Svitlana Matviyenko with Ramon Reichert: Synthetic Images | Dynamic Maps

Part of the lecture series ‘Aesthetics of Transformation’

Curated by School for Transformation and in collaboration with AIL

Maps of the war in Ukraine – and we know a good number of such tools – are typically not considered synthetic images in a sense of pure computer-generated simulations and visualizations. By focusing on one of them, DeepStateMap that is often regarded as “the most accurate map” of the war in Ukraine, the talk will consider its operational ability amid the war. Based on real-world geographic data, satellite imagery, intelligence reports, it still heavily relies on human analysts and data collectors. In other words, DeepStateMap constitutes a particular type of operational image that is, indeed, synthetic but in the most general sense of the word: it is written by a complex assemblage of human-machine collaboration. By looking at its synthetic nature and grass-roots origin, as well as its use as 1) a cognitive tool for understanding the evolving situation on the ground, including territorial control, troop movements, and the key strategic locations in the present, the talk will also address this map as a speculative tool for envisioning and modeling probable accidents and developments in the future, and 2) as a tool for negotiation between several radically different groups of viewers – not only Ukrainian forces and civilians, but also, the Russian aggressor.

Svitlana Matviyenko is an Associate Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication and Associate Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. Her research and teaching, informed by science & technology studies and history of science, are focused on information and cyberwar, media and environment, critical infrastructure studies and postcolonial theory. Matviyenko’s current work on nuclear cultures & heritage investigates the practices of nuclear terror, weaponization of pollution and technogenic catastrophes during the Russian war in Ukraine. Matviyenko is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019), a winner of the 2019 book award of the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and of the Canadian Communication Association 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson book prize.

Ramon Reichert (Dr. phil. habil.) teaches and researches at the Department of Cultural Studies at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Previously, he taught and researched in Basel, Berlin, Canberra, Fribourg, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Sankt Gallen, Stockholm and Zurich and was EU project coordinator for many years. His recent research project Visual Politics and Protest. Artistic Research Project on the visual framing of the Russia-Ukraine War on internet portals and social media (2022-2024) was dealing with the visual politics of violence, conflict and resistance. Recent publications:Warfeed on Telegram: The Russian Full Scale Invasion against Ukraine as Crowdsourced War, in: Special Issue, Comparative Southeast European Studies 2025/02;Austrian Postwar Cinema between "Restoration" and "Modernism" 1945-1955, in: Elana Shapira, Austria and Modernism, Bloomsbury: London 2025; Digital War: Media Strategies and Visual Politics during the Full-Scale Attack of Russia on Ukraine, Digital Culture & Society 2024/1, (co-editor, together with Anna Näslund, Stockholm); Digital Warfare. The Russian Full Scale Invasion against Ukraine as Enacted on Telegram, in: Harun Farocki Institut (ed. by Tom Holert, 12/10/2023); Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism, Digital Culture & Society 2021/2 (co-editor, together with Olga Moskatova and Anna Polze).

About the series and information about all lectures

School for Transformation
AIL

Upcoming dates of the series:

10.06.2025, 18:00, Noit Banai with Amanda Holmes: The Paradoxes of Positionality: Diaspora Aesthetics and Transdisciplinary Research

17.06.2025, 18:00, Heather Davis with Monika Halkort: Plasctic Aesthetics

24.06.2025, 18:00, Miya Yoshida: Transvaluation: Reclaiming Time

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