Empire in the iPhone

Chrono-schizophrenia as the new normal. The “Empire in an iPhone” series explores a fundamental breakdown in the perception of time in the 21st century.

It is not a collage of different eras, but a diagnosis: we live in a state of “chrono-schizophrenia,” where past, present, and future coexist simultaneously within a single digital field, losing their linearity and cause-and-effect continuity.

The Russian Empire is not being “revived” or “remembered” — it is present here and now, like an open browser tab, intricately and surrealistically intertwined with the realities of the digital age.

This is neither nostalgia nor satire. It is a visual exploration of how history, stripped of its tragic weight, turns into a set of ghosts wandering through the labyrinth of our devices.

It is a world where technology does not free us from the past, but traps us in its endless repetition — as a simulation stripped of its original, and therefore stripped of meaning.

The series raises the central question: is our technologically advanced present merely a spectral remake of a long-forgotten imperial dream?