„Cyberwar: violence and time” – a debate

Sunday, the 28th of May, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m., the Small Stage of Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw 

➤ moderator: Natalia Sielewicz 

➤ participants: 
– Oleksii Kuchanskii – Ukrainian independent film programmer and writer
– Oleksii Radynski – writer, filmmaker, co-founder of the Ukrainian edition of "Political Critique"
– Mykola Ridnyi – Ukrainian artist, creator of installations, objects and video works, member of the SOSka art collective
– Alexandra Tryanova – independent art curator, former curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Odessa and Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv.

In many analyses of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we encounter the thesis that the current war is one of the most documented and mediatized armed agressions in the history of mankind. But what agency does an image have in the face of continual war crimes and atrocities? Digital media shape affective responses: from empathic agitation and compassion to fear, rage and indifference. They influence the politics of memory, and force confrontation, but are also subject to constant censorship in social media in the "concern for the viewers’ safety".

Writing about the manipulation of visual practices by russian propaganda, Svitlana Matviyenko states that we have witnessed a progress from disinformation to to the strategic production of terror. 

Parallel to military action, war also takes place in the cloud and within the material infrastructures that are the basis of it. Fear management mechanisms, hacker attacks, surveillance, and propaganda shape cyber warfare practices and engage forms of experience. Together with filmmakers - Oleksiy Radynski and Mykola Rydnyi -  and researchers - Oleksiy Kuchanski and Alexandra Tryanova - we will try to better understand this foggy kaleidoscope of images, networks of connections and affects.