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Dutch Design Collective Fights Propaganda with Propaganda

Metahaven has created multi-platform propaganda meant to reveal the propaganda we unwittingly interact with today.

Sometimes the best approach to resistance is to operate within an institution’s own parameters; a.k.a., fighting fire with fire. This is the point of departure for Dutch design collective Metahaven's ambitious endeavor, The Sprawl, an attempt to make “propaganda about propaganda.”

The project has three iterations: a 70-minute film which premiered at Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year; a multi-screen installation version of the same film; and an interactive online platform. Each iteration of the project provides an undoubtedly different experience, but each is meant to complement the others.

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Due to its unique format, [sprawl.space](http:// sprawl.space), the web version of the project, is perhaps its most interesting facet. As soon as the website loads, it begins a slow, automatic scroll past a series of thumbnails that the user is free to interact with. A menagerie of videos, ranging from upside down shots of Russian highways accompanied by declarations on the lack of objectivity within popular media sources, conversations on technology’s impact on reality with design theorist Benjamin H. Bratton, and old footage of Ronald Reagan making jokes about the USSR’s political climate. If you opt out of clicking on any of the thumbnails, the scrolling slowly continues as a series of stark messages appear at the bottom of the screen. Each discusses how the internet distorts reality and traps us.

What is the objective of these fragmented excerpts? Metahaven says they are attempting to probe the reality distortions provoked by propaganda: “The Sprawl is about ways in which propaganda creates a parallel reality and how interface culture and planetary-scale computation help to further that reality and ultimately really challenge our perception, creating feelings of belonging, affect, for fantasies.” Metahaven tells The Creators Project, “The technological mega-structure that the film hints at is a phenomenon which distorts, deforms, and reproduces reality in its own image: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other interfacial regimes and platforms enable and condition propaganda, and at the same time make it irreducible to the State.”

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Metahaven chose to highlight Russia because of its historically close relationship to propaganda. “The Russian State happens to be a highly effective operator when it comes to making and disseminating propaganda, but Russia is also a country with an extraordinary literary, philosophical, and poetic background when it comes to subjects like truth, reality, and art,” explains Metahaven. “The Russian language has different words for truth, pravda and istina, which are themselves almost like parallel worlds. We saw a lot of reporting on Russia where it felt that the complexity of the issue was missing, and wanted to correct that with The Sprawl.”

After navigating through sprawl.space’s media archive, you are ultimately left with a looming uneasiness. There is no overarching solution presented for escaping the mega-structure of technology’s influence on the human condition. Exposed through digital fragments, the paranoia mounts further and further until you simply can’t bear it anymore.

Check out sprawl.space here. Visit Metahaven’s website, too.

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