Putin's Prison presents a series of screen captures taken from unsecured security cameras across Russia between 3-4 April 2022, on the 40th day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Many of these images show barriers, fences, corridors, stairwells, entrances, shop interiors, and parks in Russian cities and suburbs. In some, these banal views are punctured by hackers' replacement of standard data with anti-war, anti-Putin, and pro-Ukrainian slogans.
These interventions highlight vulnerabilities in Russia's domestic surveillance apparatus and allude to a larger information war being waged across the media on either side of the conflict. However successful these actions may be, the inclusion of counter-narrative text to the surveillance image is an ingenious attempt to subvert the camera's ability to enforce State control over its citizens.
