Rather than treating technology as a purely infrastructural or economic domain, the conference approaches it as a cultural force that shaped forms of knowledge, social hierarchies, and everyday life, while simultaneously being redefined through these very practices. Central to this framework are questions about how scientific knowledge and expert authority were produced within specific institutional environments, including closed academic cities, secrecy regimes, and highly structured research infrastructures, and how these conditions contributed to the formation of a distinct scientific intelligentsia. Equally important is the exploration of technology in everyday life: how industrial goods, housing technologies, agricultural modernization, and consumer technologies mediated daily routines, aspirations, and material cultures of Soviet citizens. The conference further interrogates how infrastructures of modernization were experienced unevenly across space and social groups, producing both visions of progress and persistent frictions of scarcity, adaptation, and informal practice. At the same time, attention is given to the cultural imagination of technology in Soviet Ukraine, including cybernetics and early notions of artificial intelligence, as well as to the ways in which technological optimism and its limits were represented, contested, and reworked in cinema, visual culture, and artistic responses to industrialization and catastrophe. In this regard, the Chernobyl disaster serves as a critical point of reflection on the fragility of technological utopianism and its environmental and social consequences.

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