Creative Technologist · Berlin

Making invisible systems
physically felt.

I build interactive installations that put bodies in dialogue with the forces that act on them — political, environmental, sonic. Work at the intersection of spatial design, interaction technology, and embodied experience.

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Interactive Installation · Sound · Hardware · Spatial

01 Selected Work
Installation · Performance
Coordinated°
2022

Autonomous drones encoding protest coordinates in aerial choreography. Human-nonhuman networks as resistance infrastructure.

Semibreve Award 2022 Lumen Prize Nominee Ars Electronica
In Development
Blind Field
2024 –

Sound made physical. A vibrating floor, a body, a field that does not register your presence as significant.

Arduino · TouchDesigner · OSC
02 Project

Coordinated°

Year
2022
Type
Multimedia Installation & Performance
Collaboration
Angelina Kozhevnikova (Animaspace)
Support
Hauptstadtkulturfonds, School of Machines Berlin
Recognition
Edigma Semibreve Award 2022 · Lumen Prize Nominee 2022

While machines are used for war and oppression — for surveillance, for border enforcement, for crowd control — could they organize resistance instead?

Coordinated° is a multimedia installation in which autonomous drones perform aerial choreography encoding the GPS coordinates of protest sites around the world. The coordinates are invisible to the naked eye. They become readable through AR — held up on a phone, the field of flying machines resolves into a map of resistance.

Drone performance documentation Semibreve Festival, Portugal · 2022

The question behind the work

In 2021, the use of drones in military operations and protest suppression was accelerating. The same technology used to disperse demonstrations in Belarus, to enforce curfews in US cities, to strike at targets in conflict zones — it was also available, at reduced scale, to anyone.

The question that became Coordinated° was not hypothetical. If protest can be suppressed by coordinated machines, can it be amplified by them? Can the tools of control become infrastructure for its opposite?

The drone is not a neutral tool. It is a political actor. We wanted to know what it would mean to give it a different politics.

The piece encodes the coordinates of protest sites — past and ongoing, from Hong Kong to Minsk to Standing Rock — into the spatial positions of drones in flight. The encoding is not symbolic. The drones are physically located at the scaled GPS coordinates of each site. A distributed, aerial map of resistance made material in the room.

AR coordinate overlay
Drone formation in space

How it was built

The system runs on a custom choreography framework that takes a dataset of GPS coordinates, maps them into a shared aerial coordinate space, and translates position data into drone flight instructions. The drones hold formation autonomously — not controlled in real-time by operators, but executing a pre-programmed spatial score.

The AR layer is built as a mobile experience that uses the device camera to recognize the drone formation and overlay the decoded coordinates with site names, dates, and the number of people present at each protest.

Autonomous drone systems Custom choreography framework AR overlay (mobile) GPS coordinate encoding Real-time data integration

In the room

Visitors enter a darkened space. A swarm of small drones moves overhead in a pattern that seems almost random — hovering, shifting, maintaining formation. The sound is unexpected: low-frequency motor hum, occasional positional shifts, the physicality of machines in air.

Without the AR layer, the work is beautiful and slightly unsettling. The machines are doing something, but what? When a phone is raised, the overlay resolves the formation into something legible, and the work changes register entirely. The pattern was always a message. You just couldn't read it.

That shift — from ambient to legible, from aesthetic to political — is the work's core proposition. The same technology, the same machines, the same space: what changes is whether you have the key.

Audience with AR devices
Dutch Design Week installation

Exhibitions & Recognition

Edigma Semibreve Award — Winner 2022
Lumen Prize — Nominee 2022
Semibreve Festival, Braga, Portugal 2022
Ars Electronica Garden Utrecht 2022
Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven 2022
Oyoun, Berlin 2022
03 Project — In Development
Currently in development

Blind
Field

Started
2024
Stage
Technical build & concept development
Upcoming
Group exhibition, Berlin studio, 2025

Roland Barthes used the term blind field for the space outside the photographic frame — the space you feel exists but cannot see. The space that the image implies but will not show you.

This piece starts from that concept and moves it into the body. What does it mean to act into a system you cannot perceive? What does it mean to be acted upon by a field that registers you, but does not care about you?

Early build — vibration platform prototype Studio, Berlin · 2024

The encounter

One person enters the installation space and steps onto a platform — plywood, slightly raised, visually unremarkable. They are given headphones. The headphones are not just for listening: they define the interaction zone, a perimeter the field can sense.

Inside the headphones: a soundscape. Not music. Something that responds to presence, to movement, to proximity — but responds according to its own logic, not yours. The floor begins to vibrate. Not dramatically. Enough to feel, beneath the feet, the state of the field.

You are standing in something that is aware you exist. But it does not prioritize your existence.

The field

The installation is built around the concept of a field with its own autonomous existence. It has states: resting, aroused, indifferent, refusing. These states are not determined solely by visitor presence — the field has its own processes running, its own timescale.

The field does not just react to you. It has been running before you arrived. It will continue after you leave. You are a perturbation in it, not its subject.

The decentering is intentional. Most interactive art places the human at the center of its logic: you do X, the work does Y. Blind Field reverses the implied hierarchy. The field's indifference is not a malfunction — it is the work's political position.

Arduino sensor array — in progress
Vibration platform — Dayton Audio transducers

How it's being built

The physical body of the work is a plywood platform fitted with Dayton Audio bass shaker transducers — devices designed to transmit low-frequency vibration through rigid surfaces. The transducers receive audio signals and translate them directly into physical movement in the floor.

An overhead USB camera running MediaPipe tracks body position within the space. An Arduino handles proximity sensor data from the perimeter of the platform. Both streams feed into TouchDesigner, which manages the interaction logic and visual state, and passes control signals via OSC to Ableton Live, where the sound designer shapes the field's sonic response.

The stack is intentionally layered — multiple systems talking to each other, with latency and imprecision baked in. The field responds, but not instantly. Not perfectly. Not with the smooth reactivity of commercial interactive work. That friction is meaningful.

Technical stack

MediaPipe Body tracking via overhead USB camera
Arduino Proximity sensors — interaction perimeter
TouchDesigner Interaction logic, field state management
OSC bridge TouchDesigner → Ableton Live
Ableton Live Sound design — field's sonic state
Bass shakers Dayton Audio transducers — vibration platform

Where it is now

The concept is fully developed. The theoretical frame — drawing on Karen Barad's intra-action, Jakob von Uexküll's umwelt, Jane Bennett on vibrant matter — is in place. The technical architecture is designed and early hardware experiments are underway.

The work is currently moving from schematic to physical build. The vibration platform is being prototyped. The Arduino sensor layer is in testing. The first complete version is targeted for exhibition in 2025.

Process documentation is ongoing. The work's incompleteness is part of its honesty — this page will grow as the piece does.

04 Other Work
2021–22
Publication Design — Urban Research

Information design and visual communication for urban research publications developed at TU Berlin and the University of Campania. Working at the intersection of spatial data and legibility — how urban systems can be made comprehensible without being simplified.

Publication spread
Ongoing
Hardware Experiments

Ongoing experiments with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Python-based sensing and actuation. Research into cellular automata, autonomous systems behavior, and human-algorithm interaction. The substrate for future installation work.

Hardware prototype
2019–21
Circular Building Systems R&D

Cross-disciplinary coordination work in circular economy building systems — material tracking, RFID-based component identification, and the digital infrastructure of material re-use. The practice of tracking matter through systems, and the gap between what systems claim to know and what they actually do.

System diagram
05 About

The through-line
is always the body
and the system.

I started with architecture — studying how buildings shape the way people move, gather, and perceive. I moved into urban design at TU Berlin, where the question scaled up: how do cities act on populations? How do infrastructures of transport, resource flow, and public space produce the conditions of daily life?

I spent several years in R&D coordination for circular building systems — work that was, at its core, about tracking matter through complex systems. Where does a material component go? Who knows it exists? What gets recorded and what doesn't? There was something in that gap — between what a system claims to know and what actually moves through it — that has stayed with me.

The move into installation practice was not a departure from that work. It was a way of making those questions physical. Coordinated° grew out of questions about who gets to coordinate systems and toward what ends. Blind Field comes from questions about what it means to act inside an environment you cannot fully perceive, and to be acted upon by forces indifferent to your perception of them.

I work with code, hardware, spatial design, and — always — with collaborators who are smarter than me in the domains I haven't mastered yet. I'm based in Berlin, registered as a freelancer, available for residencies and collaborative projects internationally.

Education
MArch, Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
MA Urban Design, TU Berlin
Languages
Russian — native
German — advanced
English — advanced
Location
Berlin, Germany
Available for international residencies & projects
Tools
TouchDesigner · Arduino · MediaPipe
Python · Raspberry Pi · OSC
Spatial & publication design
Download CV

Let's make
something real.