Description
This presentation examines how emerging technologies shape the visual experience of military violence among Western democratic publics. The ongoing war in Ukraine has seen a proliferation of technologically-generated images of warfare, such as videos from the perspective of first-person video drones; in both Gaza and Ukraine, there have been a rapid increase in the use of machinic representations of violence, generating synthetic representations of violence from novel perspectives, which provide new ways of seeing, perceiving, and experiencing violence. While much research has examined how combatants – such as drone operators, and more recently FPV drone operators – have had to grapple with these new visual perspectives and modes of vision, these novel perspectives also impact how democratic publics see and perceive military violence.
This presentation, therefore, examines the intersection of human and machinic vision and technologies of representation, and its political impacts. Drawing on engagement with open-source visual research methods and interviews with visual researchers, this presentation will examine how these new visualities of war shape democratic publics’ experiences of military violence, bridging the remoteness prevalent in contemporary warfare. In particular, I will argue, this human-machinic visual interaction provides potential new avenues for the contestation of state military practices.
