“Новый мир” (Novy Mir) is a video piece which explores an alternate Soviet Russia, critiquing institutional control and the maddening pursuit of a utopia. Through a dark humour narrative, AI soldiers developed by the soviets are forced to become ballerinas due to the lack of dancers to entertain the upper classes as there has been a mass famine, wiping out a majority of the population. Maddened, the AI revolts against the Soviets, feasting on their flesh, developing a, zombie-sci-fi world in which the player must survive a new society. Its dystopian atmosphere and dark humour is informed by Russian literature and cinema such as Tarkovsky’s films Stalker and Solaris and Gogol’s novels. Theorists such as Paul Virilio has similarly influenced this project, with his harsh outlook on the acceleration of technology in war, critically assess the misuse machinery can be used for by ruling institutions. Benjamin Noy’s ‘Malign Velocities, acceleration in capitalism’ has also encouraged thoughts on the speed of technological development and specifically looks into Russian history to assess how Russia’s obsession for a ‘new world’ and proletarian Taylorism ideology, can lead to an almost technology of workers and their downfall.

I sculpted a variety of the forms featured in the video such as the A.I. Ballet soldiers via the app ‘Nomad’. Having never worked digitally before, previously doing sculpture as my main art form, I decided to learn how to use blender to experiment with how I could make this narrative come to life. Once I created scenes in blender, I then used the app InShot to edit them together and add in text and sound where needed. Music within the video was made using the Garage Band App, and generated voices of the narrator and robots using the app Text to speech.