Can Colonialism be Encoded?

Reading sessions and didactic videos are looking into the recent leaked source code of the biggest IT corporation, which is very close to russian government. The source codes of the Yandex company were copied in July 2022 and published on the Internet on January 25, 2023. The size of the leak is 44.71 gigabytes. Yandex services, whose algorithms were published, include maps, electronic assistant, taxi, web search engine, mail, cloud storage of documents, marketplace, travel agency, electronic payments, and delivery — tools that can cover needs of a modern paying user.

Part of: Terms and Conditions. The Legal Form of Images program / “Expanded Cinema” department in HGB together with Harun Farocki Institut in Leipzig (DE), 2024; ACUD and Goethe Institut program on exile, Berlin, 2024; AMRO Festival 2024 (Linz, AT); “Alt Nets” exhibition in panke.gallery in Berlin in 2025; Critical Data Lab of Humboldt University Berlin (DE) in 2024; Mycelium decolonial laboratory in Warsaw in 2024; [ome] exhibition in Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Berlin (DE) in 2023. Didactic videos were streamed on UKRAINATV platform in 2025. In 2025 script for didactic videos was published in Antiwarcoalition journal #1: “Entanglement of Infrastructures: Civilian Systems under the Pressures of Militarization”

Didactic Videos

Videos in the environment.

Videos were shown in panke.gallery, Berlin in frame of the exhibition “Alt Nets” in 2024 and streamed on UKRAINATV stream initiative in 2025.

Script for videos was pulished in Antiwarcoalition Journal “Entanglement of Infrastructures: Civilian Systems under the Pressures of Militarization”

Reading Sessions

Collective reading sessions of leaked code, owned by one of biggest IT-companies related to the government of russian federation.

Session held: in ACUD, Berlin in 2024. During AMRO Festival 2024 (Linz). In Critical Data Lab of Humboldt University Berlin (DE) in 2024. In frame of Mycelium decolonial laboratory in Warsaw in 2024. In frame of Terms and Conditions. The Legal Form of Images program / “Expanded Cinema” department in HGB together with Harun Farocki Institut in Leipzig (DE), 2024. During [ome] exhibition in Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Berlin (DE) in 2023

A proposition is to read the code collectively, diving into:

encoded ownership on territories

exceptional cases

patterns of digital colonialism

how-to-spell constructedness

“pure web”

encoded violence

fairy tales about oil

  Conditions: {  
        Tag: "war"
        Check {
            # update according to the situation
            Expression: "0"
        }
  }

  /* 
  If Russia (country) from Russia's point of view (001) 
  contains Crimea and from Ukraine's point of view (UA) 
  doesn't contain Crimea, we build 2 variants of Russia. 
  It means, that countryToRecognitionSubjects contains 
  Russia [001, UA]. 
  */

The leaked code is the code of different services, developed by yandex company:

yandex disk, analogue of google drive
artificial intelligence assistant, yandex alisa
maps
mail
internal services
business to business applications, advertising, metrics (Metrika, which collects user analytics through a widely used SDK, and Crypta, yandex’s behavioral analytics technology)
taxi
delivery.

We started to make a counter search engine to navigate through and be able to share it. It is running on our server which we turn on and off, because of the huge amount of data.

As the source code was dumped in July 2022, there is some evidence of the ongoing russian war of agression against Ukraine at that time. With traces of annexation of Crimea, with relations/traces of the strategies of the company of expanding on the territories of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, Serbia, Turkey, and others.

For sessions were developed several reading methods inspired by Karaoke that allow to shift positions of participants.

Results of collective reading were documented in form of diagrams.