"Virtuality makes it possible to prototype social relationships and interactions, a kind of training for the real. At the same time, it immerses the user in the space of the imaginary, which he can perceive as safe, but this safety is illusory, – Kirill Makarov says, – […] the virtual environment it is limited by the written code, the will and imagination of the one who controlled its writing. But the illusion of limitless physical possibilities is appearing. One of the distinguishing characteristics of humans is their ability to radically empower and manipulate their environment with technical objects."
Within warfare, the soldier becomes a weapons system in which organic and inorganic, man and machine, are integrated to the point of complete interdependence, aiming to strengthen himself in order to unleash a contained inner malevolence, and give power in the form of domination. Violence, as Michel Wieviorka (2009) argues, tends to be the opposite of conflict; it closes the debate and "encourages rupture"
As Kirill Makarov claims media in a kind of reverse engineering transforms bodies within warfare into technically reproducible objects, to quote Guy Debord, "appeasing people with spectacle" and thereby depriving them of the ability to see. Not seeing one's place in the structure creates an alluring comfort zone, making this reassuring alienation a desirable state, not validating one's presence, not validating one's ability to be affected. This is an important property of technology, a necessary part of modern alienation: to pretend to be absent in order to deny the consequences of one's presence, actual and potential, and to consider only the desired consequences.
Kirill Makarov (b.1988 in Saint-Petersburg, Soviet Union, lives and works in Paris, France). Kirill works with various media, including painting and computer graphics, explores game engines, the emergence and production of relationships between humans, images and machines. By using different graphic languages, he creates hybrid spaces in which natural, artificial, algorithmically produced objects and actors coexist, subordinate to a function that digitally retains traces of discarded impressions, minor gestures and past events, trying to convey a sense of atomized attention in the space of machine «care» about time and reconstruction of experience in objects of digital morphogenesis.