Advice well taken: Folk tales of digital salvation intends to create an ethnography, documenting the folk strategies around the uses of technology. Focusing on saving damaged or dying devices, and the sharing of mythologies to explain the obfuscated workings of algorithms used in social media applications, Ilina documents what she calls techlore – ‘folk knowledge’ on the complex and opaque functionalities of the modern technologies that surround us. The artist touches on issues affecting our data and privacy, the shortcuts we use to fix our devices and the explanations we find for technological mysteries. For this project, Ilina collected folk tales of digital salvation: everyday stories of anthropomorphisation, hacking and corner-cutting. They show how ordinary people are doing what they can to assert control over technology.

Dasha Ilina developed Advice well taken during her EMAP residency at IMPAKT (NL) in 2023, in collaboration with Supisara Burapachaisri.

Dasha Ilina is a Russian techno-critical artist based in Paris, France. Through the employment of low-tech and DIY approaches, her work questions the desire to incorporate modern technology into our daily lives by highlighting the implications of actually doing so. Her practice engages the public in order to facilitate a space for the development of critical thought regarding social imperatives for care of oneself and others, privacy in the digital age, and the reflexive contemporary urge to turn to technology for answers.

The publication features contributions by Teresa Dillon and Geert Lovink and was done in collaboration with Supisara Burapachaisri.

Images: courtesy of the artist.

Funded by the European Media Arts Platform (EMAP) and hosted by IMPAKT (2023).