Observing signs of russo-Ukrainian war fatigue I decided to come up with a poem called "Is the war over?". I've labeled it as poésie concrète drawing an analogy with musique concrète - genre where music is composed of non-musical pieces of sound.
In the same way, my poem is composed of search engine results for "russian war crimes" in the latest week which are then processed by a sentiment analysis model to extract sentences that highlight russian atrocities most properly. After ML-processing sentences assembled in the poem. Each Sunday the poem is regenerated with new and new war crimes.
The war will be over on a day when the search engine will return no results and the poem will be blank.
One may argue that search engine might return results long after hostilities will end. This is exactly the point. Many people in Ukraine will have to live with the aftermath of war for their entire lives. Consider war veterans, traumatized children, and families who lost their close ones.
The poem is by the link below and it's pretty graphic. Because the war is a graphic thing, you know. Especially when you deal with russians.
is the war over?Naturally, I've spent all this effort to craft this project not just to tell that 'le war is bad'. My goal is to encourage you to take a stance and support the Ukrainian military defending its home via these funds I've been supporting myself.