Rallies in Absentia in Quarantined Russia:

Re-enacting the Space of Appearance in Augmented Reality

Author

Elena Gapova

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of rallies in absentia which took place in Russia during the quarantine of 2020 on the platform Yandex.Navigator Created by tech giant Yandex and similar to Google Maps, it allows users to check in at a particular geographic location and post comments, as if one were physically present. On April 20, 2020, multiple users in major Russian cities simultaneously checked in at symbolically significant urban sites like Red Square in Moscow and demanded the declaration of a national state of emergency and the compensation of financial losses. Due to the functionality of the digital tool that was used to create the augmented reality of a video game, participants re-enacted the “space of appearance” (the term by Hannah Arendt) where bodies in their plurality put forward claims to those in power by performing their message. This interpretation draws on the concepts of public space, performativity, and virtual/augmented reality to suggest that it is productive to think of this rally in terms of the heuristic potential of the case. The rally can be seen as a generic case of virtual gatherings that might be sustained with the help of digital technologies creatively repurposed for political uses in an increasingly digitised world.

Keywords

rally in absentia; augmented reality; space of appearance; performance; video games; virtual mobilisation; Russian Federation; quarantine.

Introduction

When new communicative technologies – defined as a diverse apparatus of hardware and software that makes it possible to create and communicate messages – became available and, importantly, affordable to the larger public, it was obvious that the world’s populace got a powerful new tool. This was especially true when cell phones, an everyday device that currently permits the application of not just speech and text, but also visual and audio material to create content, ushered in a plethora of new ways to render meaning, facilitate activist interventions, and incite assembly. While this social mobilisation function became apparent more than a decade ago, when the Arab Spring was metaphorised as the first cell phone revolution (see Frangonikolopoulos 2012), it is only now, during the Covid era, when the pandemic has affected social interaction in major ways, that new technological possibilities have become crucial in sustaining social life. In spring 2020, national governments worldwide were first to resort to unprecedented measures to confront the spread of the virus, imposing quarantine and lockdowns on their populations, leaving the streets and public spaces of cities and towns emptied. Much social interaction, including civic activism and political protests, had to move online, while users were constantly exploring and devising new communicative possibilities that became available with the ICT evolution.

This article focuses on one demonstrated case of quarantine-related online protest: the ‘rallies in absentia’ (митинги in absentia) that took place spontaneously in several major Russian cities on April 20, 2020, after a strict lockdown had been announced by the government. Physically limited by quarantine rules but eager to be heard, protesters exploited some features of a Russian navigation application similar to Google Maps, called Yandex.Navigator, to demonstrate resistance and deliver their message (Fig. 1, 2).

The paper does not delve into the political claims and causes of this protest, except for a brief contextualisation of the case. Rather, the forthcoming analysis is quite formalistic: it concerns the creation of meaning (in a linguistic/semiotic sense) or, more concretely, it is the communicative and visual mechanisms through which it creates its message and conveys it to a broad audience. A related question is how this form of protest operates, what it is, and how it acquires the quality of being political. This analytical perspective is driven by the idea that the form of this autonomous event has heuristic significance for understanding how, under certain circumstances, the public sphere can be re-created online. If one thinks of the communicative techniques that have been made available with new media as a ‘language’ of sorts, which is what McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message” suggests, then this case can provide insights into the ‘grammatology’ of the sign system that sustains ICT’s meaning-making.¹ A ‘deconstruction’ of this grammar consists of three parts. First, information is provided about the ‘rally in absentia’. Second, the rally is examined as a collective performance of a public gathering, or ‘space of appearance’ made possible by some specific features of Yandex.Navigator. Finally, the non-linear content creation at play in some new media forms is explored. I argue that this protest event is different from ‘normal’ virtual mobilisation done through the release of linear textual, visual, or audio information and calls for action. Rather, it is inadvertently pre-programmed by digital technology that makes use of both texts and images (maps) and, importantly, creates simplistic virtual worlds/augmented realities in which agents can re-enact ‘real’ action in a video game.

Contextualising Rallies in Absentia

The word ‘rally’ normally means a mass gathering with the purpose of political protest or support for a cause; as such, it requires the simultaneous presence of multiple actors in the same physical location. One of Hanna Arendt’s conceptualisations of the political is that of “the space of appearance” where people make their presence explicitly (“Erscheinungsraum”, Arendt 1958). From this point of view, a ‘rally in absentia’ seems to be a contradiction in terms: how can one rally if one is not actually there? However, rallies in absentia did take place ‘in’ several major Russian cities (Moscow, Rostov-on-Don, S. Petersburgh, Nizhnii Novgorod, Krasnodar, and others) on April 20, 2020, a couple of days after the strict lockdown had been instituted throughout the Russian Federation. Thousands of enraged citizens virtually ‘gathered’ in Moscow’s Red Square and in front of government buildings or other sites of state power in urban locations to protest against the strict self-isolation regime and demand benefits and reimbursements for those who had suffered financial losses because of pandemic shutdowns. The gatherings were ‘performed’ via the Yandex.Navigator and Yandex.Karty (maps) applications run by Yandex, a high-tech giant and, essentially, a Russian version of Google.² The applications that can be accessed freely via a cell phone or a computer at www.karty.yandex.ru are similar to Google Maps, with one difference: they have a check-in and comment function. Thus, these tools allow “drivers themselves to report on the traffic situation on roads in real time” (Edwards 2020) by checking in at a particular location and posting a brief comment of warning (Fig. 1, 2) that shows up on the screens of other drivers (or any clients using the application). Comments are supposed to be traffic-related, but technically they do not have to be: sometimes drivers make ‘civic commentaries’, shaming officials for poor road conditions or other issues.

On April 20, 2020, several thousand virtual (or real?) drivers who checked themselves in simultaneously at some politically significant locations on the digital map, posted brief comments demanding compensation for the losses they had sustained because of the lockdown and made other claims as well. According to the BBC Russian Service, which was one of the first to report on the rally, it started spontaneously, first in the city of Krasnodar (Fig. 2) in the south of the Russian Federation and then went viral, as users in other cities became aware of what was going on and began to virtually ‘assemble’ in plazas and squares of their urban areas by checking in and commenting on digital maps (BBC 2020). From that point on anyone who used Yandex.Navigator could not help but see the ‘gathering’ on their phone screens. Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are the screenshots of the rally as it appeared on cell phones at several moments throughout the day, as users were checking in on a digital map and posting hundreds of comments at the same time. Those read, for example: “We require a national state of emergency! The government shall resign!” or “Respect human rights and freedoms!” Most demands, however, were economic rather than political. Commentators lamented: “[We have] No money to pay our loans! What are we supposed to do?” One message declared: “Feed my cats, and I will stay home” (BBC 2020). As thousands of clients were checking in at the same time, and the ‘rally,’ due to the functionality of the tool, was visible to those ‘driving by’ or using the application. Yandex moderators, sometimes called “Yandex police”, mass-deleted the comments, as this massive subversive performance did have a disruptive quality and affected the functionality of the tool, but new ones would pop up.

Source: https://www.svoboda.org/a/30568782.html?fbclid=IwAR0wGbT1kgB2r7bT7uVA0w2pha4qJI3OwfWd01Y6xy0CB5Y-x_3Tv5Fj108

With an event like this, it is difficult to separate action from context, and sources that were collected to make sense of the rally include news websites and some online discussions that occurred either during the protest or immediately after. A keyword search of any links and secondary data helped to identify media reports on the rally from various places all over the Russian Federation. Information about the protest rally on Yandex.Navigator was first reported on Twitter and then appeared in multiple media sources as the event was spreading across the country. As soon as word about the event got out, its screenshots were also posted on multiple “independent” media platforms and sites (the newspaper Moscow News, Radio Free Europe, BBC, and others). Popular Moscow-based political commentator Ekaterina Shul’man, who discussed the protest on her radio show on the same day, recognised that while Yandex.Navigator had been used for activist purposes before, this time the visibility of the event, which relied on ‘vernacular’ creativity and the simultaneous action of multiple actors at different locations, was much broader. Some participants made demands to lift the quarantine and introduce a ‘national state of emergency’ instead. The logic of those demands was the following: the ad hoc lockdown, while epidemiologically reasonable, was quite ambivalent from a legal point of view. When introducing it, the government did not have any clear policy regarding compensations of losses and, as many believed, was not providing enough support to entrepreneurs and certain categories of workers. A ‘national state of emergency’, on the other hand, is a special legal regime with clear rules and policies regarding the compensation of losses and waivers of taxes and loans (Shul’man 2020).

While there is no available information on the number of users who took part in the rally, which lasted for several hours, news about the protest spread outside the primary user base of drivers and reached a much broader and more diverse audience.³ The event, which was reported in Russian and English, got national and even international visibility, and the next day participants received messages via Yandex from city administrations and other officials that explained the necessity of the quarantine and promised benefits and compensations.

Augmented Reality: Re-enacting the Space of Appearance

The rally in absentia emerged as one “unintended consequence” (to use Robert Merton’s sociological terminology), of complex transformations of the concepts of space and participation that were brought about by the arrival of new ICT. In the pre-internet era, the organisation of protest required identifying supporters and leaders, building solidarity, creating organisational structure, and getting the word out (MacAdam 2001). With digital instruments that produced new ways of sharing information and debating, the mobilisation of network resources and communication between groups became easier and more spontaneous (Rheingold 2008), and the importance of organisational hierarchy diminished (Blodgett and Tapia 2010). As the bar for political participation was lowered, online mobilisation has become common (especially as in Russia, for a number of reasons, many have been apathetic to traditional forms of political participation).

At the same time, online mobilisation (with emails, text messaging, etc.) is often used as an instrument to incite real-life gatherings which remain the main way of demonstrating a certain ‘body count’ and thus send a message of ‘the will of the people’ that cannot go unnoticed, to those in power. Such phenomena as pre-Covid Occupy Movements, BLM rallies all over the US in the summer of 2020, populous marches after the rigged election in Belarus, or the invasion into the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, provide compelling evidence that people resort to the power of ‘bodily gathering’ to push for change. In fact, bodily congregations epitomise the very essence of the political which has a spatial quality: it is the space of appearance. In her book on the theory of assembly, Judith Butler asks what it means to assemble in a crowd and why it is so important to be there physically. She then argues that the political requires a bodily enactment for which it is essential to be plural, as “bodies in their plurality lay claim to the public” (Butler 2015: 71). This is what takes place in public space which historically used to be a common or shared physical space where dialogue and interaction between individuals take place resulting in a sense of community and solidarity. As a gathering place, cultural geographer Henri Lefebre (1991) explains, public space can be a site where citizens congregate and realise their right to political participation by articulating their claims and thus, in some contexts ‘public space’ can be synonymous with the public sphere. With the arrival of automobiles, the concept of public/shared space expanded to include the experience of interaction with/via vehicles, which will prove significant later in this discussion.

The rise of the internet as a site of social interaction pushed a reformulation of the concept of public space, inciting a discussion of whether the online world is, in fact, public. Howard Rheingold, an enthusiastic internet pioneer, considered it a space for dialogue and community and, thus, a version of public space, although, at that time, his idea was little more than wishful thinking. Others have shown that in contemporary high-tech societies the concepts of public sphere and public space are redefined and significantly expanded, arguing that the internet can be seen as a space for the exchange of information, discussion, contestation, political struggle, and organisation (Kellner 2014; Evans 2000). The internet does facilitate some functions of public space, as it democratises communication (Bremmer 2010) and makes possible the discourse of viewpoints, mobilisation and other acts that pertain to public spaces; the term ‘cyberspace democracy’ is sometimes used to highlight the civic function of the internet. Still, there are important differences between offline and cyber public spaces, and they concern how the “space of appearance” is performed.

This difference became especially demonstrative with the pandemic, as lockdowns, executive orders, states of emergency, and even curfews (in Italy, France, and some other European nations) made offline gatherings impossible. At an early stage, moving protests online might have seemed one way to deal with these restrictions; however, online public spaces can only be ‘substituted’ for real meeting places to an extent. Confined to a ‘slot’ on a particular platform, for which one has to register and get a link, they are limited in their functionality and effect. For example, this was the case with the digital March on Washington (“Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington”) to oppose poverty, economic and climate violence, and militarism that took place on June 20, 2020, on a special platform and which, according to the current information on the site, was watched (and not attended) by its supporters: the use of the passive voice is telling here.⁴

It is hardly possible to bypass this limitation completely (at least at the current state of the art of ICT), however, the rally in absentia serves as a substitute to the real one. It functions as a gathering space which can be shared by diverse ‘residents’ in almost the same way as physical spaces: one can just stumble onto this protest as it is being performed. As a social event, it took place at the ‘junction’ of two phenomena: the ban on presence in offline physical space that was ‘compensated for’ by the possibility of gatherings facilitated by new online technology in virtual reality. The term ‘virtual reality’ (VR) came into use relatively early, at a time when the internet comprised a modest number of information databases and discussion forums. In his book about early virtual communities, Howard Rheingold treated cyberspace as a multitude of computer-generated scenes that one can enter and navigate as if one were inside them (Rheingold 199: 112; Evans 2000). In VR, the users' perception of reality is based on virtual information; however, actions that users perform based on this information are not necessarily confined to cyberspace and may take the form of physical action. This ‘blending’ of online and offline tends to be viewed as a new augmented reality. Unlike VR, where the surrounding environment is completely virtual, in AR technology superimposes digital ‘objects’ or computer-generated images onto a user's view of the real world, thus providing a composite view (Ritzer 2019: 30). Computer generated information affects the perception of reality, and people act on the basis of this perception, as was the case in the famous game Pokemon Go. Similarly, with the rally in absentia, an electronic site emulates physical reality that prompts participants with what ‘script’ to follow, while immersed individuals, experiencing virtual space as, in a way, ‘real’, perform the action of arriving there, checking in, and uttering claims.⁵ Thus, they reenact being in a particular location and participating, while creating, at the same time, the space of appearance. It is not pregiven but brought about by the very act of appearing there performed by participants: this public assembly exists only in its own making.

Performing the Message

The point of public mobilisation is making claims, which traditionally have the form of texts or images either sent to a particular addressee or displayed on a billboard or a newspaper or, more recently, on blogging platforms, for example “Voting rights to women!” or “Make love, not war.” The method of articulating claims employed during the rally in absentia is critically different: it is a “speech act”, to use the terminology of J. L. Austin. It relies on a specific signifying mechanism when the message/content is not articulated but “performed” by actors inside a particular setting. Austin pointed out that there are instances of language use when we do things by uttering words, and that the utterance of statements like “I name you” or “I declare” is best understood as doing something: making a promise, naming and so on (Austin 1962). Such utterances are considered performative: put differently, performativity implies the functioning of language as a form of social action which has the effect of change (Cavanaugh 2015). In sociology, the related term “performance”, is used to designate human action in particular situations. Erving Goffman suggested that people as social actors are “performers” who act within particular frames or scripts (Goffman 1959), similar to the way actors perform on the stage. For example, talking on the phone, lecturing, or having a friendly exchange with a neighbour can be seen as performances, and it is the ‘setting’ that prompts us as to what ‘script’ to use. On the internet, communicators function as dialogical partners (Evans 2000) or as the performers of conversations, information exchanges or mobilisation campaigns. In the same way as public place and public space, the terms ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’ are related, but not the same: performativity and visibility are exercised in performances that take place in public spaces. This conceptualization brings in a theatrical component or 'space of appearance' that is central to the functioning of a democratic space (Valentine 1996) and that is also applied by Goffman in his book.

This primer on performativity brings together both linguistic and sociological roots of the concept which are needed to make sense of how the rally in absentia works. Producing messages on the internet is a participatory practice that involves taking part in an endeavour (Lankshear and Knobel 2006), and thus is performative. In the rallies under discussion, protest messages are not produced as “remarks” in a conversation but are instead ‘performed’ by participants in augmented reality. This method of creating and conveying messages is possible because signification (i.e. creation of meaning) can function through other forms than the straightforwardly verbal or textual. With Web 2.0, new tools for non-linear technologies of signification become available online. Thus, the tool can be seen as a location-based augmented reality instrument through which a sophisticated blending of online and offline, i.e. ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ takes place. Let us consider the proposition in more detail.

First, the collective action took place in the virtual reality of a digital map that represents the physical reality of objects in space. These ‘objects'’ include both ‘real’ buildings and streets and ‘imagined’ people and vehicles digitally represented by ‘icons’ (check-in markers) that overlay the ‘real’ environment. Simply put, the map on cell phone screens makes it look as if people were there in the streets, while they were not. This complex ‘palimpsest’ of the real and the imagined is possible because we live in an age of technical images, produced with the help of special tools or ‘apparatus’ – a term by Vilém Flusser, an early theoretician of photography whose lexicon is useful for thinking about contemporary visual media, digital imaging, and their virtual uses. The first technological (‘technical’) image form that has fundamentally changed the way we see the world was the photograph: it might look like a “traditional image” but harbours (encodes) different concepts (Flusser 1983). These days, other types of technical images have come into being, most of them digitally produced.

A map of physical space is an image, as it represents reality, and a digital map (for example, on Google maps or Yandex.Navigator) is a technical image produced with the help of special technology. In daily life we tend to think that a photo is a faithful representation of reality, while a map is not; we consider the latter more of an abstraction or a ‘scheme’. In fact, both a map and a photo are images, just created according to different principles of representation ‘pre-programmed’ by the apparatus used. No image, however, equals reality: it only encodes it, and we have been culturally trained to decode these signs.

A photo and a map can sometimes be substituted for each other.⁶ The following example would help to see how this might be possible. Anti-lockdown (and/or anti-masking) protests were not specifically Russian: they have been taking place all over the world, for example, for several weeks in April and May 2020 in front of the state Capitol building in Michigan’s capital city of Lansing. If one compares the screenshots of the “rally in absentia” (Fig. 5 and 7) and the photos of the Michigan protests taken by drones (Fig. 6 and 8), the similarity of the two sets of images becomes obvious and, clearly, the greater the altitude, the more similarity there would be between the two images. Importantly, in both images the “message” is as an element of an image, the way it is in modernist paintings by Picasso or Braque.⁷

At some point it becomes possible to substitute a photo for a map; in fact, these days maps are made on the basis of photos taken from flying planes or drones. However, images 6 and 8 taken in Lansing represent what took place in physical reality, while images 5 and 7 ‘show’ people doing’ something (in this case, rallying) they did not really do physically. They never gathered in those urban spaces in Russia, but the augmented reality of the digital map makes us believe they did, for from the point of view of visual perception, there is not much difference between the image of the real and the image of the imagined. The resulting ‘aberration’ in the perception of reality can be considered a feature of the modern age, which has become saturated with images: image, rather than text, has triumphed over the world (Hartley 1992), as media and cyberspace have become constitutive of everyday life. We perceive reality through a medium where, as it turns out, signs can be interchangeable.

Second, the digital map that was used as an instrument for the rally is, in fact, a basic video game with a very simple interface. The analysis of its ‘text’ builds off critical analysis of games as broadly configured “visual texts” and interaction patterns (Consalvo 2006). The game involves users becoming ‘characters’ (of the protest performance) who move in space and utter claims. Users ‘perform’ their presence virtually rather than showing up physically; the game has a limited social component built into it, and users see the markers (“signs”) designating other users.

With video games, an important question is the one of agency or who the actor is. In the absence of individual avatars on Yandex.Navigator, users ‘appear’ in this virtual space as identical check-in markers. This is similar to a passing car ‘honking’ in solidarity with protesters in an offline rally: the sound performs the function of a check-in marker, and the driver becomes a participant through the functionality of her vehicle. Thus, as one identifies oneself by checking in at a particular location on the map, one ‘comes into being’ and becomes known to others: otherwise, the actor ‘does not exist’. Erving Goffman’s performance theory helps to make sense of this. From this perspective, a social actor exists or comes into being as a performer of a role she is playing at every given moment, and this is how a user is ‘created’ as a supporter of the cause. The actor inside this script is a persona, a “mask” (in Goffman’s language, p. 11), rather than a real person, and the multitude of participants ‘perform’ the message they want those in power to receive.

Third, as mentioned above, one crucial issue with public protest is that of visibility, for an event attracts attention as it becomes visible to an audience. To be delivered, the message needs to reach those outside the milieu of protesters themselves, importantly ‘those in power’, whoever they might be. The politics of the visibility of the rally under discussion is pre-programmed by the functionality of the tool that protesters used. In a way, Yandex.Navigator creates a version of public/gathering space – ‘space of appearance’ – where (almost) anyone can appear and thus the message can potentially reach a wide and diverse audience. The tool’s functionality makes protest performance and message articulation possible, as it creates ‘quasi-public space’ where visibility is exercised.

Clearly, the rallies that took place all over the Russian Federation were visible to ‘netizens’, i.e. those connected to the internet (and also to those who learnt about the protest through other media outlets), as would be the case with any other virtual mobilisation. However, as the world becomes saturated with digital technology to a greater and greater extent, what takes place in virtual reality becomes a technique through which life is constructed and understood by greater numbers of people.

Conclusion

This article, inspired by quarantine-related digital activism, has been focused on making sense of two issues: what the participants of the rally in absentia actually ‘did’ and how their message was constructed as a communicative utterance. Proceeding from the assumption that this protest can be interpreted as a mass event-driven digital mobilising performance taking place in the augmented reality of a video game, the analysis focused, more specifically, on how the game functioned as a representation of something else – in this case, “space of appearance”. Technically, this interpretation involves analysing agents via available images and the nature of the interactions the actors are involved in. The rally, which had the potential to convey a message to a maximally broad audience due to the functionality of the platform on which it was realised, is more than a one-time event. Importantly, I am suggesting that this type of online rallying, once ‘invented’, may become a regular feature of social mobilisation, as digital tools that create versions of gathering places open and visible to everyone come into being and become the features of everyday life and of civic imagination. Quite recently, for example, information about a major shift on Facebook has appeared. It has been announced that the platform, which currently unites several billion users, is set to move in the direction of the so-called metaverse that “would introduce people to shared virtual worlds and experiences across different software and hardware platforms” (Frenkel 2022).

Elena Gapova
Western Michigan University
elena.gapova@wmich.edu

Bio

Elena Gapova is Professor at the Department of Sociology, Western Michigan University. She writes extensively on nation, class, gender, and intellectuals in postsocialism and, more recently, on nation building on the internet. She is the author, most recently, of “Class, Agency, and Citizenship in Belarusian Protest,” Slavic Review, 2021; “The Russian Revolution and Women’s Liberation” in The Routledge International Handbook on Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Routledge, 2021; and "On the Relationship between Science and Reality in the Time of COVID-19." Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2020.

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Suggested Citation

Gapova, Elena. 2022. “Rallies in Absentia in Quarantined Russia: Re-enacting the Space of Appearance in Augmented Reality”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 15. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2022.00015.296

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This license does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms