Wartok: Networked Soundscapes of Memetic Warfare (original) (raw)
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Remixing war: An analysis of the reimagination of the Russian–Ukraine war on TikTok
Frontiers in Political Science, 2023
Interpretative struggles of global crises are increasingly being reflected on social media networks. TikTok is a relatively new social media platform that has achieved substantial popularity among young people in many parts of the world and is now being used to disseminate and make sense of information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Through a user-centered sampling approach, we collected 62 TikTok videos and conducted an in-depth qualitative analysis of them and their uploading profiles to explore how the war was being represented on the platform. Our analysis revealed a strong prevalence of remixing practices among content creators; that is, they recontextualise images, sounds and embodied self-performance within the platform-specific affordances of trends. We found that distant suffering is mediated through the emotive online self-performance of content creators, cuing their audiences toward appropriate emotional responses. Trending sounds situate videos within a singular-motif and context-diverse environment, facilitating what we theorize as affective audio networks.
The sound of disinformation: TikTok, computational propaganda, and the invasion of Ukraine
The sound of disinformation: TikTok, computational propaganda, and the invasion of Ukraine, 2024
TikTok has emerged as a powerful platform for the dissemination of mis-and disinformation about the war in Ukraine. During the initial three months after the Russian invasion in February 2022, videos under the hashtag #Ukraine garnered 36.9 billion views, with individual videos scaling up to 88 million views. Beyond the traditional methods of spreading misleading information through images and text, the medium of sound has emerged as a novel, platform-specific audiovisual technique. Our analysis distinguishes various war-related sounds utilized by both Ukraine and Russia and classifies them into a mis-and disinformation typology. We use computational propaganda features-automation, scalability, and anonymity-to explore how TikTok's auditory practices are exploited to exacerbate information disorders in the context of ongoing war events. These practices include reusing sounds for coordinated campaigns, creating audio meme templates for rapid amplification and distribution, and deleting the original sounds to conceal the orchestrators' identities. We conclude that TikTok's recommendation system (the "for you" page) acts as a sound space where exposure is strategically navigated through users' intervention, enabling semi-automated "soft" propaganda to thrive by leveraging its audio features.
GESJ: Musicology and Cultural Science, 2023
Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24 th, 2022, "Ой у лузі червона калина" ("Oh, the red viburnum in the meadow") has become a symbol of the Ukrainian people's resistance and unity against the aggressor. When Ukrainian pop-musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk posted his performance of the song on Instagram, multiple social media platforms exploded with numerous mashup versions of the song, all manifesting a symbolic counterargument toward the war narrative of the attacker. Employing invitational rhetoric as our framework, we analyze three video products created within what we call the "Kalyna" movement, one featuring the original performance by Khlyvnyuk along with other Ukrainian celebrities, and two others that stem from Estonia and Georgia. We suggest that, rather than serving as a direct call to arms, the song's renditions reflect the performers' own negotiation of their national selfhood and thus enact support of a nation under assault by celebrating its history and its right to freedom. We conclude that the media content produced in the participatory culture of the "Kalyna" movement all but validates its voluntary participants' perspectives on issues of independence, cultural identity, and human and national values.
Soviet War Songs in the Context of Russian Culture
This volume presents a unique study of war songs created during and after World War II, known in Russia as the “Great Patriotic War”. The most popular war songs, such as “Katyusha”, “The Sacred War”, “Dark Night”, “My Moscow”, “In the Dugout”, “Victory Day”, provide illuminating insights into the musical culture of the former Soviet Union and modern Russia. In the year of the 70th anniversary of victory in the war, the book studies the cultural heritage of famous war songs from a new perspective, exploring the historical background of their creation and analysing their lyrics as part of Russian cultural heritage. The book also discusses the modifications required when translating the songs from Russian to English. It concludes with a description an educational project studying war songs at Moscow schools run under the auspices of UNESCO.
Sounds of War: Aesthetics, Emotions and Chechnya
E-International Relations, 2018
Sounds of War is a book on the aesthetics of war experience in Chechnya. It includes theory on, and stories of, compassion, dance, children’s agency and love. It is not simply a book to be read, but to be listened to. The chapters begin with the author’s own songs expressing research findings and methodology in musical form. Susanna Hast is Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher with a project “Bodies in War, Bodies in Dance” (2017–2020) at the Theatre Academy Helsinki, University of the Arts. She does artistic research on emotions, embodiment and war and teaches dance for immigrant and asylum-seeking women in Finland. See also the album Man State War by Hast & Cast on Spotify, Google, Play, ITunes etc. Additional material: https://www.susannahast.com/sounds-of-war
Art Music and War: Ukrainian Case 2022
Musicologica Brunensia, 2023
After the beginning of full-scale war Russia against Ukraine from 24 of February 2022, Ukrainian composers are reflecting the theme of a war in diverse ways. This article examines general underpinning concepts, guiding the composers of the present-day Ukraine, as well and their actual musical realizations, in order to 1) provide a basis for the understanding of the wartime functioning of the Ukrainian music culture; and 2) capture a specific brand of a creative response to a dramatic and oftentimes, tragic political situation. Specifically, attention in the article focuses on works Eyes to Eyes by Evgen Petrychenko and Lullaby for Mariupol by Illia Razumeiko, Roman Grygoriv and Opera Aperta ensemble, and investigate their structural, semantic and reception-related aspects.
East / West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2022
This article examines representations of the enemy in the Ukrainian satirical songs pertaining to the Russo-Ukrainian war in the Donbas. I focus primarily on the output of Orest Liutyi (the stage persona of Antin Mukhars'kyi) and the semianonymous Mirko Sablich (Mirko Sablic) collective. Using the method of multimodal discourse analysis, I examine how the enemy opposing the Ukrainian Army is portrayed in the song lyrics and the accompanying music videos. Considering the complex nature of the conflict and the lack of uniformity in the backgrounds of the warring parties, I am particularly interested in who and why is identified as the enemy in the songs. The enemy appears in several guises: "moskal's" -- Russian or pro-Russian aggressors from outside Ukraine; "separs" -- Ukrainian collaborators who support, often through military efforts, the separation of the Donbas from Ukraine; and "vatniks" -- passive anti-Ukrainian individuals who live in Ukraine and whose inaction is perceived to be harmful to Ukraine's wartime efforts. Whereas these songs call upon Ukrainians to repel the external enemy ("moskal's") in armed combat, no clear strategy is suggested for how the internal enemies ("separs" and "vatniks") should be dealt with or, in some cases, even identified. As a result, Liutyi and Sablic, while positioning themselves as "counterpropaganda" projects, risk labelling as "the enemy," and thus alienating, the audiences most susceptible to propaganda, who could otherwise benefit most from their myth-debunking efforts.
BALKANISTIC FORUM , 2021
Both the official army music and combatants’ informal folk songs have always played a noteworthy role in their respective societies regardless whether this music was created as means of actual propaganda or subsequently as part of reinvented commemorative culture. This article focuses on comparison of the two most recent European armed conflicts, namely 1) the ethnically motivated conflicts in former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995/1999, and 2) the interethnic violence followed by Russian military intervention in Ukraine in 2014; the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has not yet been settled and still threatens to escalate. Building on wide range of primary and secondary sources (mainly of Western, Central and South-Eastern European provenience) that has been ignored by a regional scholarship, the paper seeks to provide a contextual background behind the war songs and to compare their prevalent patterns and typology of their inner dynamics and transformations. This paper will not inquire into international, economical or military implications of the aforementioned armed conflicts; it will focus specifically on textual and contextual analysis of those songs. Study brings completely new insights on phenomenon of war songs in East European and former Yugoslav environment and brings much-needed light on the intertwined social, cultural and identity relations that can be established between the former Yugoslav and post-Soviet countries. This topic is very important since state doctrine, national narratives, historical memory affect current and also future development of both regions what is clearly visible on elaborated material.
Memes as antibodies: Creativity and resilience in the face of Russia’s war
Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine, 2024
Ukrainians responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion not only militarily, but also with an explosion of creativity on the linguistic and cultural fronts, in the form of wartime songs, sayings, art, jokes, and memes. I view this rapid cultural production as a cultural immune response, and consider how it functioned as a defense against the cultural and ideological threats that Russia presented along with its military invasion. I focus on three key threats in Russian propaganda: the denial of Ukraine’s existence, the insistence that Ukrainian and Russian are the same, and depictions of Ukrainians as weak and demoralized. These threats were countered by three themes in Ukrainian social media: the affirmation of Ukrainian existence, the assertion of Ukrainian distinctiveness, and the celebration of courage and resilience in the face of assault. The Russian aggression, instead of disrupting Ukrainian identity, prompted a consolidation and renewed vigor in Ukrainianness. Social media amplified the power of this burgeoning cultural resistance. The digitally circulating memes helped to construct a community that is imagined as bound and yet is pervasive and boundless, including its displaced and diasporic members. An effect of the cultural explosion was the creation of unity across status, class, region, age, gender, and language in Ukraine, and with Ukrainians in diaspora. (This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.)
“I Felt Frightened and Then I Started Singing”: Songs at Russian Protest Actions
Folklorika, 2023
This article explores the role of songs in Russian protests. Data are drawn from ethnographic observations made at protests held between 2015 and 2022, mostly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as part of the project, "Monitoring Contemporary Folklore," based at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. The authors consider materials from 240 protests. Viewing protests as an act of communication, the article analyzes the circumstances for song performances and suggests a hypothesis for songs' communicative goals. The article additionally demonstrates how song choice changes from common 1980's protest songs to new tracks that gained later popularity. The article demonstrates how song production depends on the types of protests and the levels of participant engagement.