Prof. Dr. Vladan Joler

Prof. Dr. Vladan Joler is a academic, researcher and artist whose work blends critical design, data investigations, counter-cartography, investigative journalism, writing, data visualization, and numerous other disciplines. He explores and visualizes different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures and many other contemporary phenomena in the intersection between technology and society. As co-founder and director of the SHARE Foundation - one of the leading expert and activist organizations in the field of digital rights in Southeast Europe - Vladan has played an active role in organizing, researching, creating, and advocating for public policies at the national, regional, and European levels.

Publication Contribution
From Research to Play: Algorithmic Capture and Geopolitical Infrastructure

Mark Cinkevich’s game-based project operates simultaneously as a research apparatus, analytical model and narrative device, collapsing these layers into an experience. Rather than representing surveillance as a distant or abstract threat, the work situates the player inside the operational logic of data extraction and algorithmic control, where participation itself becomes the medium of capture. Nevertheless, this is not a story about resistance, but a story about how resistance is metabolised by systems of power.
Behind the scene, at the level of research, the project is grounded in a much needed investigation of the infrastructural conditions underpinning Russian neocolonial expansion through data, infrastructure and opaque network of government bodies and private companies. By tracing the synchronisation of Belarusian and Russian databases, from CCTV systems to migration records and traffic violations, Cinkevich reveals how sovereignty is no longer only dismantled through territories, but through technical alignment and data capture.

Reference to specific recent cybersecurity, political and military decrees, as well as the role of Russian companies such as ‘Positive Technologies’ grounds the work in the present. This research layer is neither supplementary nor a decoration – it is the backbone of the work, ensuring that the speculative future the player inhabits is already unfolding in the present. The game emerges from this research not as an illustrative add-on, but as a continuation of it: a way of thinking through infrastructures and data flows by experiencing their effects.

The analytical and conceptual strength and contribution of the work lies in how it models surveillance as a process of calibration. The conceptually exciting structure of this game is its dual perspective. Player One, tries to escape and operates under the illusion of possible invisibility. Simultaneously, Player Two, positioned in the role of the surveillance operator, is observing the system at work. From this dual position it becomes clear that every movement, every resistance strategy, becomes a part of the feedback loop, continuously feeding the training data and surveillance system itself. Every noise in the statistical system, every act of resistance basically sharpens the lens of the statistical surveillance model. In this sense, the work resonates strongly with understandings of algorithmic or AI governance as a continuous process of probabilistic sorting, where subjects are never simply watched, but constantly computed and statistically measured. What initially presents itself as another interactive dystopian scenario, gradually reveals itself as a rigorously researched model of contemporary algorithmic surveillance and governance, where play becomes a method of exposure rather than escape.

There are three main segments of this work: the research, the diagram and the game itself. Each of these segments give us a different point of view and a different way to explore and engage. The accompanying diagram gives us an analytical and systematic bird’s-eye view. Like in many of my own works, the diagram functions as a cartography of power, mapping invisible systems, temporal dependencies and asymmetries of control. I always think about them as a form of non-linear storytelling devices that have more in common with the open-ended worlds of computer games than with linear structures such as essays or sequential videos. In that context I find Cinkevich’s mix of game and the diagram exciting. Here, the game and the visual research diagram form a composite methodology where experience and evidence reinforce one another. The diagram is a systematic device that emerges from the research data as a form of diagrammatic storytelling to be then deconstructed into the game concept. One allows the player to feel algorithmic capture from within, the other situates that experience within the larger geopolitical machinery.