‘CrossWorlds’is a work about political manipulation.
It comes from Olga Kisseleva’s experience, and it researches similitude between Soviet and American propaganda since the twenties to the end of Cold War.
The advent of the digital communication systems at the end of the ’90s generated a major change in society. It is undeniable that this technological revolution profoundly modified the structuring of relationships between individuals on the one hand, and between the individual and the collective (e.g., governments, large companies,…) on the other.
Olga Kisseleva has implemented an original collaboration between art and science, proposing an innovative development as regards a collaboration between artists and scientific laboratory, working following an experimental approach: a discrepancy, detected during a process or in the operation of a structure, leads her to formulate a hypothesis, explaining the observation in question, and as far as possible, to propose a solution to the problem. To do so, she identifies the skills required to carry out the studies and pilots the research. Her artistic hypothesis is thus checked and approved with a strictly scientific method.
Kisseleva has built a particular protocol to realize « CrossWorlds », by selecting some of the most popular pictures from the American and Soviet propaganda, as well as seven American and seven Soviet slogans.
She has then encoded each slogan as an electronic tag composed with two pictures – one Soviet and one American. Each tag has a black part and a white part, it can be decoded tanks to this contrast. The slogans are also composed with threats and promises. In each tag one of two slogans represents it’s black part, another one – the white part.
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