UKRAiNATV MANIFESTO
HOPECORE MANIFESTO
GREEN-PINK NOISE MANIFESTO
STREAM ART MANIFESTO
MANIFESTO OF HYPERACTIVITIES
1. When war crashed the social system, UKRAiNATV emerged as a small source of hope to power it up as a collective, a meeting spot, the poorest and weirdest TV around, a vibe, and an aesthetic. We call it #HOPECORE. Every Thursday we light digital bonfires: some calm and cozy, some joyful and drunk, but always igniting connection in a reality fractured by Russian aggression and genocide. Our #HOPECORE aesthetic is not pretty and soothing, because hope is never pure in times of war.
2. Welcome to the GREEN PINK NOISE MANIFESTO. Green stands for growth and endless mutability of the digital, a wild garden of virtual creativity. Pink is defiant but in a camp way, cheerful and insubordinate, a hue of hope and rebellion. We add noise to remind everyone of the materiality of the medium, a static that keeps us sane, a distortion in the illusions that things are either pretty or ugly. We embrace but do not fetishize the glitch.
3. Our HYPERACTIVITIES, we call them STREAM ART. It brings, in fact, a new perspective to the game of digital communication. It’s an intersection between people and machines, hardware and software, infrastructures and performances, and people and data, in a fresh stream of circulating energies. We’re talking about human and non-human entanglements in hybrid space and time. For us virtual equals potential.
4. All around us, screens are reflecting and distorting our shared fate, not just once, but a million times across dimensions, serving the loop. A radical but soft alternative to distant tensions. The ideal image does not exist, stop looking for it and wasting hope! It’s a precious resource that runs out.
5. The internet, this improbably centralized network (why would we ever choose simplicity over complexity?)1, is infected by techno-nationalism, a program that turns out to be the contagion. Through screens and goggles, we navigate this maze, leeching on the platforms’ walls, creating shortcuts, offering support, and trying to rebel against the sad and boring status quo of the social media era and its common nonsense. We defy the rigidity of digital borders, both national and infrastructural, forging new paths for a more complex web of connections.
6. The internet is governed by a race for optimization and popularity, a contest that often overlooks compassion and curiosity. We challenge this cold efficiency, harnessing technology for ethical and communal purposes and reimagining wires as conduits for empathy and playfulness. In this context, social platforms are like highways: fast, wasteful, and disengaging paths in one direction forward (or down the stream) that end only in burnout without ever reaching any destiny. We want to lay smaller paths, together and for smaller groups. Let’s log out of the cars! Let’s become environment-conscious again.2 We trample paths through virtual and physical worlds, creating new passages for people and signals, and finding what’s best: the unexpected.
7. We grew suspicious of identity politics, because it justifies and normalizes individual self-performance, sacrificing our inherently relational nature. Individualism is celebrated now at the expense of the community. We search for an alternative, strive to build creative collectivities, and foster improbable networks that uproot the solitary pursuits of the selves, chained uncomfortably together only in social media rectangular cages. We want to use technology to confront and connect people, using self-performance not for egoistic gains but for common joy. If you ever dressed to impress, you probably did it for others! Forget narcissism! Let’s become conscious of our social bonds and responsible for entertaining others, it’s only fun when it’s for everybody!
8. Our network is like a garden of CYBER-MUSHROOMS, a collective network of musicians, DJs, researchers, artists, and whoever is willing to come. We grow together in the coziness of our studio, hidden away from the stifling intensity of the mundane, to cook for at least a few hours every week a diverse, divisive, but nurturing mushroom soup. We send pixels around, waiting for connections to #OTHERS, PARALLEL and PARAREAL gardens… “DO U READ ME?”
9. We explore the fringes of the relationship between performance and recording, making the ephemeral permanent and the permanent ephemeral. The art of performance emerged when recording tools became widely accessible – it’s not narcissism, it’s by design. Through cameras and software, with bodies here and there, we create hybrids. All that is solid melts into VIRTUAL, augmented and MIXED REALITIES, or the glitch. In our world, we welcome these paradoxical states: we want both the fleeting and the lasting. Why compromise?
10. Our call is to “make drama, not war”. We invite you to our THIRD space-time – a viridescent theatre of Dionysus, a MAGIC GREENBOX that overlaps the folds of reality, where everything that’s green disappears for a second in the ether, just to come back again in another form and in another dimension. That’s where we provide a platform for human and non-human interaction, staging dramas with care (and everything else), during which disagreement meets embrace and discord blends with peace.
11. LIVE LAUGH LOVE. In the global context of neoliberalism changing to NEOIMPERIALISM – where war is escalating – empathy and peace become disruptive elements, a paradoxical state where values and vibes are blurred together. We defy the expected, celebrate solidarity, and embrace hope and positivity as rogue elements in a system subjected to the war’s long shadow. We oppose full-scale war with full-scale LIFE.
Kraków, October 5, 2023
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