The program Outside All Dimensions. Contemporary Art Practices and Journalism in Russia aims to support research projects by Russian and international authors writing in Russian and to develop the press as artistic media.

We live in a multiplicity of fundamentally constructed and often illusorily measurable worlds. In Russia, Daniil Turovsky's investigations into Russian hacking coexist with the adoption of the Yarovaya package, and Sasha Sulim's reporting with the Golunov case. The positions of those who organize and describe these worlds are incompatible, and yet they exist together as a background to millions of people’s everyday experiences. These positions and their contradictions are further reinforced by technologies that disseminate and moderate information at ever greater speeds and on larger scales.

Over the past two decades, journalism in Russia has become something distinctly different from mere news coverage (or rather it was forced to do so). For some in the professional community the functions of monitoring the systems of power and business turned out to be impracticable without a more active position in support of civil society: the basic value of neutrality in journalistic practice became artificially inaccessible as a result of restrictions and forced self-censorship.

Developing media offer new ways of describing hidden but significant parts of reality that can become shared. The turn toward experimental narrative in journalism and the separation of data journalism into an independent practice indicate the importance of image and technology in creating a common reality. Critic Stefan Jonsson notes that “aesthetics would seem to be a vaccine that protects journalism from conformity and keeps it from degenerating into shallow, if perhaps entertaining, reproduction of the gestures of power.” In his book Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform Without Informing, Alfredo Cramerotti describes how the art environment and journalism exchange methods and roles, creating new approaches to the formation and dissemination of knowledge.

The shift in contemporary art toward artistic practices based on research, investigation, and documentary mediums, as much as the legacy of tactical media and media activism, echoes the processes taking place in journalism. One of the aims of this type of artistic practice is the possibility to challenge established concepts of reality and draw attention to the lack of consensus as such. The experience of projects such as Forensic Architecture blurs the boundaries between evidence-based investigation, the development and implementation of an artistic gesture, and direct interaction with problematic areas of reality.

The joint study of this field by participants in the two—journalistic and artistic— worlds suggests developing new languages ​​and formats for telling invisible stories, investigating hidden hierarchies, and recomprehending established cultural codes. The program Outside All Dimensions is named after the eponymous Yegor Letov song, which describes becoming free in the midst of total, vital horror. For Garage Digital, the problem of measurability (of experiences, social activities, and political agendas) inherent in this title is an important point of interest in the face of tightening control over what is happening on the Internet and articulated concerns about the introduction of restrictions and blocking comparable with the Chinese model.