Interview with

ALEXANDRA (SASHA) YAKOVLEVA

If you would have to give a starting point for this project, what would it be?

I think it all started with strange physical sensations I would sometimes experience while browsing the web.

I remember looking something up on maps, and by a missed click I suddenly zoomed out so much that I ended up floating in open space, looking at virtual Earth from afar. Suddenly that sent very real shivers down my spine, my toes curled - it was very physical, my body reacted as if I was in a real danger of getting lost forever. I was still in front of my screen, safely in my chair, but that sudden expansion of the virtual space has almost sent me into panic.

I was so puzzled by this experience that I started to look for more triggers like this. I found this live NASA streaming where random people just came to look at the image of Earth spinning real-time, and chat about mundane things. I found a website with live statistics, numbers running endlessly, of everything that happens in the world per second - forests burning, children being born, cigarettes being smoked. I started to collect digital experiences that gave me the feeling of the sublime: feeling infinitely small in front of something strange, bigger than life and awe-inspiring.

Most of these web "spaces" ended up in the film.

The driving force behind Does Space Dream In Bits seems to be the desire to find meaning in contemporary life. As the film unfolds, we find out that this question is prompted by the tragic death of your friend Andrew Capra. In the film, Capra is presented as an early vlogger who decided to make videos in which nothing seemed to happen, except for the passing of time itself. At some point your voice-over comments: “The images he created were so radically meaningless, that it was almost an act of vandalism against the calculated, analytical environment. He was trying to hijack the space, making sure that no one could ever extract any sense of it.” Can you tell us a bit more about Andrew Capra and how his charismatic resistance against the search for meaning prompted your quest to find existential meaning in the digital?

Haha, if I would have called Capra a digital rebel to his face, he would roll his eyes and call me lame. It would sort of miss the point of the whole meaninglessness deal.

Capra actually made his way into the film really, really late, at almost the last stage. He showed up as a character at the time that the movie was already taking shape, and when you inevitably start thinking "but why, why am I making this movie, what's in it for me?" The memories of his passing 3 years prior suddenly answered that question.

I have never met another person like Capra. He was, and is, a dear friend, a bard, one of those people whose ways of being is an art project in itself. He was the king of weirdos, loved by so many people. Even his passing prompted so much warmth and closeness among people who knew him across the world. Many of these interactions happened online because of the international nature of our circle. His facebook page became a place for friends to come visit, write a note, share a picture. For years after his death my heart would sink every time I got a notification presumably from his account - a tag, a comment, a memory. When I missed him, I would go through his photos, watch his videos, again and again.

Working with his public archive was a bit of an excuse to keep interacting with him a little longer. That was the most sublime and strange online experience of them all.

Does Space Dream In Bits features some eccentric characters. What do you feel these characters have in common?

Everyone in the film has a very particular way of using the Internet - in unconventional, experimental and almost metaphysical ways.

Sarah practises her religious chants, Alexei fights his mortality, and Capra delightfully wastes everybody's time. I am, myself, also a character in the film, attempting to do some soul-searching in a soulless digital world.

While researching the film I was looking for traces of the "old Internet" that I find myself very nostalgic about. I grew up at the time when there was no “correct” or purposeful way of using the web, so people would experiment and come up with a lot of bizarre stuff. The Internet was a paradise for weirdos like myself.

These alternative ways of internet-ing and the characters’ take on it have informed their presence in the film.

The world has changed quite radically since you made the film as part of the DocNomads program. Did this also shift the meaning of the film itself?

The way I see it, since the film was completed the world hasn’t necessarily changed that much, it's more that things have greatly escalated – politically, socially and also digitally. If change implies something surprising, I feel that most of what happened to the world in the last three-to-four years was quite foreseeable.

Due to the escalation of all the bad things in my country, the pointless and cruel war Russia started, I find myself looking recently less into existential, large ideas, and digging into more tangible things – propaganda, history, political actions. This film wouldn’t be the same if developed in 2024.

Even looking specifically at the transformation of our digital realm, it's actually quite likely that DSDIB couldn't have been made today:

Three years ago, I was still quite excited about the Internet as a source of creative materials. Today it's much harder to get that feeling of serendipitous online-discoveries anymore.

I used to love looking up something on YouTube, and then to go to the very last page of the search results - to inevitably find a random guy playing guitar from 10 years ago, a wall carpet behind him, a bad webcam, 3 views, his buddies talking nonsense in the comments. Those used to be my favourite bits of the digital world. I would feel like I got a glimpse of a stranger's life, of something true. It was infinitely inspiring. Have you noticed YouTube search results aren’t in "pages" anymore? It's an infinite scroll now. No way of looking past all the influencers to find bizarre beautiful stuff at the bottom.

I don't know if it's your experience too, but in the last few years it's generally been harder to find things online, even the things I'm actually searching for. The algorithm directs me places I don't want to be, showing me things I don't want to see and tries to get me to buy stuff I don't need.

This sometimes makes me think that very soon the creation of found-footage collage films will become, if not impossible, then at least much harder. Filmmakers and artists will need new ways to collect evidence of people's presence on Earth.

I'm guessing in this sense DSDIB could be, among other things, a monument to the ending era of the Internet serendipity.

April, 2024