Oleksandr Sirous

In the Decentraland project, Oleksandr Sirous creates digital terraria by collecting data from visitors in Kyiv, Frankfurt am Main, Seoul, Antwerp and other cities. This artwork uses an MMORPG engine and converts the collected data into biomes, aiming to represent them in organic form. Each type of data corresponds to a particular type of living things, such as bugs, mushrooms or plants. Each location where the data are collected has its own type of digital environment that mirrors the natural environment typical for the climate zone of the area. This way, the visitors share the authorship and get immersed in the project: by allowing the artist to use their personal data, they become directly involved in the creation of the environment of a new utopian digital world of universal interaction.

In this work, Sirous warns about the danger brought on by centralised systems such as big data storages and social platforms, which accumulate an immense amounts of power that can potentially allow governments to control users and spread political narratives. By creating this new kind of digital environment, the artist attempts to break free of circular logic and proposes the players to look at the problematic side of common ways of communication.