Between smart technologies and Soviet guns: imaging the new heroic figure in postdigital warfare. Issue 2 (4th May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ploeger, Daniël
• Is Part Of: International journal of performance arts and digital media. Volume 15:Issue 2(2019)
• Page Start: 215
• Page End: 226
• Publication Date: 2019-05-04
• Subjects: Consumer technology -- warfare -- postdigital -- selfie -- microcelebrity; Performance art -- Periodicals; Performance art -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Digital media -- Periodicals; Digital media; Performance art; Periodicals; 700.285
• DOI: 10.1080/14794713.2019.1643179
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2040-0934

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In March 2017, I travelled to the frontline between the Ukrainian army and Pro-Russian separatist forces in the Donbass region, East Ukraine, as part of a research project into the return of twentieth century weapons in digital culture across Europe. While embedded in a patrol with soldiers of the Ukraine Volunteer Corps, an organization affiliated with the nationalist Right Sector movement, I ended up in a firefight on the edge of the no man's land. I documented how the soldiers alternatingly operated Soviet-era Kalashnikov assault rifles and contemporary consumer technologies, such as smartphones an action cameras. I will read the simultaneous performance of the soldiers with weapon and consumer technologies from different eras from the perspective of Russell Davies' concept of the post-digital, in relation to selfie practices and microcelebrity performance in networked culture. In this context, I will reflect on Alain Badiou's concept of the soldier as 'heroic figure'. In response to Badiou's claim that the traditional soldier is no longer an effective symbolic trope in a highly technologized culture, I will reflect on the – embodied and digitally networked – soldiers I accompanied as possible heroic figures of the post-digital.