It’s Just a Single Swing of a Shovel, 2015, full HD video, color, sound, 7 minutes, 23 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.
“You don’t have to dig deep to deliver good media criticism!” is the crescendo of Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze’s short video It’s Just a Single Swing of a Shovel (2015). The film focuses on Hayastan Shakarian, a 78-year-old Armenian woman in Georgia who, in 2011, accidentally severed a fiber optic cable supplying internet to 5 million users in three countries while she was salvaging for scrap metal. Gago lightheartedly explores this event as a historical turning point, the dawn of a new way of hacking—to “hack” literally means to cut with rough or heavy blows.
Shakarian hacked away neither at software nor even computer hardware, but at physical infrastructure—the broader system connecting us that is absolutely concrete, and evidently extremely fragile. Gago’s interest in Shakarian is a gentle but serious warning that planetary-scale information systems are subject to the power of an impoverished Armenian grandmother who claims to have no idea what the internet is.
