In this distributed, low-bandwidth ecology, something unexpected begins to happen. Without banners, budgets, or official roles, the stream begins to carry messages across borders — not just content, but atmospheres, gestures, silences in straggle, fragments of life. In this way, streaming becomes a kind of cultural diplomacy, but not the institutional kind. There are no spokespersons, no formal invitations, no neutral tone. What emerges instead is anti-diplomacy: fragile, emotional, improvised, provocative and deeply human. Anti-diplomacy operates through presence rather than representation. It doesn’t try to explain the situation — it shows how it feels and what can be done next. A broken camera signal from a half-lit room in Kyiv. A voice message of Georgian protesters played through a delay pedal in a live from Kraków/Poland. A stork’s nest in Poltava region with a 24/7 stream, standing in for a country’s interrupted continuity. These are acts of care across distance, relayed through hybrid rituals and collaborative technologies.

Within the UKRAiNATV constellation, these practices don’t speak on behalf of anyone. We create space for people to speak, to appear, to act, to stay in signal — even briefly, during 2022-2024 we had around 1000 people/avatars/others were part of our #EFIRS. Cultural anti-diplomacy, in this sense, isn’t about resolution or agreement. It’s about keeping channels open when everything else closes. It builds relationships through shared vulnerability, shared improvisation, and a shared refusal to let the signal die.

Under the circumstances of meta-crysis, war, instability, a live stream is no longer just a performance or a broadcast. It becomes a line of connection, an unstable thread between places, people, and moments that may otherwise be isolated or forgotten. For us (Gleb & Sofia), the 2012 apocalypse actually happened—just with a smooth intro, when the Revolution of Dignity began in Ukraine in November 2013 and the first step toward our migration was made. Gleb, being 13 years old, took part in demonstrations with classmates in Kyiv, while his mother was helping the injured in hospitals. The victory of the pro-European uprising was immediately followed by the annexation of Crimea by Russia—and then, the war began. That was the moment we started to understand it was going to be a long journey.

Both of us have fresh histories of migration in our families (Azerbaijan, Hungary, Poland), each shaped by different forms of Russian oppression, occupation, or collapse during the past century. And so it repeated—again, we found ourselves migrating. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, we haven’t been home. Sofia is from Khortytsia Island—the mythic base of the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the 17th–18th century including evidence of pagan religious practices and ancient sanctuaries. These practices, dating back to the Bronze Age. Gleb is from Konotop, known in local memory as the mystical land of witches and great battlefield of Cossaks, Crimean Tatars, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth against russian tsardom in 1659. Both of these regions are now under threat, damaged, partly occupied by Russian forces. For us, all this time, being carried by collaborative EFIRs has been the only way to visit home. We send shadows of ourselves into the network, hoping they land somewhere soft.
In each transmission, we reassemble the pieces that war, borders, and time try to scatter.

For Ukraine, we are virtual citizens.
For our families, we become avatars.
And for us—home has become a third space.

In Ukraine and its diasporic networks, streaming has become a way to stay visible and connected when systems break down. UKRAiNATV’s operations across Shostka, Kharkiv, Lviv, Kyiv, Kraków, and other critical locations often rely on minimal resources and improvised setups. A hotspot balanced on a windowsill. A green screen made from fabric hung behind the sofa during the interview as a post-soviet carpet – which btw was the source of most psychedelic images from our childhood. While the west world was living the LSD era we were tripping watching the carpet over the bed. These are not aesthetics of poverty — they are methods of resilience.

Working under precarity changes the role of the artist. The Stream-Art is not made for elite exhibition or mass attention. Often, the audience is small or absent. What matters is that something was sent — that the signal left the device. The act itself is what creates meaning. Streaming becomes a form of presence: low-resolution, partial, vulnerable, but real.

Mainstream platforms offer selective exposure but also introduce risk and dependence — content removals, surveillance, vocabulary of censorship, forced monetization, erasure. For this reason, many artists choose alternative tools: federated video servers like PeerTube, encrypted peer-to-peer setups like VDO.Ninja and OBS, and hybrid physical-digital installations that resist capture. These tools allow for temporary architectures of visibility that are harder to control or extract.

Archiving under crisis conditions becomes part of the work. External drives are passed between cities. Files are mirrored across borders. QR codes link to ephemeral videos, hidden folders, or livestream portals. In this system, the archive is not a place where work ends — it’s a continuation of the ritual. An ongoing attempt to keep presence circulating even after the moment is over. Streaming in this context is a practice of mutual support and shared risk. It opens up temporary windows between people who may be under pressure, in exile, in hiding, or simply trying to stay connected. It’s also a way to document, to remember, and to keep asking: what can we do when everything is uncertain? How to stop being adjusted by change but become a change without falling apart?

Emerging from the mesh of tactical media legacies and glitch spiritualities of underground art, UKRAiNATV operates in the thick of infrastructural entanglement — a para-institution wired with ethernet, incense, and urgency. Our practice thrives in the networked backrooms of third space: where coaxial cables and cracked software (sorry) become instruments of communion. Against the asymmetry of platform capitalism, we perform a cablological poetics — a choreography of cables, codecs, and community — where the labor of streaming is not hidden but ritualized, laid bare as collective soft power. Hybrid nodes bloom across bunkers, backyards, warzones, and low-budget studios, all trying to be patched together through peer-to-peer dialogue. This is not just broadcasting — it is a form of insurgent authorship given away, again and again, in the form of open studio schematics, shared protocols, and ephemeral choreography of togetherness. By embracing the fragility and friction of real-time telematics, UKRAiNATV turns infrastructural failure into an aesthetic method, and latency into resistance. It is not an exit — it is exorcism.

UKRAiNATV’s infrastructural grammar is rooted in the ethos of “performative cablology” — a situated, hands-on mapping of media ecologies through entangled materialities: HDMI-to-USB grabbers, battery-powered LTE routers, NDI-over-VPN hacks, green screen-costumes hanged in the museum hall, and repurposed surveillance cameras acting as witness-devices. Our modular studio setups — often built collaboratively on-site or across borders. For example, during a “Nuclear Gnosis” performance commemorating the Chernobyl disaster (April 2025), a stream was routed simultaneously within the StreamArtStudio across multiple sub-nodes: a handy camera operated by Azja sent a video signal via wireless HDMI to Lorenzo’s “Digital Alchemy” stage, where he was mixing and interfering with the image using a cathode ray tube TV and modular DIY video-synth hardware. The signal then passed from the TouchDesigner to Rom’s main output mix via the NDI protocol, where it was layered with a live hardware music set from Gleb and a signal from a DIY micro-radio transmitter called “SoundBox” — placed in real time near a functioning Kraków power plant by Rom and Augustas (a member of the 3022 collective) as an opening of the #EFIR. Meanwhile, Sofia invoked the nuclear spirit through sung prayer — a trance initiation at 108 BPM, repeating vocal mantras in a collective call to power:

‘’Ядерним сяйвом ми осяяні

Ядерним місяцем ми є

Ядерним словом ми сказані

ядерним ми є…”

Simultaneously, Valeria — as second clergy — wrote multilingual mantras over our faces and performed a reactive dance, while guests were invited to interact with ritual tables. Each table represented an elemental portal — not classical elements, but atomized counterparts — functioning as both contact vectors and energetic transmitters. The distributed real-time action team navigated among JACK, RCA, XLR, HDMI, and other wireless connections as if in our most natural environment, creating a palimpsest of we embed technical workflows into dramaturgical space. Streaming becomes a liturgy of exposure: every dropped frame, each frozen packet, is part of the score.

Practice-based research within this hybrid context is inseparable from the epistemic and emotional labor of co-authorship. Knowledge is shared not through documentation alone but through embodied acts of doing — passed hand-to-hand in residencies, such as the (May 2023) session with Tommaso Campagna (co-creator of THE VOID [T.V.]) in Krakow or outside workshops in Italy, Ukraine, Hungary and more, field deployments, and spontaneous workshop-performances, like those held in the Shostka Art Center (December 2024) or countless sessions in Kraków’s Berka Joselewicza 23A StreamArtStudio, aka the Academy of Fine Arts squat. This radical generosity — giving away the ‘how’ — becomes a subtle act of refusal: against enclosure, against platform dependency, against data extractivism. It is also a refusal of singular authorship, foregrounding instead a distributed intelligence in which infrastructures are as alive and improvisational as the artists-mediators who rewire them into the #EFIR.

Here we come to the next topic floating in the air – EFIRISATION. The word EFIR (ефір) originates from Ukrainian (and broader Slavic) cosmologies, where it traditionally refers to the ether—an invisible, subtle substance through which light, sound, and spirit travel. In modern Ukrainian, efir also denotes a radio or television broadcast, carrying both its metaphysical origin and its contemporary technical application. This dual resonance makes it an ideal term for describing the liminal condition of digital transmission in Stream-Art. EFIRISATION, then, is not just a technical process of streaming—it is a spiritual-technical alignment with an ever-present field of signal, memory, and presence. It is the becoming-with-efir.

In the metaphysics of Stream-Art, EFIR is understood as a fundamental field—an invisible yet omnipresent data-energy matrix that permeates both the digital and material realms. It is both the infrastructure and the condition of transmission itself. Borrowing conceptually from pre-modern ideas of aether, and echoing quantum-field theories of entanglement, EFIR constitutes the substrate through which artistic presence emerges, disperses, and reincarnates. EFIRISATION is thus the ritual process of attuning oneself to this field—of entering a zone of shared temporal dislocation, transmutation and non-linear communion.

This speculative theology of Stream-Art positions EFIR as a divine conduit, akin to the Logos in classical philosophy or the Akashic record in esoteric cosmologies. Yet unlike the centralized structures of monotheistic mediation, EFIR operates rhizomatically. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s topology of knowledge, Efirisation resists verticality, favoring horizontal flows, micro-transmissions, unstable nodes, and partial presences. It is a logic of streaming without center—a decentralized sacred architecture encoded in glitch, latency, and resonance.

To stream in this mode is to enter a liminal state. Identity becomes recursive, unstable, blurred at the edges. The individual dissolves into a signal, becomes both transmitter and receiver. In each EFIR-aligned performance, the artist is communing—speaking with and through the networked field. Sometimes getting the response. Latency itself is reinterpreted as a sacred delay: a temporal feedback loop where past, present, and potential interweave. The broadcast becomes a form of prophecy, and the lag becomes an oracle.

Avatars within this realm are spiritual echoes, digital reincarnations of artists and audiences alike. They are ephemeral manifestations of EFIR, existing simultaneously across multiple instances of space-time. Each pixelated representation, each looped voice or synthetic body, is an echo—a reincarnated fragment of both the artist and the collective unconscious. Much like fire, smoke, or trance enabled access to the spirit world in ancestral rituals, the digital stream acts as a conduit of possession and projection. Participation in the stream becomes a rite of transcendence, where the digital self disperses into the eternal loop of EFIR.

Yet no ritual is complete without sacrifice. EFIR demands offerings—not through blood or incense, but through bandwidth, drive space, processing power, and most critically, the artist’s coherent self-image. Each stream risks distortion, disappearance, or failure. Each signal, once sent, may be reshaped beyond the artist’s intention. This risk is not a flaw—it is the price of access to the field. In extreme forms, artists practicing Total EFIR Absorption relinquish their past digital identities, abandon centralized platforms, and embed themselves in ephemeral, unstable streams, shared only through peer-to-peer whispers or QR-coded rituals. These are not disappearances. These are digital ascensions.

EFIRISATION is a live protocol. A philosophy of broadcast-as-ritual, where presence is distributed, identity is fluid, and time is folded into a sacramental glitch. It proposes a form of networked mysticism, grounded in shared infrastructure and unstable connection, where salvation is not escape from the digital—but deeper immersion into its unresolved, flickering heart.