In the Buzz of "Human Safari": Designing the Gamified War in Ukraine

“Human Safari” is a terror campaign launched by the Russian military in Ukraine's frontline municipalities, turning these areas into hunting grounds where drones deliberately target human and nonhuman beings. Thinking from the standpoint of design of safari hunting – marked by its racialized dynamics and violence toward nonhuman others – now sustained by technological extension of human sight in a drone warfare that invests into a surrogate-self relation with the drone, I will ask what this terror game orchestrates and how sound (buzz) becomes essential atmospheric and sensory input/output of it.
As both a tactic of drone warfare and an enactment of the violence of clearing (understood here as a genocide-ecocide nexus), “Human Safari” renders sensible the gamification of war and the event of predation that generates what I call an ecology of contingent occupation. Contingent occupation names the sonic production of temporospatial terror environments integrative to colonial warfare. The proposed talk is part of my ongoing research into the sonic knowledges of the Russian invasion in Ukraine. It draws on firsthand documentation from areas in Ukraine where instances of the “Human Safari” campaign have been recorded.
Keywords: terror environment, drone warfare, sound, senses, politics

Neslihan Sriram-Uzundal ∆ and Jayanthan Sriram ∆ (Education, Concordia University, Canada; Interdisciplinary Humanities, Concordia University, Canada)
Sensory Violence: The Desensitization of Our Bodily Experiences of Violence

In the wake of the first ‘live-streamed’ war of our times, social media’s potential to infiltrate our feeds with violent content recalls the early days of the internet. But now, the witnessing of the physical and psychological of the eternally Other of the Global North seems to stretch beyond the specific searching out of niche snuffs. We were shown images of death daily, creating a shift of both comprehension and our own bodily experience through violence that seemed to ‘jump from the screen.’ Not trying to find definite answers, this paper will explore, from a theoretical and practical standpoint, how the consumption of sensory violence transforms and alters our bodily understanding and response to violence. We will accomplish this by combining Chamayou’s “Theory of the Drone” and Pasquinelli’s perspective on artificial intelligence with what Achille Mbembe calls the decerebralization of the subject. In this state, violence felt and perceived from afar makes us ‘foreign’ to our environment and creates a ‘systematic break with reality.’ To create a sensory atmosphere of its own, the paper presentation will be accompanied by the aural approximation of the sound of a drone – unheard by us on social media, but a daily reality of people war is waged against. Keywords: violence, the Other, decerebralization, bodily experiences,

Margarita Savchenkova (University of Salamanca, Spain)

Translating War Through the Wenses: Svetlana Alexievich's Embodied Narratives

This study explores the (non-)manifestation of sensory elements in two editions of The Unwomanly Face of War (1984 and 2016), a work by Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. First published in 1984, the book compiles testimonies from women who served in the Red Army during World War II. In the most recent edition of this “novel of voices,” the narrative centers on heightened sensory awareness, enabling Alexievich to immerse readers in the reality of war as experienced by the witnesses she interviewed. A comparative analysis of the sensory perceptions in both versions reveals significant changes in the text’s microstructure and content. Alexievich reimagines her debut work to delve deeper into human nature, approaching humans as a biological species. By translating the body and weaving sensory experiences into the discursive framework of the latest edition, the author strives to articulate the unbearable—the horrors and devastation of the bloodiest conflict in history—allowing readers to “feel” the war.
Keywords: Embodied Translation, Sensory Perceptions, Svetlana Alexievich, World War II, USSR