Minsk, evening, film-like mood, people.

I took a few photographs during a fire in a building in central Minsk. I tried not to get in the way of the emergency responders, and I did not want to breathe smoke for long, so I did not stay there and soon moved on.

I think these photographs convey the contrast between a warm summer evening and the tension of an emergency situation.

I noticed that this poster behaves in a very interesting way on a smartphone screen.

On a sunny day, I can barely see the text on it. To see it, you have to get the angle right. Point the screen straight at the sun, wait for the light sensor to kick in and for the screen to light up at maximum brightness. Only then does the barely discernible text begin to appear. Of course, this works if auto-brightness is enabled. Indoors or at night, on the other hand, the text becomes much more visible.

When I made this poster, I was not yet thinking of it as a digital object. I imagined it in physical space. For example, on matte paper, with the letters printed in a slightly glossier layer or made with some kind of embossing. You walk past the wall and suddenly notice that there is something on the poster. You come closer, and the text almost disappears. You look at it slightly from the side, and there it is again.

But it turned out that something similar happens on a screen. Digital space also has its own conditions. Light, brightness, sensors, the behavior of the device, the position of your hand, the time of day. The work begins to live a life of its own in an environment I had not originally accounted for.

I think we need to pay closer attention to how digital devices behave today. A smartphone, a TV screen, a chat with an artificial intelligence, virtual reality glasses. All of these have their own strangeness, their own sensors, their own small glitches and peculiarities.

And the better we notice this, the more precisely we can use this new space. Not just as a medium, but as part of the expression. Even if the meaning is very simple. Like on this poster.

I saw this pictogram in an underground passage and felt all of its pain.

Honestly, I don’t know how to draw it better. I haven’t looked into the details or researched how signs like this are designed around the world. But what I see here scares me more than it reassures me.

There is a staircase here. These jagged steps are very prominent, very active. There is a wheelchair user on some kind of surface. But it is unclear how this surface is supposed to move along the steps, and why this movement should create any sense of safety.

I’m not saying the pictogram needs to show the entire mechanism. But it should contain at least the idea of smooth movement. Here, it doesn’t. The eye does not move upward with the platform. It trips over the steps.

The arrows look strange, too. They seem to live in a world of their own. It is unclear what exactly they are explaining. If the sign is located below, inside the passage, then the downward arrow no longer makes sense. The task is not to go even lower, but to get back up. Yes, I understand that there is standardization and that there are standard templates. But the standard should follow the meaning, not the other way around.

Formally, this pictogram has everything. Stairs. A wheelchair. Some kind of platform. Arrows. The logic seems to be assembled. But the meaning gets lost.

A pictogram of this kind should be a saving symbol. A sign that a person’s problem has been solved here. But this pictogram does not solve the problem. It creates a new puzzle. Where should this person go? What will move? How does it work? Is this person supposed to overcome this staircase?

I look at it and see not accessibility, but a barrier. Not “you will be lifted,” but “here are the stairs, good luck.”

This is a small scene of tension, not a sign of help.

It seems to me that writing with the help of artificial intelligence is a wonderful thing. And people underestimate it today, because they often think about it too flatly: as if you are simply asking a machine to write a text for you.

But they do not see the whole game. They do not see all the work that happens behind the scenes.

For example, I go out for a walk, open a chat, and begin a conversation. This conversation can last for several hours. And at some point, it turns into a note, and sometimes into a whole essay. Not because I simply said: “write me a good text.” That is not how it works. And not because I gave the machine a set of constraints and received a finished result. I would most likely write that kind of text better myself.

The real work with artificial intelligence begins somewhere else. In the mode of playful guidance. When you do not hand the text over to the machine, but create an environment in which thought begins to move differently.

But I have realized that this method has its own downside. For me personally.

Before it got dark, I decided to take a walk through the microworld.

This is my first experience like this, and I already really like it. I got stuck near some tiny white and yellow flowers, literally on ten centimeters of ground. But in macro, it is no longer ten centimeters. It is a whole little city square: the flowers stand in different ways, some in pairs, somewhere there is a blade of grass, somewhere gaps between them, somewhere light.

It felt like I had looked into a small world that had been right here all along.