Luke Ryan

TU Dublin

Project Statement:

Chief Designer (2021-2022)

I began work on this project in 2021, before the February 24th invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. My research on space travel led me to the complex history of Ukrainian astronautical engineer, Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov, who headed up the Soviet space programme in the 1950s and 1960s. False accusations from fellow rocket designers led to doubts about his loyalty to the regime. Korolyov was incarcerated at Kolyma labour camp for six years, on charges of being an anti-Soviet counter revolutionary. However, his strategic value to the Soviet government in the Space Race led to his rehabilitation.

Korolyov oversaw the design, construction and deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the development of the Sputnik rocket programme. His Ukrainian identity was consistently obscured, and he was known by the anonymous appellation, ‘Chief Designer.’ His full identity was revealed only after his death in 1966. A mysterious figure, Korolyov has been treated extensively in other forms of representation outside of photography, such as literary fiction and film. I have traced Korolyov’s life through open-source images and Soviet-era visual propaganda, incorporating nineteenth century photographic processes in order to produce an alternative, visual biography.

– Luke Ryan

Artist Bio:

I am a photographic artist from Dublin, Ireland. My work treats a number of contemporary issues such as surveillance, artificial intelligence, consumerism, and modern technologies. The appropriation of digital images from public sources such as webcams, GaN (Generative Adversarial Networks) systems or online databases is an important feature of my practice, as these methods have the ability to reveal the hidden, underlying networks in society.

The lack of materiality of the digital image is also important to me. I collect images in abundance, shaping and moulding them into bodies of work. This working method was used for my books State of Security (2020), T.H.E.M.: The Heuristic Electric Machine (2020-2021) and Chief Designer (2021-2021). Drawing upon online archives, I equally experiment with photographic printing processes in order to enhance the tactile nature of the images and challenge the boundaries between the material and the immaterial.