Overand
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Human cognition is increasingly entangled with machines. In its fifth year of full-scale war, Ukraine is experiencing this transformation under extreme pressure: drones, nonstop livestreams, and technologically mediated trauma raise questions that extend far beyond the country.
Overand is a Ukraine-rooted initiative at the intersection of psychoanalysis, resocialization, and emerging technologies. Bringing together psychotherapy and emerging tech prototyping across sound, AI, neurofeedback, and prosthetics, it develops new knowledge and applications for open-source recovery protocols.
Founded by professor Bogna Konior and psychoanalyst Yuliia Leites, Overand is a non-profit institute in formation. The name signifies the cyclicality of time: recovery as the creation of new life after rupture, rather than a return to what has passed.
Overand: what comes over and after the rupture.
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Ukraine has become a global centre of defense innovation, yet innovation in how people survive, process, and recover from modern warfare has not kept pace. Meanwhile, the technology industry everywhere is turning toward the psyche: attention, sleep, stress, and mood are now design problems, increasingly addressed through biometric wearables, spatial and binaural audio, VR exposure environments, neurofeedback, and conversational AI positioned as a first line of psychological support.
Nearly all of this innovation is calibrated for peacetime cognition, with little research being done on how contemporary war affects the mind, and whether new rehabilitation methods are required.
Our initiative focuses on two key areas: studying how technologically accelerated modern warfare affects the human psyche, and developing open-source technological tools and social homecoming protocols that support cognitive health and collective agency.
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Overand is operating in an open space of exploration. The institute exists to place the questions, ask them — and find the people who can answer them, in Ukraine and worldwide.
Overand aims to create a feedback loop between the academic institutions and tech labs of the world and the frontier in Ukraine — where these developments are both specific to the country’s circumstances and universally relevant.
How does technological acceleration under traumatic conditions, such as warfare, affect the human mind?
Should we develop new approaches to rehabilitation in response?
Can technology and digital culture serve not only as tools of trauma but also of recovery?
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Decades after artist Harun Farocki documented video games being used to treat PTSD, post-war recovery demands a new body of work. We believe that Ukraine can become a leader in the field of ‘recovery technologies.’ We are committed to fostering this practice, learning from other communities internationally affected by war, and creating open-source knowledge that can be adapted elsewhere.
Overand Institute carries out this work: we maintain outreach; engage international funders across humanitarian, university and tech circles; integrate what we learn with psychotherapeutic and technological research on trauma and recovery; publish methodology and findings for practitioners elsewhere; and build the clinical, academic, cultural, and international partnerships that let this work travel beyond a single course or city.
As a politically independent institute rather than a conventional NGO, Overand keeps the autonomy to research and develop recovery technologies directly with battalions and communities — while freely sharing validated methodologies across the network.
Two priorities in a continuous feedback loop
In Ukraine — Support recovery. Learning, therapeutic support, veteran–civilian connection, and homecoming protocols.
Worldwide — Build a field of knowledge. Ukrainian practitioners, artists, and thinkers develop recovery technologies through exchange with universities, festivals, and collaborators worldwide.
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01 — Sound · Immediate practice
Sound is a weapon and environment of war — drones, missiles, alerts, threatening silence. It can also be a technology of recovery, reaching the body and mind where language cannot.
02 — AI, Neurofeedback & Prosthetics · Desired development
Closed community agents, therapeutic neurofeedback interfaces, and human–machine cognition in care.
Prosthetics as sensory interfaces. Exploring sensation and self-image as people reconnect with a changed body after war injury.
03 — Psychedelics · Long-term horizon
Sound, setting, and technological augmentation of integration protocols for psychedelic-assisted therapy — pending legal and clinical permissions.
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How You Can Help Let’s build Overand together!
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Foundations, private funders, and tech companies interested in this work are warmly invited to get in touch. A detailed budget and timeline are available on request, and support can go to the institute as a whole or to a single project.
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We are looking for partners to co-develop evaluation methodology, host elective modules or placements, and co-publish findings in Ukrainian and English. Departments in psychology, engineering, media arts, and rehabilitation sciences are all relevant.
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We welcome local and international mentors skilled in new media production, hosts for listening sessions and showcases, and clubs and festivals willing to take Ukrainian soldiers and artists onto their lineups.
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We are assembling both the clinical supervision and safeguarding side of the programme and the R&D that follows it — spatial sound, AR/VR, biosensors. If you work in trauma care, or you build tools, we would love to hear from you.
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