fantastic little splash’s hybrid video-performance, Transtranslation (2017), was created as an extension of an ongoing experimental investigation titled New Information, which the duo began in 2017. The initial episodes of New Information, and subsequently Transtranslation, sought to explore new technologies—photogrammetry, 3D modeling and animation, AI voice over, game environments, interactivity, and live streaming—as methods for articulating a fractured media reality. The version of Transtranslation presented here is documentation of the interactive video stream [трансляція or translation is a synonym for broadcast in Ukrainian], which attempted to synthesize old (expressed in the impenetrable Russian-language Soviet-style academic monologue) and new (expressed in the AI voice, the spatial organization, and other elements of the video) forms of knowledge into one fragmented transtemporal information space.

Transtranslation documents the beginning of a process of fragmentation that occurred in Ukraine in the years following the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and the initial stages of Russia’s War in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. This period was characterized by not only local expressions of the global proliferation of new information formats, but also a site-specific exploitation of the malleability of media as an information tool. The efficacy of propaganda in this context exists equally in active disinformation and passive relativization. As institutions of reality (media, legal systems, etc.) become unstable, classical formats of knowledge and communication have also become untenable. Today, in the new phase of the war, in which Russia no longer hides behind thinly veiled proxies and plausible deniability, its neocolonial ambitions and programmatically nihilistic tactics have been laid bare. This clarity, however, exists within the legacy of the informational instability captured in Transtranslation, which remains with us in the form of a media ecosystem of fragmentation and acceleration. As clarity reappears in some regions, ambiguity simply migrates to more hospitable climes of the informationscape, staking out new claims on our realities, on- and offline.

fantastic little splash is a collective comprising journalist / artist Lera Malchenko and artist / director Oleksandr Hants. Their work combines art practice and media studies. fantastic little splash is interested in utopias and dystopia, the collective imagination and its incarnations, projections, delusions and uncertainties. Established in 2016, their projects have been exhibited at post.MoMA, Plokta TV, The Wrong biennale, POCHEN Biennale, Liste Art Fair Basel, Construction festival VI x CYNETART, KISFF, Docudays among others. Participants of the Transmediale x Pro Helvetia Residency 2022. See more of their work at fantasticlittlesplash.com

Published 16 November 2022