Postscript: Crisis as glitch

The works presented in this experimental research project are intended to offer viewers an atypical lens from which to enter an inquiry into the massive and complex network of historical crises in Southeastern Europe which have driven the unrest in Ukraine over the last nearly two years. This project asserts that it is impossible to “trace” the occupation of Ukraine, or begin to understand it, without firmly attaching the crisis to both its histories and futures. The impact of digital media on the genesis of the occupation in Ukraine, for instance, is yet to be fully understood – this project speculates that it maintains the ability to “glitch” material events through a sort of digital-cultural scrubbing. How this war will last in cultural memory remains to be seen. Crisis may be conceptualized as an act of “glitching” – of division, scrubbing, erasing, rewriting, overwriting, and breaking – systems of culturally embodied memories and the fantastical ideals of national “sovereignty” which underride them. 

As of June 2023, much of the digital media covering the conflict has been deeply entangled with the archetypal rhetoric which Zelenskyy and Putin each work to embody. The embodied experiences of those living in the region are digitized and made bite-size, reduced and “disappeared” in an effort to produce manageable, profitable content in the United States (and particularly on social media sites like Twitter). To assess digital media’s level of authority over how crises are culturally remembered is also to assess how crises have been culturally rendered before the advent of the medium. In this instance, my family’s personal histories are shared with audiences in an effort to underscore the importance of human experience and oral history, particularly over any digitally parsed-down retelling of those oral, embodied histories.