The collaborative duo, fantastic little splash (Lera Malchenko and Oleksandr Hants), is part of the 2022 Digital Art Residency programme in collaboration with Pro Helvetia. During their residency, fantastic little splash will develop see also: the set of compressed images and feelings, an installation and video essay that explores how war-related technologies such as alarm maps, siren signals, and mass media transform those affected into a collective body. Calling to attention how this techno-ecological multiplicity emerges from the scaling and synchronisation effects of technology, fantastic little splash raise questions about what it means when collectivity is forced yet necessary.
Examining a collection of found footage of operational images from the war in Ukraine, staged shots of people assuredly patting themselves, and videos taken from social media platforms, fantastic little splash compile footage of people patting themselves – a behaviour they noticed in many of the Ukrainian media circulated online – and ask how this gesture might be a way to remember unity within a fragile collectivity.
The duo explores the online formation of a fragile yet necessary Ukrainian collectivity – a collectivity formed under duress of the war. Through this collection of burnt-out, compressed, pixelated, and blurred images, they attempt to decipher feelings and images through distorted perception systems, logics of wartime (self) censorship, and the politics of digital platforms.
jury
Lukáš Likavčan, Svitlana Matviyenko, Tobias Brenk, and Nora O Murchú.
credits
The Digital Art Residency is a cooperation between transmediale and Pro Helvetia. transmediale has been funded as a cultural institution of excellence by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) since 2004. with additional funding by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Department Culture.
