WARBOUND: COLLECTIVE AUDIO STREAMING FROM UKRAINE

Olya Zikrata

                                                                                                                                                                                                     I would like to thank Natalka Revko for sharing her insights with me,

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       together we are – разом ми є.

Introduction

Each war is more than one. It is never limited to a single dimension of violence. The multiple it becomes is vast and devastating, engulfing and eroding. It spills across the battle fields – territory, environment, body, senses, information, making assault operational in the surplus. This text is about the Ukrainian experience of Russian assault, in a specific context of encounter. It is about the experience of invasion that cannot be defined by visual cartography of occupation but fathomed in its expanse: the multiple that “spread its span”, in the Serresian sense of the word (Serres 1995: 59), its terror, in a continued acoustic encirclement to which I want to refer as inhabited warbound.

Warbound as a way of being-with war in its acoustically forged territory echoes Bruno Latour’s (2017) formulation of “earthbound”, a politics of place-making that is invested in entanglements, relationalities, and collective survival. To become warbound is to be gathered by shared fragility, and shared trembling, not only in the sense of the vibrational continuum of war that Steve Goodman (2010) carefully examines in his book Sonic Warfare but also in the sense of reterritorialized discontinuum of peacetime that warbound entails, in its relational nexus and ecological truth. Warboundness hence is profoundly affirmative, for it places one in the space of war that rematerializes one’s existence, revealing the depths of world’s “indivisible volume”, to put it in Salomé Voegelin’s terms (Voegelin 2019: 60), the sonic wartime (-earth) as commonly lived bound.

To live in Ukraine after 24 February 2022 is to be entrenched in what becomes a place of war, to be held not just by a territory as space bounded by a border but by “one’s situation on a given soil”, in Latour’s (2022) understanding of it, a new kind of ground defined by an “ordeal”. For the world, Ukrainian ordeal is a capital-centric concern, a situation of yet another “conflict” by which to measure resources; for Ukraine, its ordeal is a set of new bounds around which to orient of what it, Ukraine as earth-centered multispecies community, can do and how it must survive. Warboudness in this context is multi-situational, and my focus on sound as materialism of war and condition of invasion marks specificity of situation. The sonic bound is of “acoustic territory” (LaBelle 2010), a soundway by which war acts, marks (soils) and ruptures (transforms) the background, leaving a material trace of the invisible trajectory it becomes, a trace to which one can claim truth – and a certain (uncertain) truthfulness.

What does it mean to claim the truths of war in a state of sonic contingency? To make warbound a site of knowing? To implicate sitedness for the sake of evidential integrity of “material emanations” (Schulze 2018: 112) from all there is – war? I turn to these questions through examination of the creative work done by Ukrainian sound artists and practitioners within the scope of the project Listen Live (Nazhyvo), with its experiential, sonico-political, and justice-seeking implications. My intention is to give the project needed attention, rethinking its collective effort toward a sonically structured (as sonically thought) forensic architecturing of war experience, a technologically produced act of living and sharing both the immediacy of war, as it traces itself in sonic and sensory conditions, and its performative evidence from which to fashion what Susan Schuppli (2020) constructs as a “material witnessing” act.

Listen Live is a series of real-time audio streams transmitted from various parts of Ukraine, just as it is a set of recordings of these streams which now serve as a media-specific memory archive of the war experience. In its technological undertaking, the work must be understood within and beyond the empirical givenness of audio streams and recordings by which it crafts the act of (ear-) witnessing and renders “listen live” as witness live. One can argue that Listen Live makes listening its “referent”, the term I borrow from Anette Vandsø’s (2017) discussion of event-specific recordings that seek affordances offered by more than human “technological ear” in commemorative contexts. Yet technological construction of the listening act is not one and only focus of Listen Live, a constitutively collective Ukrainian project that has evolved from artist-led war study workshops into a form of acoustemological commitment.

The essay is a study of this commitment, explored within the overarching pursuit of truth-claiming. I begin with more of a contextual section on the collective experience of the Russian invasion as invasion by sound, among other ways. I touch on the colonial intent and coercive tactics of the aggressor, drawing out an understanding of shared war as lived expanse that is thoroughly performative. The war in my thinking of it unfolds in the specificities of oppressive operations, in the material details of aggression that may not be strictly of taxonomic order, of this and that, but rather of complexity that makes warbound a lived space. Listen Live is introduced in the ecology of relation emerging in this space, in the bounded sound of wartime.

I then proceed to a more focused discussion of the project, seeking in its format of inquiry both humanist and posthumanist renderings of truth-telling. The discussion gathers from theoretical insights of Salomé Voegelin, Steven Feld, and Susan Schuppli, and ethnographic vocabulary of J. Martin Daughtry, while also drawing on Ukrainian awareness of collectively developed sonic intelligence, the shared knowledge of being-with war. As I delve deeper into acoustic knowings and political potentials they harness, and as I map the project as a probing of material witnessing, I call for a new experiential truth of Ukrainian justice-seeking efforts committed to sonic relationality, and ethics into which it extends.

Collectivity of shared war 

Ukrainians live in “belliphonic” times.[1] In times of blunt violence and shared contingency of Russian aggression experienced by the entire population. War tears through the air, sparing no living being as it seeks to claim all. Survival becomes a ruthless game of chance, a Russian roulette, no longer merely a figure of speech but a grim reality of Russian missiles, aerial bombs, Shahed kamikaze drones, and other weapons of destruction aimed at Ukrainian lives. Danger as it does not always lurk within the seen but resides in the unseen, in the material conditions of its sonic propagation. Ukrainians find themselves ensnared in dramatized displays of colonial aggression, haunted by the acousmatic presence of their predator. The war for them is more than a visually framed battleground; it is a lived actuality of sounded intent. The aleatoric orchestration of ideological reality, that of genocide.[2]

With the piercing wails of sirens, deafening detonations, and intense shock waves, acoustic environment transforms into an ecology of predator-prey relation where sound performs the conditions of presence that extend aggressor’s violent reach. The aggressor asserts its dominance through contingent yet continual involvement, traversing the geographical map of active combat and creating a newly bounded space in which war takes on tangible form in the material reality of its sonic continuum. Such involvement is orchestrated expansively and eventfully. Warnings of attacks come in waves, often several times a day, and are heard across the regions. The barrage of missiles and drones is directed at multiple locations at once to maximize the impact of terror. Ballistic paths are frequently changed to disorient the population and heighten the sense of dread. Life becomes harnessed at the will of the aggressor whose schemes of air assault are deeply entwined with sleep deprivation tactics to cause widespread exhaustion and suffering. 

Sound in its “potential for violence” (Daughtry 2015: 5) is turned into a resource to sustain a colonial operation performed through invasive techniques and coercive means of torture.[3] The Ukrainian experience of torture is not restricted to makeshift torture chambers established by Russian authorities across the occupied territories of Ukraine. It encompasses psychological manipulation and physical coercion enacted by occupying forces across lived spaces. Floodwater, for instance, was made a tool of torture when hundreds of Ukrainians found themselves "quite literally, undergoing waterboarding" in their own homes after the detonation of the Nova Kakhovka dam. (Matviyenko 2023) Flooded towns were sealed off by the Russian military that sought to submerge the Ukrainian territories in rising waters to inflict collective harm.[4] Similarly, sound too has been leveraged for Russia’s predatory profiteering. It has enabled the aggressor to exploit both space and body in its collective capacity.

Any sound that could signal or perform Russian aggression must be understood as a crucial component of acoustically designed, sonically bolstered, and collectively lived performative environment within which the Russian invasion is sought to unfold. This research article is about being in the space of this environment, not in the sense of what it holds but how it transforms, orchestrating realities of possible worlds in which the war is more than a lived belliphonic attack but a state of perpetual alert that Ukrainians navigate. “More than” in the implication of what else violence can be challenges the idea that belliphonic violence is strictly of the “spectrum” of sounds produced by war, and that it can be quantified in view of a particular taxonomy. In his book Listening to War, J. Martin Daughtry writes toward a certain givenness of such taxonomy, mainly drawing on military and civilian testimonies, written and spoken. For Daughtry, wartime is demarcated from peacetime in an acoustically possible way, in a qualified range of wartime sounds. What I want to argue is that “listening to war” is not just listening to belliphonic sounds in a complex taxonomy of their difference. It is also listening across the possibly impossible ways of registering the invisible as it reveals itself in the temporalities and intensities of disruption that war becomes and works to be, in the fullness of its potential to serve to harm life – life itself and in the character of involved relations.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started in the spring of 2014 when the Russian military “green men” seized Crimea and launched a special operation in eastern Ukraine, turning the region into a war zone. It later evolved into a full-scale assault when Russia escalated its attacks on 24 February 2022. Ukrainians were drawn into an existential fight for survival, facing the imminent prospect of death if they were not to defend themselves, the Ukrainian land and a living multispecies world, against genocidal and ecocidal destruction. Survival became a posthumanist imperative, necessitating a fight for life that was more than the preservation of one’s individual body-self but a collective body-other. It called for a new status of Ukrainian truth as one of a plurality of what it could be in the situated knowledges of a more than human community, ecologies of beings and things, and diverse ontological entities from which to gather and with which to imagine a heterogeneous Ukrainian testimony.

Everything – from Ukrainian fields disfigured by explosive ordnance; to mutilated bodies of Ukrainian civilians recovered from mass graves; to Ukrainian airspace pierced by combat drones – bears witness to Russia’s war in a totality of its crime scene. Attack on Ukrainian life is lived in the actuality of multiple ruptures that wartime as shared timescape works to orchestrate. To live inside the war is to be entangled in worldly transformations of which violence as distributed force bears agentive capacity, erupting or acting slowly into the world that makes itself a part of it. It is to be urged in a continual witnessing act from which there is no withdrawal. “This World Is Recording” (Ide zapys), as Ukrainian artist Katya Buchatska (2022) has put it through her own being in it.[5] One can neither pause nor rewind it. Recording becomes “this world” folded onto a present continuum.

Witnessing, and “labor” of being involved in it, as Ukrainian artists and scholars (Bazdyrieva et al. 2022) asserted, is never a choice but everyday responsibility to respond to a situation in which one is in measure to be with the others. It is an integral positioning from which there is no retreat. Labouring here is not affixed to self or individual; it operates transindividually and within the larger more than human activity in experience. It reconnects a politics of commitment with an ontological state in which wartime humans and nonhumans live, and in which they must survive. One may think of such response and responsiveness in Karen Barad’s terms (Barad 2010: 265) – the terms of responsibility not as an “obligation” one chooses but an “incarnate relation” one becomes. War is registered across the lived world of beings and things and their interdependent temporalities. It is evidenced by disruptions performed on the world whose conditions of (and for) living are dictated by war. The world (as in Buchatska’s “this world”) is now a record of these disruptions, a living witness risking to be caught in its own recording-as-witnessing. Witnessing that is not just subjective-collective but rather ecological, or out of relation. It is performed on many terms and forms of togetherness, including sonic.

The Ukrainian laboratory Land To Return, Land To Care (Zemlia povernennia, zemlia turboty), and its offshoot project Listen Live (Nazhyvo), can be seen as a creative incubator for thinking and probing modes of witnessing that, among other ways, invest in sonic sensibility and acoustic presence. The laboratory works at the intersection of Ukrainian art, philosophy, and activism, focusing on research-creation projects that engage in collaborative knowledge production in a time of war. It is conceived as a joint initiative aimed at developing a deeper understanding of the Ukrainian experience of the Russian invasion through experiential research, curatorial practice, and critical intervention. All the projects carried out so far have been invested in the practice of active witnessing and speculative possibilities it opens, as collective intelligences must be gathered not only from human subjects but from everything bound in earthly survival. Inasmuch as Ukrainians testify to what they are living, the land in its material conditions becomes itself a living testimony. Land To Return, Land To Care commits its efforts to embracing an expanded testimonial capacity with which the affected more-than-human world is endowed.

In this context of curatorial frame, Listen Live stands as a proposition to explore the act of acoustic testimony and modes of truth-telling it affords. The project directly engages with the experience of invasion, refraining from solely interpreting it as an encounter with belliphonic violence. Instead, it explores this experience as one of emergent collectivity operating from acoustic relations shaped by new wartime orders. The participating artists seek to redefine the acoustics of wartime from their own idiosyncratic stance realigned with collective acoustemological commitment and auditory practice.

The environment that the participants inhabit and that inhabits them holds profound transformations that the war has wrought. It testifies to shifts in lived conditions, exposing the scars and consequences etched into physical and mental spaces. Knowing the war from within it exposes one to terrifying and triggering sounds and silences, while harnessing the resonance of vulnerability that they inaugurate. As Listen Live unfolds, it urges to imagine what this resonance might be and how it is enacted. The artists lend a palpable urgency to shared experience of war, working from acoustic narratives that both encapsulate and transcend individual struggles, fostering a collective stance of resilience, survival, and mutuality. Acoustic environment is approached with attention to detail in encounters and reciprocity by which sonic traces of war are forged into a contingent testimony that can only be made through one’s own being-with it.

Listen Live

Listen Live is a project that deepens our understanding of invasion through the acoustic study of wartime. It started as a grassroots initiative spearheading the acoustic exploration of ecological contexts in the Odesa region. With the onset of Russia's full-scale war, the project shifted its focus to the creation of an acoustic community, embarking on a newly explorative inquiry into wartime life. The curators expanded the scope of the project and its activist stance, seeking a broader geographical frame and site-specificity. In its recent iterations, the project draws on ecological knowledges and collective experiences of war, paying closer attention to the experience of loss across the everyday materialities of life and within the continuity of ecological existence.

The first documented phase of the project included workshop sessions with five artists from across Ukraine who used portable open microphones “streamboxes” to stream the sounds of their locations to online sound map which could be accessed live. An online listening event took place on November 5, 2022, with the support of several external and internal partners. Soundcamp, the UK-based arts cooperative, played a key role in the development and distribution of streamboxes to Ukrainian artists. It stood out for its significant contribution, offering indispensable creative tech guidance during workshops and throughout the event. The UK platform Acoustic Commons hosted the working versions of project, facilitating live audio streaming and documentation.The Ukrainian NGO Slushni Rechi and Museum of Odesa Modern Art provided curatorial support, while the cultural memory platform Past/Future/Art facilitated the project’s commemorative agenda.

Some of the streams in their entirety were later archived on the Land To Return, Land To Care website and made available for continued exploration. This inaugural phase set the precedent for subsequent iterations of the project, which included the 2023 stream from Odesa performed by Natalka Revko, and the upcoming 2024 event featuring more than a dozen of Ukrainian streamers, curated by Natalka Revko and Valeriia Nasedkina, and supported by Soundcamp and the Lviv-based cultural center Dim Zvuku.

For this research paper, I will draw from the readily navigable audio files and the archived material of the 2022 stream to think with the sonic geography of invasion and what it makes fathomable through the collective – ecological – emergence. What Listen Live proposes in the practice of streaming and mapping is more than an acoustic art of commoning and making together that the platform Acoustic Commons essentially supports and politicizes. The stakes are radically higher. The project testifies to the Ukrainian experience of invasion contained by its acoustic truths from which to draw an understanding of what the invaded body and the invaded environment might be in the simultaneity and reciprocity of their invisible materiality, and in the belliphonics of ecological entanglement.

In her work on sonic possibilism and the entanglement of the world that it performs, Salomé Voegelin develops an argument for a temporal geography of sound in which there are no lines of separation enabled by visual logics. The world on sonic terms is contingent and formless, yet its “formless form” can be inhabited and fathomed in the invisible depths by which we are held together in a coexistence with the environment. (Voegelin 2021) What we are as a world is not measured by the thickness of skin, or by individuation, but by the possibilities of porous, inclusive and expansive, becoming that is contingently gestured. It is in the political of it that a geography of our “invisible and indivisible” existences can be probed. (Voegelin 2019)

The invisible that Listen Live makes audible reveals reality that resists a taxonomy of belliphonic sounds by which war in its sonic dimension is sought to be defined. It gets us to the depths of what can be navigated as a world disrupted by a nontaxonomic aggression. We do not necessarily hear the invasion in the belliphonic scope of acoustic territory it performs but in the belliphonic becomings it enables. What we detect are ways in which the belliphonic body starts negotiating the possible reality of military attack, ways in which it starts acting from wartime orders: digging tranches, assessing its safety, grappling with exhaustion, listening out for a next round of bombardments, dreaming of homecoming from a place of refuge, finding itself on a move from dangers that surround it in the real war it lives and navigates.

The five streams produced by Ukrainian artists who joined Listen Live from the cities of Kyiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Uzhhorod, and Lviv converge to form a creative inquiry into the concept of belliphonic body: a collective body emerging at its “interbeing”, in Voegelin’s terms, in its essential relation with the belliphonic environment of which the war is deeply complicit. The proposition comes within the streams as they remain thematically focused on the relational potentials of acoustic environments in which the belliphonic body materializes itself in its differential co-composing across the experiential time and space. Each stream has a narrative solicited from the artist to orient the listener around a particular encounter with the war through which belliphonic (em-)bodying is explored. The narratives describe the overall moment of the stream, drawing into the situations from which the streamer entered a relational process.

These contingent situations are defined by collective vulnerability: war is there to be-with and to live-with in a new livable relating that requires a great deal of craftiness and involved attunement between, and in-between, the body and the environment. As the streams unfold, it becomes hearable that the body that emerged in its belliphonic relation shares the war by acting into it, just like the war shares itself to the body by enabling its acting. The artists imagine around this sense of belliphonic co-emergence as they explore the everyday environments and their materialist consequences for the sensing body that is always in the process of self-orienting in response to violent ruptures. Whether it is an air raid siren or alert on the phone delivering the trajectory of an aerial attack, the body is listening across the total performativity of space, gathering from the acoustic cues in coming to knowing in the conditions defining and shaping its chances of survival.

In accounting for the streams from her own acoustically situated position, Ukrainian cultural journalist and curator Yuliia Manukian writes about the operational context within which the collective belliphonic body acts out of its invisible surroundings. Since the full-scale invasion Ukrainians are deeply aware of the genocidal intent of the enemy. They are immersed in a complex work of war, with all the actualizations and hauntings that make reflective consciousness of collective death the order of every day. This is particularly evident in Manukian’s engagement with the streams. When one of the streams suddenly cuts off, Manukian is immediately concerned with the potential danger confronting the streamer: “…silence weighs heavy on my heart: he (the streamer) went offline as if lost to us forever… Death, though, doesn’t come as a shock anymore. It is so pervasive that it makes me wonder how I am still alive when so many of us have lost their lives.” (Manukian 2022)

Reflecting on a newly communitarian listening condition in which Ukrainians find themselves living in a time of war, Manukian points out that her way of listening to the streams is negotiated continually from all there is a belliphonic place that is charged with mortal danger. In its heightened relational awareness, the belliphonic body recognizes itself as a target of missile strikes, knowing that it can be attacked at any given moment. The immediacy of war is not yielded by crude observation but is braced through cultivated sensibility that brings forth a new truth of the world inhabited in the materiality of acoustically mapped and sonically lived genocidal intent. “We may not have a tomorrow,” as Manukian writes, speaking to what it feels like to be “we” in times of sustained aggression distributed against the collective body, and its warrior-sociality.

The realization that any of many Ukrainians in the “we” may not “live up to tomorrow” is further underscored by the wailing sirens in Manukian’s surroundings which she hears in simultaneity with the sirens from the stream. The war is harnessed and pluralized in the invisible and mobile sonic worlds to which “belliphonic auditors”, to use Daughtry’s term, are frequently exposed, listening to war both on the ground, from where they are, and across the grounds, from where they could possibly be in mobile connection with the other.

Listen Live, in this sense of probing a site of togetherness from which to rethink the Ukrainian experience of the Russian invasion as an experience of collective sonic sensibility, reclaims the belliphonic body in its transindividual mode of knowing and unknowing the world that does not conform to depoliticized matters of fact but gathers itself contingently across politicized matters of concern and modes of truth-making they fashion.

In the truths of collective streaming

In a series of videos exploring the sonic impact of the Russian invasion on civilian auditors, Leipzig-based artist Leon Seidel (2023) presents interviews with the Ukrainian artists Natalka Revko, Oleksandr Rudovskyi, and Oleksandr Naselenko who recount their firsthand experiences of the war. The interviews gather from individual recollections of belliphonic violence to necessitate a focus on a collective sonic momentum of living with, and through, the war. The artists are asked shared questions to reflect on what it means to be inside the war in a mode of newly experienced sonic operation of relation under belliphonic circumstances. As they tell their stories of sonic encounters, hauntings, and adaptations, it becomes clear that what they have lived through is an acoustically enacted situation in which one is contingently challenged by a routine condition of war.

The war is explored as an atmosphere of aggressive reclamations with which one establishes a form of relationality. Sounds and silences are understood as materializations expressing appearances, disappearances, and liminalities of a companion animality that war becomes in its communicative difference. One must learn to coexist with this relentless force, a beastly being that keeps showing itself, in signals and strikes, manifesting sonic presence through things and creatures alike – whether they soar as flying objects or birds, reverberate through a phone or the airspace – in a totality of what becomes warwork’s ecological creation. As Oleksandr Naselenko’s interview reveals, life is measured by the incoming and outgoing artillery, enemy’s projectiles and Ukrainian defenses, and long silences in between, gathering into a testimonial trace of sounds that attest to the way the war echoes in everything, including the cries of disturbed seagulls.

The invasion holds a place for the body to dwell within the material complexity of aggression that is more than strictly a missile campaign launched to perform what Ukrainian environmental anthropologist Darya Tsymbalyuk (2022) has called the act of “erasure” in its multiple facets. The place of war, as it crafts itself in forces and matters, and in physical entanglements deepened by blurred boundaries of one’s sonically sited presence, is always indexed by the distribution of sounds and the heard, and by the continuities of auditory feedback. Aggression gains specificity and a resonant frequency, alongside the acoustic time that renders silence as menacing as sound. In his documentary “20 days in Mariupol”, Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov (2023) encapsulates this reality with haunting clarity: “…wars don’t start with explosions; they start with silence.”

Silence as a wartime condition of ruptured background noise is both sign and sound which auditors cannot ignore. It is a quiet-before-the-storm marked by anticipation and acoustic expressivity of war in the making. Oleksandr Rudovskyi has compared it with a rupturing of life, of relations entwined with place. In his terms, belliphonic silence is contradictory as it takes on two meanings (feelings) – the promise of immediate safety and that of foreseeable attack. In speculative terms, belliphonic silence is sound of war in potential, yet to be actualized. It is already aggressive in the imagination of whose presence and absence (erasure) it may become. In more political terms, belliphonic silence is ordered by violent events to which disappearance as a material more-than-human reality is issued. Disappearance in its concrete temporality can be as situated and contingent as a sounding silence of the abandoned seaport in Odesa that Natalka Revko recalls, recounting her experience.

Thinking with these interviews and drawing back to Listen Live, I want to contemplate the practice of collective audio streaming as a particular knowing and sounding presence that Ukrainian artists seek to articulate and politicize. In probing Ukrainian being in the war as being-with war, of which the streams and the interviews make us deeply aware, I am led by Steven Feld’s argument for an acoustemology of place relations. Feld thinks from a position of relational body that operates in a mode of attunement and situated listening. To be in the surroundings is to be-with surroundings, cohabiting a place of which one becomes acoustically aware through immersed relation and implicated relationality. He writes: “Acoustemology, then, is grounded in the basic assumption that life is shared with others-in-relation, with numerous sources of action… that are variously human, nonhuman, living, nonliving, organic, or technological. This relationality is both a routine condition of dwelling and one that produces consciousness of modes of acoustic attending, of ways of listening for and resounding to presence.” (Feld 2015: 15)

In Feld’s text, acoustemology is undertaken as a critique of Murray Schafer’s acoustic ecology to account for an acoustical condition of relationscape and its more-than-human dimension. Feld focuses on human-bird relationality in the Bosavi rainforest, rethinking environmental existence as a heterogenous relating and contingent cohabiting of place. The Bosavi performative interaction with the forest is approached epistemologically rather than aesthetically, as “sounding-as- and sounding-through-knowing” and framed as relationally inclusive sonic mapping of place. (19) Feld’s argument is structured around thinking through a new materialist and posthumanist stance toward scales of entanglements that may include a new kind of plurality of sounding presence that commits to place and its ecological – collective – resonance. To be on acoustemological terms with a place is to reciprocate and reverberate through all there is sounding. But what can it mean to be on acoustemological terms with wartime environment in the technological context of collective audio streams that perform both a commoning and a mapping action, while participating in the contingency of witnessing?

Listen Live, in many ways, is an experiential project undertaken by artists as a way of knowing and thinking with belliphonic worlds in which they found themselves living. It is a project of collective sonic intelligence that calls for a credibility of the belliphonic body and its knowledges. Each stream situates the streamer within their techno-experiential encounter of acoustic space inhabited and shared to ontological resonance. The streamer choreographs a particular situation in which their sociality (warrior-sociality, survivor-sociality, IDP-sociality) emerges in the being of acoustic relations and from within the event of war. These socialities in the relation are belliphonic socialites, ones that engage a condition of warbound as a condition of entanglement at the heart of more-than-human ontologies from which to claim a contingent and plural Ukrainian testimony of the Russian invasion.

The stream by Ivan Skoryna is called “Digging Day” (Chas Kopaty). It situates the listener in the Ukrainian experience of digging tranches, a mundane task performed by Ukrainian defenders who brace for Russian assault. The stream is shaped by Skoryna’s own experience of joining a volunteer squad that helped a local unit of territorial defence in the first days of the full-scale invasion when the Russian forces advanced to the suburbs of Kyiv after gaining control over large areas of Ukraine. Skoryna does not tell the story but sounds the experience of collective knowing that his exhausted body performs, becoming as earthly as it can possibly be in its relationship with the earth that it is now destined to protect one from the Russian occupiers.

The stream is a performative iteration of defense process and wartime human-earth relationality in its material-embodied complexity impressed on the listener as a continuum of sound within which Ukrainian warrior-sociality becomes diagrammatic. Digging holds the truth of experiencing the war as a shared temporal tuning of relation with the living earth into which Ukrainian warrior enters in labouring and sounding, and in collective breathing. The stream puts breathing at the heart of the digging experience, underscoring that Ukrainian fight for life is all about endurance. Ukrainians simply cannot afford to become exhausted: if they were to cease digging, if they were to halt their fight, consequences would be dire – it could cost them their lives. To stop digging is to stop breathing, as literal as it can be in a three-hour long acoustic study of Skoryna’s own breath-taking exhaustion.

The five streams in their collective realization concern the constitution of acoustic truths and the way these truths harbour evidence of lived invasion. The invaded world as it is made hearable cannot be foretold, it must be experienced. What the Ukrainian experience underscores is that the belliphonic cannot be constrained by a taxonomy of war-generated sounds but discovered in the specificities of disruptions brought about by these (and other) sounds. The loss of peacetime is fathomed in the situational awareness of war as a wartime world in (all, and all its) sound. The belliphonic body, as the streamers render thinkable in creative stream-telling, is constituted in the totality of war environments which can range from the coercive space of attack and defensive operation to journeys of refuge and homecoming to architectures of sheltering and sharing, and more. Despite their humanist aspects, these streams, however, should not be reduced to the study of human experience or be approached solely through the humanity of the streamers. They must be thought in materialist terms, as acoustic knowings and traces from which to relate to what has been entailed by more than human (war-) boundness.

Knowings and traces

The position of acoustic knowings and traces is a posthumanist position from which to probe a contingent testimony of wartime life under Russia’s sonically expanded presence in Ukraine. Knowings here refer to more than human involvement in experiencing and evidencing; while traces refer to what constitutes a situated character of this involvement. Listen Live is a quest in knowing the war as a sonic condition shared by human and nonhuman beings and their ephemeral temporalities with things, a condition in which the world is bounded in, through, and with war, in sound. It is informed by an ethos of entangled relationality around which to construct an understanding of being-with war and evidential knowledges and capacities it may manifest. What can it mean to sound out of warbound? To testify in sounding the truth(s) of war?

I conclude my essay with these questions to rethink Listen Live as a project that exposes the sonic reciprocity of a witnessing world. Hosted by the Land To Return, Land to Care lab that works toward an earth-centric Ukrainian testimony of the Russian invasion, the project essentially operates on the commitment to acknowledge in the living world the right and experience of witnessing. It comes in resonance with other projects of the lab, especially Buchatska’s work “This World Is Recording” in which the war-torn Ukrainian land, zemlya cratered from explosives, is given agency to testify to the Russian invasion. Buchatska imagines with the political possibilities of “this world” doing the recording and turning into a living record. In her creative elaboration, recording is approached in the plurality of what it can be, experientially, materially, and technologically. Listen Live too must be seen alongside these efforts to recognize the truths of beings and things in a more than human populated world.

In her book on other than human forms of testimony, Susan Schuppli (2020) argues for a way of truth-claiming that is radically inclusive, heterogeneous, post-anthropocentric. She puts forth a perspective of “material as witness” to account for the evidential effects of events on ecologies of vibrant matters. Witness testimony cannot be reduced to the testimonial power of humans; instead, it should be extended to the agency of nonhumans and more-than-human entities. Truth is sought in the being of relation where experience is attended in its greater sphere across all life. Can we think of sound in the materialism of its truths? In ways of witnessing that makes these truths agentive?

The experience of invasion that Ukraine as zemlya (territory, land, earth, ecosystem) is living, the experience that Land To Return, Land To Care recognizes and explores – informs a wider understanding of invasiveness as a condition sustained, among other ways, by material and relational terms of sound. The invaded environment and the invaded body to which Listen Live attends in mapping the war across belliphonic truths and lived socialities cannot be divided in sound. In sound, they can only be in a material – sonic – continuum as indivisible field of knowings and traces within which truths are cohabited.

The streams perform from actual possibilities of such cohabitation. Trenched earth, haunted shelter, abandoned city, displaced body, and lost connection are more than facts of human challenges. They are conditions of invasion lived cross-referentially, not only in the encounters of artists-streamers whose presences and sensibilities afford greater attention to wartime concerns but across a broader spectrum of experiences and reverberations that persist into a contingent multilateral and collective testimony. Knowledges of invasion are drawn from all sounds and every truth claim they make, challenging the existing imaginary of belliphonic war.

References

Barad, Karen (2010). “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3/2: 240–268.

Bazdyrieva, Asia, Dariia Kuzmych, Yarema Malashchuk, and Svitlana Matviyenko (2022).  “Labour of Witnessing.” Theater of Hopes and Expectations. Youtube video posted on November 6, 2022.

Buchatska, Katya (2022). “This World Is Recording.” Slushni Rechi. Youtube video posted on December 27, 2022.

Chernov, Mstyslav (2023). “20 Days in Mariupol (full documentary)|FRONTLINE+.” Premiered on November 21, 2023. Youtube video posted by FRONTLINE PBS.

Daughtry, J. Martin (2015). Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Feld, Steven (2015). “Acoustemology.” In David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (eds.), Keywords in Sounds (pp.12-21). Durham: Duke University Press.

Goodman, Steve (2010). Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

LaBelle, Brandon (2010). Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum.

Latour, Bruno (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (trans. Catherine Porter). London: Polity.

Latour, Bruno (2022).“Is Europe’s soil changing beneath our feet?” Géopolitique, Réseau, Énergie, Environnement, Nature 2 War Ecology: A New Paradigm.

Manukian, Yuliia (2022). “Zvukovi landshafty za chasiv viyny. Golos Nimoty.” Post Impreza, December 11.

Matviyenko, Svitlana (2023). “Pollution as a Weapon of War.” L’internationale, June 8.

Schulze, Holger (2018). The Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound. New York: Bloomsbury.

Schuppli, Susan (2020). Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Seidel, Leon (2023). “Imagined Cities: Natalia Revko.” Youtube video recorded on August 1, 2023, in Kyiv, Ukraine, and posted by leonseidel on December 6, 2023.

Seidel, Leon (2023). “Imagined Cities: Talking about the Sounds of the War against Ukraine with Oleksandr Naselenko.” Youtube video recorded on August 15, 2023, in Odesa, Ukraine, and posted by leonseidel on August 29, 2023.

Seidel, Leon (2023). “Imagined Cities: Talking about the Sounds of the War against Ukraine with Oleksandr Rudovdkyi.” Youtube video recorded on August 3, 2023, in Kyiv, Ukraine, and posted by leonseidel on August 30, 2023.

Serres, Michel (1995). Genesis (trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Shandra, Alya (2023).“Kakhovka Dam Breach: Hundreds of Ukrainians Drown as Russia Prevents Evacuation, Seals off Flooded Towns.” Euromaidan Press, July 3.

Tsymbalyuk, Darya (2022). “Erasure: Russian Imperialism, My Research on Donbas, and I.” Kajet Digital, 15 June.

Vandsø, Anette (2017). “The resonating past: Stephen Vitiello’s World Trade Center Recordings as a lieu de mémoire.” SoundEffects, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience 7/2: 45–63.

Voegelin, Salomé (2019). The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening. New York: Bloomsbury.

Voegelin, Salomé (2021). Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound. Revised edition. New York: Bloomsbury.

Zikrata, Olya (2024). “Sonic Fictions in the Ruins of Catastrophe.” In Adrian Ivakhiv (ed.), Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, unpublished draft manuscript.

Footnotes

Sound here originated from an undisclosed location within a greater Kyiv area, a site to which Skoryna returned for the second time in the fall of 2022. Earlier in the year, Skoryna had dug a trench at this very site in the offensive conditions and defensive maneuvers aimed at diverting the enemy’s attention from genuine defensive positions. The decision to withhold the location serves as a reminder that Ukrainians face the ongoing onslaught, and that these trenches may need to be swiftly utilized should the Russian forces escalate their aggression. With each strike of the shovel, the stream amplifies the determination of Ukrainians to persevere, to keep digging and pressing forward, despite overwhelming fatigue.

The streams “Hidden Sounds” (Zakhovani Zvuky) by Maksym Ivanov and “Autumn Excursion” (Osinnia Ekskursiia) by Viktor Konstantinov are transmitted from the war-torn cities of Dnipro and Odesa, respectively. Both cities are subjected to relentless assaults by Russian forces, facing regular missile strikes and Shahed drone attacks. Despite the imminent danger, artists chose to remain in their cities, offering us a listen into the stark realities of their surroundings. Their streams are void of explosive sounds and artillery blasts, instead they delve into the unsettling quiet of desolation, the haunting echoes of memories, and the resilient spirit of survival amid ruins, shelters, and the shadows of once vibrant communities.

In her analysis of the streams, Yuliia Manukian (2022) highlights that Listen Live may disrupt one’s preconceptions of belliphonic soundscapes, often shaped by experiences of watching war films. Such films tend to employ audio manipulation by editors to amplify dramatic effect, yielding a simplified rendering of the auditory aspects of war. The belliphonic war is a more complex experience of everyday situations suffused with hazy sound environments, dim presences, and blurry depths into which one entrust themselves in knowing. Ivanov’s stream delves into this murky middle of being-with war in the everyday struggle to shelter life, to seal it in a shell of reinforced barriers, in a hideout between the walls of a flat which is boarded up to withstand shock waves from bombardments.

The stream is relayed from Ivanov’s own flat, now serving him as a shelter due to the scarcity of dedicated shelters in Ukraine, a country under attack yet ill-prepared to withstand the invasion. The artist allocates exactly one hour of stream time to explore acoustic relationality of shelter space in the corporeal and material character of waiting for the next round of attacks. The period of curfew is embraced as a shared time of inhabiting the sheltered world during the hours between late night and dawn when atmosphere is charged with fear and anticipation. Within this confined space, Ivanov's stream becomes a lifeline, transmitting the hum of war as it carries itself from the street to the flat and back across more-than-human materialities and existences from which to fathom the ongoing making of a wartime world. Although the hum is traced to a specific location, it is collectively liveable as a “long night of silence”, in Ivanov’s words. Silence, of course, is both a conceptual and experiential component of the belliphonic experience for there is never the absence of sound but a felt possibility of war in the absence of audible attack.

Both Dnipro- and Odesa-based streams invest in the quality of encounter with the wartime world which produces survivor-sociality in the field of lived relation where things and beings have a shared life deepened by consequences of violent conditions. War forces itself on all matter, human and nonhuman, leaving scars across ecologies of living. It does not parse the world into passive objects and living subjects but attacks a collective assemblage, shelter and the sheltered (“Hidden Sounds”), excursion and the excursed (“Autumn Excursion”), crafting vulnerability as commonality. The pool of “hidden” (indoor) and “exposed” (street) sounds holds the truth of experience and relates war to its distributed continuum generative of belliphonic actuality that confirms no ontological hierarchy.

The two remaining streams are “Rotunda-Church Shelter” (Zakhystok Tserkvy-Rotondy) by Kseniia Yanus, broadcasted from the city of Uzhhorod, which is situated at the border with Slovakia; and “Distance = Way = Connection” (Vidstan’ = Shlyakh = Zv’yazok) by Kseniia Shcherbakova, transmitted from the city of Lviv, which is located near the border with Poland. Since the full-scale invasion, both cities became hubs for internally displaced persons (IDPs) seeking refuge and safety in regions of Ukraine located at a significant distance from the border shared with Russia. Yanus came to Uzhhorod from Odesa where she had to relocate after fleeing her hometown Donetsk in 2014, following the onset of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine’s eastern regions. Her stream imbues an experiential sense of exile, encapsulating ten years of escape from the war into one and a half hours spent searching for peace and quiet in the surroundings of the Transcarpathian church, Horyany Rotunda (Horyanska Rotonda).

For Yanus, peace is not merely a possibility but a contingent conviction, a temporary pause in the ongoing reality of war. The stream orchestrates this pause as a total situation of worldly sensibility, a manifesting certainty and uncertainty in a flow of appearances and obscurities humming away in the background. Sounds become compositions of forces from a larger ontological choreography where the more-than-human of the animal, of the wind, of the human, etc. resonate an experiential excess at the heart of sonic speculation through which peace and war are channelled, and, essentially, conveyed. Here, peace is transient, never fully realized as a lasting sounding presence, but rather fleetingly experienced and momentarily grasped before succumbing to the forces of war that Yanus acknowledges toward the end of her stream, in the prayer for the fallen arising from within the war-bounded space. The stream imparts the truth that in Ukraine, one cannot evade the war for it is omnipresent, its echoes reverberating through lives and situated existences, leaving no found sanctuary untouched.

Shcherbakova’s “Distance = Way = Connection” navigates the urban landscape of wartime Lviv where the artist has recently resettled as an internally displaced person from Odesa. The stream unfolds as a travelogue, detailing Shcherbakova’s experience of place and displacement as she moves through the city to a train station and boards the train to her hometown. In this acoustic undertaking, the journey is an act of overcoming the distance that Shcherbakova has traversed speculatively. In sounding the experience of distance as shattered connection, she both tells her story of loss and longing and lives it in a most visceral way. The stream is intended to communicate what the artist defines as a “restless state of forced displacement” shared by those fleeing from war.[6] The displaced body is an emplaced body already bound to war and its acoustic truths, which cannot be reduced to the sounds of sirens and explosions but extended to a new restlessness of being, the invisible connections and disconnections inhabitable and shared across time and space. “Distance = Way = Connection” embodies the tangible manifestation of the lived connection, which the artist yearns to reestablish with those distanced from her. As she explores the very essence of connectivity, the stream becomes her form of speculation about technological affordances of streamboxes, which could facilitate acoustically rich interactions during periods of wartime separation. What if any, and all Ukrainians could stream in and gather in their acoustic performativity? What if one could attend to their emergent polyphony of being-with, and -in, war?

Konstantinov’s stream is an acoustic drift through Ukrainian heritage sites in Odesa, the port city marred by the ravages of Russia's attempts to obliterate Ukraine’s cultural identity. It is approached as a derivé, tracing a path through the space of Russia’s war as war on Ukrainian culture, as well as on Ukrainian humanity. The war becomes a composite field of relations within which Konstantinov choreographs his presence as survivor amidst forces of erasure that shape the everyday materialities of Russian offense, manifested both in the military attacks on the city and in the reverberations of these attacks experienced as abandonment, destruction, and loss. For Konstantinov, Odesa is a far cry from the vibrant city he once knew, bustling with life and energy. It is now a haunting echo of its former self, overshadowed by the ambient sounds of war: a rumbling of local trams ferrying those who remain in the city despite the dangers, a stark absence of tourists that permeates the once lively streets, a recent missile strike on the port that brought destruction to Odesa’s National Fine Arts Museum.

His survivor-sociality is woven into the fabric of life marked by traces of the Russian politics of the past and present. Here, these marks manifest in various forms: from neglected graves of Ukrainian Cossacks, left forgotten during the Soviet times; to the museum where Konstantinov volunteered to evacuate artworks in anticipation of the impending attacks; to the building where he sought refuge from Russian airstrikes, echoing the experiences of Ukraine’s cultural figures like Yuri Lypa, who once dwelled in the same building a century ago only to face persecution at the hands of Russian authorities; and finally, to the city’s landmark where the Ukrainian-speaking poet Borys Necherda, whose literary contributions were overlooked due to his choice of language and style, is now commemorated.

location photos by Viktor Konstantinov   

location photos by Kseniia Yanus

Excerpt from “Hidden Sounds” (Zakhovani Zvuky) by Maksym Ivanov

Excerpt from “Rotunda-Church Shelter” (Zakhystok Tserkvy-Rotondy) by Kseniia Yanus

Excerpt from "Digging Day" (Chas Kopaty) by Ivan Skoryna

Excerpt from “Autumn Excursion” (Osinnia Ekskursiia) by Viktor Konstantinov

Excerpt from “Distance = Way = Connection” (Vidstan’ = Shlyakh = Zv’yazok) by Kseniia Shcherbakova

 photo collage by Kseniia Shcherbakova 

location photos by Maksym Ivanov

 location photos by Ivan Skoryna