Visuality and War - reporting on a workshop

The Research Programme Securities at the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (www.open.ac.uk/ccig/programmes/securities) organized a two day workshop on visuality and war. It brought together scholars from art history, film analysis, international relations, sociology, and archeology to discuss the visualization of war. The keynote and papers engaged the main questions of the workshop - how visuality helps us understand war and what war tells us about visuality - through film, archeology of aerial photography during World War 1, the relative taboo of showing facial injuries of soldiers, romantic military art, new media technologies and the relation between beauty and war.

The keynote by Roland Bleiker is available at: http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/media/visualizing-war-politics-between-image-and-text-professor-roland-bleiker

The programme and abstracts can be found at: http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/events/war-visability-workshop

The workshop was challenging because of the continuous changes in disciplinary perspective. The disciplinary pluralism created, however, a particularly rich set of insights in how interrogating visuality and visual materials create insights in various aspects of how war is embeded in societies and cultures.

The papers and discussion also made it clear that visuality differs according to regimes of seeing. For example, looking at beauty in war implies often another way of seeing war than visualizing war as horror or terror. Understanding visualization as working on affect differs from visuality as a regime of creating truth. The discussion also came back several times to the question of the agency of visualizing and the agency of the visual materials themselves. This started from a discussion on whether the visual works agentially through reception, i.e. communication to a viewer, with the latter determining the real world effects of the visual material, or whether the visualization through cinematic techniques, for example, writes certain agency into a film like The Battle of Algiers.

At the end a most interesting point was raised: while most of the workshop had focused on different visualizations of war, and regimes of seeing it involved, we had not really discussed in what sense war itself is a regime of seeing, a regime of visualizing.