Marie Naja Lauritzen Dias

Visualizing War in Digital Images
Art as a Diagnostic of Perception and Affective Mediation

Contemporary war is not only fought in images but through them. Images act as operative agents, shaping how war is sensed, known, and desired. This talk uses three case studies to examine how artworks function as probes into these operations, revealing the affective, sensory, and technological infrastructures of contemporary warfare.

The first case – a YouTube video of a press conference at the bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza – examines the politics of ‘truth’ in war images, where pixelated or improvised ‘snapshots’ are perceived as authentic while staged “scenographies of war” provoke skepticism (Baudrillard, Sjöholm, Didi-Huberman). The second, drawing on Thomas Hirschhorn’s Pixel-Collage and Ilkin Huseynov’s AI work Looming Dreams, addresses sensory experience, showing how “hyper-aesthetics” and “hyperaesthesia” (Fuller & Weizman) produce aesthetic ambiguity as perception oscillates between coherence and breakdown. Lastly, Noura Tafeche and Tobia Paolo’s videowork MICCHAN, confronts the gendered and algorithmic dimensions of war, exposing how Israeli MilTok influencers weaponize cuteness and empowerment as soft-power tool functioning as “operational images” (Parikka).

Together, these cases show how war images are not only seen but inhabited, shaping perception, desire, and intimacy. Mediation transforms the perceptual and affective terrain of war through visual formats, sensory oscillations, and platform-specific performances. Understanding contemporary war thus requires mapping its media ecologies as well as political and military strategies, within which art becomes a diagnostic tool, exposing how images operate as agents of aesthetic warfare.

BIO
Marie Naja Lauritzen Dias is a PhD scholar in Art History at Aarhus University, with a Master’s degree in Digital Design. Her research explores the intersections of war, digital media, and contemporary art. Her doctoral project, The Pixellated War: Artistic Engagements with the New Image War investigates how images of war and conflict circulate, are mediated, and shape perception, desire, and intimacy. Using contemporary art as a lens, she examines the visual, sensory, and technological infrastructures that structure these images, showing how they function as operative agents in digital environments. Her most recent publication is the peer-reviewed article Logics of War in APRJA.

Æstetisk Seminar er tilrettelagt af AIIM – Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images, Lotte Philipsen og Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.