Victoria Ivanova
She is also the co-founder of IZOLYATSIA and has worked extensively as a curator, writer, and strategist across arts institutions, technology companies, and NGOs. Her practice is grounded in systems analysis and a deep interest in infrastructures as mechanisms for shaping and (re)producing socio-economic and political realities. Victoria holds a Master of Science in Human Rights from the London School of Economics, a Master in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, and a PhD from London South Bank University, where she was based at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image. Her current research focuses on technological innovation and financialisation in the contemporary art sphere, as well as the development of new technological infrastructures for prototyping post-Westphalian citizenship models.
From Null to Situated
Tamara Kametani’s Greetings from Null Island project proposes a timely inversion: if datafication has flattened our lived experience into abstract coordinates ripe for exploitation, why not migrate that data to the one point on earth that is pure abstraction – the coordinates 0.0, where the prime meridian meets the equator? A non-place for non-data. An anti-surveillance utopia built from the same logic it seeks to escape.
The gesture illuminates the trajectory we’ve been on. Over two decades, the dominant movement has been extraction and decontextualisation: turning behaviour into signals, signals into data, data into training material for systems with no memory of origins. As Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst put it, ‘all media is now training data’ – cultural labour rendered indistinguishable from any other input in a repository like Common Crawl.
But the flattening isn’t only spatial. It’s temporal. Predictive systems trained on historical data don’t just process the past – they fold the future back into an eternal present where everything that might happen is already probabilistically contained in what has happened. The result is a kind of sticky, entropic now. Time itself becomes decontextualised, stripped of the conditions that allow cultural moments to catch fire.
There’s a counter-movement emerging, a boom-erang effect. We are now in a period of re-situation: the question is no longer just whether data can be protected from extraction, but how to give it back its cultural specificity, its situatedness in both place and time.1
This is where new forms of data governance become generative rather than merely defensive. Through work on trusted data intermediaries at Serpentine, I’ve seen how making data governable also makes it culturally legible.2 When UK community choirs participate in decisions about how their recordings might train AI models, those recordings cease to be abstract audio files. They become embedded in networks of consent and collective intention. The data becomes thick again.
Knowledge graphs offer something further: a way of making weird adjacencies visible. Where predictive systems optimise toward the probable, graphs can reveal unlikely bridges – a 1970s textile pattern and machine learning architecture, a medieval choral tradition and a sound artist’s practice. Whether these adjacencies catch fire depends on contingencies no architecture can guarantee. But graphs resist the flattening, keeping the relational texture of cultural production legible – a precondition, at least, for zeitgeists that feel alive rather than algorithmic.
Null Island sits at the heart of this. A place that exists only as a data error, it is both the endpoint of algorithmic logic – coordinates without territory – and a sanctuary, ungoverned and unoptimised. Kametani’s invitation to migrate there is not an escape from datafication but a way of turning its tools against its purposes: making the algorithmic serve opacity, using the system to produce something it cannot capture. That gesture is resistance. The work of trusted intermediaries and knowledge graphs – making data thick, a source of creators’ agency, situated – is construction. We need both. The alive and the algorithmic, held in productive tension. Perhaps this is precisely what culture is best placed to negotiate.
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1 Eva Jäger, Victoria Ivanova and Alasdair Milne, Future Art Ecosystems 4: Art × Public AI (London: Serpentine Arts Technologies, 2024).
2 Victoria Ivanova and Jennifer Ding, ‘Prototyping a GLAM Trusted Data Intermediary for Public Interest AI: Choral Data “Trust” Experiment’ (white paper, London, Serpentine Arts Technologies, 2025).