Thinking through the Visualisation of Power in the Twentyfirst Century

The next session at ANZCA 2023 is on journalism and war, and starts with Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen, whose interest is in how to visualise twentyfirst-century state and corporate power. Neglected from a visual perspective is that which is not seen – the invisible systems, structures, and processes of corporate-military power, and the indirect, systemic, or socially abstract invisible warfare in which we are immersed daily, and ineluctably participate on various levels.

Today, this happens at the nexus of global corporatisation, digital information and communication technologies, and modern, AI-driven warfare, and is aided by the global digitisation, corporatisation, datafication, and financialisation of our societies. It is visible and invisible; enabled and protected by corporatisation and the legal fiction of corporate personhood which knits together the military and industrial, state and corporate security, surveillance, and information, and digital media and entertainment complexes; and occasionally challenged when the persons behind the corporations are held personally responsible for its consequences.

This is channelled especially by the digital, and also critically represented by the post-photographic visualisation practices of war and conflict by more abstract, conceptual, but also forensic imagery that focusses on the non- and inhuman faces of warfare. Digital technologies can be valuable here, but also have a dark side; the digital is pervasive in our daily lives, and we can only disregard it as we go about those lives yet are also highly aware of its influence. The same is true for its role in warfare; digital tools can be used for warfare, but also to scrutinise it. They can give us a deeper and broader scope as we do so, but we are also reflexively and existentially immersed in them.

The growing corporatisation of governmentality is the connective tissue without which the organs of state would fall apart; AI, for instance, is capturing and empowering individuals, corporations, and the state. This may appear abstract, but is forensically mappable, and it is possible to harness imagery in representing these ideas. Such strategic visualisation must involve artists and image-makers, but this is not just a question of aesthetics, but of how we produce knowledge by what we in- and exclude in the visible field. We are urgently tasked with exploring fresh ways of how we address and visualise twentyfirst-century power.

(OK, there was a lot here, and I probably didn’t do it full justice…)