Warbound: Collective Audio Streaming from Ukraine

Russia’s war of aggression is a multidimensional process of conquest that expands its time and space through sound. As Russian forces continue their advance into Ukraine, seizing Ukrainian territories both “horizontally” and “vertically,” as warfare scholar Svitlana Matviyenko (2024) has argued, Ukrainians across the country find themselves living in the sonic expanse of Russian assault. This research paper refers to this experience as one of warbound, of a (sonically) lived relation to war. To explore this relation and situated relationality it may entail, I turn to the work of Ukrainian sound artists and practitioners who participated in collective audio streaming, seeking to recast the Ukrainian testimony of the Russian invasion as a contingent truth claim. The paper examines the 2022 iteration of the audio stream project Listen Live, constitutive to the Land To Return, Land To Care research-creation laboratory. The project is studied in the scope of its testimonial reach and activist pursuit, as well as its humanist and posthumanist performativity. keywords: Ukraine, war, wartime, audio stream, war sound, witnessing, testimony, materialism, posthumanism, ecology, Ukrainian, earthbound, warbound, belliphonic