The conference Digital War: Online-Media, Visual Politics and Crowdsourcing
in the Russian War against Ukraine takes the opportunity to investigate the digital war on social media and online platforms
that has accompanied Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine since January 18, 2022. In this context the participants analyze
digital society and its relationship to war, violence, and power in a critical and reflective manner. In his book Radical
War: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century, published in 2022, the sociologist and political consultant Matthew
Ford, who is invited to the Vienna conference, argues that the Russian war in Ukraine is the first war between two states
in Europe, that would be mediated by digital technologies and would blur the boundaries between soldiers and civilians.
Lesia Kulchynska (Kyiv/Rom): Limits of witnessing, and the role
of art during the networked war
The war in the digital era is accompanied by an inseparable from the instant
and massive witnessing. Every citizen equipped with a smartphone can produce and circulate the instant evidence of every crime
committed, document and share her own war-related experience. In the background of the mass production of visual evidence
of the war, what is the role of art?
Social media became a platform for sharing artistic messages related to war,
providing the desired instancy of the audience outreach and its emotional engagement. Yet after the first year of artistic
witnessing of war, this strategy seems to face its limits: from algorithmic content moderation to the saturation of the attention
market, loss of news value, and doubts in its efficiency.Exploring the influence of the architecture of social media on the
artistic practices of witnessing and on setting its limits, I will try to map the artistic strategies that go beyond the established
logic of networked war.
Yana Barinova(Kyiv/Vienna): Casted image: artistic
representations of Mariupol from 2014 till nowadays
Yana Barinova is sharing her own story, given that her
family is from Mariupol. In addition, she is picking out some artworks from well-known artists who've shown the harsh realities
during the occupation of Mariupol and the Azovstal siege. The presentation will be a mix of personal and artistic viewpoints.
Kateryna
Lysovenko
(Kyiv/Vienna):Painting/War
The painterKateryna Lysovenko talks about her creative-artistic
understanding of aesthetic resistance in times of war, death, violence, destruction, genocide, thought control and the massive
restrictions on human rights and freedom of expression. She willtalk about the connection between the image and the ideology
regarding her own artistic practice, she will also discuss the context of the art field and art education in Ukraine, and
she will talk about monumental art in Ukraine, because it's connected with her paintings.
Screening: Chornobyl
22.Directed byOleksiy Radynski, Ukraine, 2023, 20 Minuten.
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Credits:
Abb.
1: Der Account @xenasolo, der von einer weiblichen TikTok-Nutzerin betrieben wird, kontextualisiert die Situation in der Ukraine
für ein englischsprachiges Publikum. (Quelle: Tiktok)
Abb. 2-4: Quelle: Kateryna Lysovenko
