Organised by Asia Bazdyrieva, transmediale's current artist-in-residence, the evening included conversations about the production and dissemination of images and affects within the mediated contexts of climate change and war.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation majorly invested (and intensified) a catastrophic reaction towards the nuclear threat reminiscent of the Cold War parapolitics. This revitalized the Cold War imaginaries impacting decisions of the major geopolitical players. The latter have taken a preemptive semi-neutral position which left aside what this war is mainly operating with: the bodies as psychosomatic singularities and collectives in their intimate mental environments. In this way the war exceeds national borders by mass-mediatizing social affects and toxifying commonly shared existential territories. Drawing on Felix Guattari’s concept of 'mental ecology' Elena Vogman and Olexii Kuchanskyi propose to investigate 'mental geology' as a complex unconscious formation of the nuclear threat that navigates desire. Mental geology allows to address the multilayered temporality of this process. Focusing on cases of mediatization of the Chornobyl accident and the recent occupation of Energodar, the presentation reflects in recourse to Guattari’s ecosophical project on the current geopolitical, media, and social conditions.

Asia Bazdyrieva and Svitlana Matviyenko discuss the concept of 'labor of witnessing' to explore how individuals and non-human entities absorb, metabolize, and narrate complex realities of war amidst both slow and fast acts of violence. This labor is intricately tied to communication infrastructures within regimes of power, actively shaping terror environments and subjects through militarized communication techniques. Images are mobilized as instruments of formatting environments, territories, landscapes, subjectivities, and social relations, encompassing various acts of witnessing that a subject cannot escape. This labor runs in parallel with the production of data-subjects within digital infrastructures, which are instrumental in politics of terror and deterrence.