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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2022 19:54:39 -0500
From: Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com>
To: patrice riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>
Cc: Nettimepost <nettime-l@kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> The War to come ...
Message-ID: <
C9C1AD1F-D055-40DE-A052-C9AF6515167C@panix.com>
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When I was in Russia in 2008 for 5.5 months, I recorded a lot of tv footage. The piece linked here is based on a series of commercials on Telekanal Zvezda (i.e. The military?s own star channel, complete with red star). At the time, all I remember them showing
besides these commercials were old Soviet era war movies.
I paired this with some other footage from Youtube, which I considered equally obscene and provocative, though in a different way.
https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url="">
I asked my students at the Smolny Institute (now defunct, then a collaborative project between Bard College and the University of St. Petersburg) what was going on in these commercials. They could only say, ?Russian incompetence.? The Russian titles are a recuperation
of the famous inversion of the genitive, so dear to the situationists. They read: The Force of Beauty, the Beauty of Force. One could translate the word Silo (????) by Strength, but it also figures in the Russian phrase for the Armed Forces, so I kept it as
Force and that translation seems more apposite now than ever.
Russia in 2008 practiced and now practices conscription; military service is required. It is also brutal, with many incidents of hazing, and of officers extorting the grunts for their pay. This is information I heard in Russia from Russians, not in the USSA.
This piece, which pairs the commercials with other footage was part of a project called ?Equivalences? which was a large scale installation, installed only once in Antwerp. It was largely based on Youtube footage.
The current invasion in Ukraine is somehow rooted in a very long term plan. This footage plays some strange role in it.
Not for the faint hearted.
Keith
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