Savva Dudin is an artist, game designer, and writer whose work revolves around serious play, fictioning, and alternative socio-political infrastructures. He explores how participatory art can implicate the spectator's agency to overcome stasis and the numbness of catastrophe-thinking in times of hybrid peace.
Savva Dudin grew up in Moscow and studied political philosophy at HSE University. He was an exchange fellow at Humboldt and Stanford universities. He researched the utopian Soviet cybernetic social-engineering projects of the 1920s and 1960s, asking how project participants’ multidirectional memories formed intergenerational subjectivity.
During years of practice as a learning designer, Savva was focused on tools developing a better capacity to navigate one's attention from easily manipulated fast, semi-automatic judgments to vigilant, effortful, and slow thinking, thus enabling one to tolerate ambiguity through somatic, affective, and reflective awareness. The recurrent query through artistic research goes: How can alienation from the self be designed as a more generative than an extractivist form of attention?
He is recognized for prototyping anti-pedagogical libraries, LARPs, and p2p tools of collaboration, policy white papers, protest blueprints, soundscapes, and theater scripts. Currently, Savva facilitates interactive serious games to teach courses in philosophy and anthropology of seeing in Stradarium school, developing methods from the master thesis about modern iconoclastic crisis and iconology in times of war.