But in fact
A small absurdist website, object-oriented actor-network, created together with Roman Osminkin during a residency at Civic Media Lab in Dnipro in 2017, was devoted to dismantling Russian propaganda myths about Ukraine. Each such “fact” is deconstructed through methods that are just as absurd as the claims themselves.
Method
The research was conducted according to the uniform pattern — in the original news text the actors were singled out and their interrelations were indicated. They were then formed into a chain of interaction, which was taken out in a separate post / draft for clarity. Further, each relationship was subjected to a careful scrutiny of the degree of its stability and functionality. Based on the results, a final report was formed, transforming each chain of interactions into the form of a poetic object that went beyond the initial propaganda.
Factchecking Agency is a speculative model for reassembling propaganda. We do not ask who or what stands behind a propagandistic news item — behind propaganda there is no reality other than the reality of propaganda itself. We simply determine what a given news item is assembled from and define for each of them its own register of truth and mode of existence. Each news item, instead of appearing as an aggressive seizure of reality, emerges as a network of actors, things, facts, and concepts. As many propagandistic news items as there are, so many ways of assembling realities exist. Each news item deserves the right to real existence. There is nothing more absurd than denying reality to the absurd.