Keith, Your vimeo link seems to be password-blocked?
Barbara ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2022 19:54:39 -0500 From: Keith Sanborn <mrz...@panix.com> To: patrice riemens <patr...@xs4all.nl> Cc: Nettimepost <nettim...@kein.org> Subject: Re: <nettime> The War to come ... Message-ID: <c9c1ad1f-d055-40de-a052-c9af65151...@panix.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 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=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F84056896&data=04%7C01%7Clattanzi%40alfred.edu%7C04c77e1528cd4c4b9b9a08da017c5c7d%7C14abbcd1df5a413ababb7853e26fce3a%7C1%7C1%7C637823930900747276%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=bpvbUPE0oQOPtOWMF80YGqWG1JzGj5Cby7UzMYkW%2FXE%3D&reserved=0 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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