is essential for independent reporting. Kraft thus makes complex propositions at the frontier between art, technology, and activism to counter the current and forthcoming information wars.