Project Launch Symposium: The War Image: The ethics of showing, seeing and sharing war

This symposium brought together leading artists and scholars to explore the nature, uses and effects of the war image in an era of digital overload. Speakers included: Mark Neville (artist, Kyiv); Lesia Kulchynska (curator and researcher, Amsterdam); Lilie Chouliaraki (prof of media and communications, LSE); William Merrin (associate prof. of media studies, Swansea University) and Andrew Hoskins (prof. of AI, memory & war, Edinburgh).

What is the role of the artist, the photograph, and humanitarian communication in wars defined by the digital flux and saturation of images? Has digital participation and instant connectivity illuminated or obscured war’s human experience and costs? How are colonial technologies of vision and image-making translated into the realm of automated decision making? And after digital war is all that is left only more traumatic memory or something salvageable for remembrance, justice and accountability?

This symposium launched Prof. Andrew Hoskins’ project WARSHARE: The New War Front: Digital Participation in War (UKRI HEu ERC Advanced Grant EP/Z53335X/1).

Recorded presentations

Speaker details

Professor Andrew Hoskins, University of Edinburgh

High Definition War. Who knows or cares about the war image?

Andrew Hoskins holds a personal chair in AI, Memory & War at the University of Edinburgh.

He leads a new ERC awarded/UKRI funded €2.27M project WARSHARE: The new war front: digital participation in war (2025–30) focusing on the Russian war against Ukraine. He is founding Co Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Journal of Memory, Mind & Media and founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Memory Studies.

Mark Neville, Kyiv

In a rare appearance outside of Ukraine, and showing never seen before images and film excerpts, Kyiv-based British artist Mark Neville will talk about his current work that symbiotically fuses humanitarian aid deliveries with his documentary art practice. In a presentation that takes in his last two Ukraine-based photobook projects, the pre-war ‘Stop Tanks with Books’ and the latest publication ‘Diary of a Volunteer’ — made as part of his hybrid art and aid project ‘Postcode Ukraine’ — Mark will outline plans for a new book project, a collaboration with Professor Andrew Hoskins.

Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, LSE

From platforms to prompts. Rethinking humanitarian communication in the age of platforms and AI.

Illiberal political forces imposing cultures of violence, cruelty and expulsion are gaining force both the Global South and increasingly in the liberal global North. In this context, it becomes urgent to examine how humanitarian communication — the communication of vulnerable humanity as a cause for action — might still cultivate a civic imagination in which we can begin to feel and understand what it means to be human beyond our European, predominantly white, humanity. To this end, I offer critical reflections on posthumanitarianism, a dominant style of humanitarian communication defined by its abandonment of attempts to represent vulnerable humanity as a historical condition rooted in the structural violence and enduring inequalities that marked the postcolonial Global South.

While earlier, yet still pervasive, forms of humanitarianism rely on platform-driven digital aesthetics that centre western donors as benevolent consumers prompted to click like, upload and shop, emerging AI-generated representations of human suffering intensify this platform logic and its playful digital aesthetics but now also introduce an unsettling layer of colonial photorealism. Confining engagement to mobile screens, lifestyle-oriented actions and familiar tropes of the past, posthumanitarianism prioritises self-gratification over critical understanding, thereby reproducing hierarchies between those living in stability and those denied safety, dignity and recognition. Against this dynamic, we must continue our efforts to imagine and represent vulnerable humanity in ways that resist both the self-centred playfulness and the revived colonial tropes of posthumanitarianism and that reopen possibilities for meaningful care and just action beyond the confines of our immediate lifeworlds.

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research explores the ethical and political complexities of communicating human suffering, focusing on disaster news, humanitarian and human rights advocacy, war and conflict reporting and migration news. Her books include, among others, The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006), The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Posthumanitarianism (2013, ICA Outstanding Book Award 2015); The Digital Border. Mobility, Technology, Power (2022) and Wronged. The Weaponization of Victimhood (2024, ICA Outstanding Book Award 2025, and ICA Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division Best Book Award 2025).

Dr. Lesia Kulchynska, University of Amsterdam

From Hacked Profiles to Hacked Bodies: Participatory War and its Coercive Dimensions

Hacking social media to simulate social dynamics was a trademark of the Kremlin propaganda since a notorious troll farm, Internet Research Agency (IRA), was established in 2013. IRA’s initial task was to fight Putin’s opposition, substituting the expression of social discontent in the Russian online spaces with the staged demonstration of popular love for the dictator. This expertise in faking reality became a crucial weapon during the war with Ukraine. With the recent campaigns, such as Doppelganger, Matryoshka, or Operation Overload, based on the strategy of hacking and mimicking the pages, profiles, and images of real individuals and institutional actors to express pro-Kremlin narratives, the Russian simulation machine entered international digital space, prompting numerous researchers to portray Russia as the global epicenter of disinformation innovation in the age of participatory media.

Yet, what is often overlooked by the existing accounts on Russian propaganda is that it is not limited to faking the media representations, but is engaged in editing the physical reality itself. In my talk, I will look at how the Russian propaganda logic of faking and hacking the profiles developed into the practice of hacking the bodies, proposing to think of the Russian war against Ukraine as a violent simulation machine targeted at forceful adjustment of matter to the hollow signifier of propaganda.

Lesia Kulchynska is a curator and researcher in media and visual studies, currently based in Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Film Studies and has worked as a researcher at the Pinchuk Art Center and as a curator at the Visual Culture Research Center and Kyiv Biennial in Kyiv. She taught courses on Media and Communication Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv Academy of Media Arts, and John Cabot University (Rome). In 2018/2019, she was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University (NYC, US), where she worked on violent responses to art, studying cases of banned and attacked exhibitions in Ukraine. She was also a postdoctoral fellow of Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute of Art History (Rome, Italy) from 2022 to 2024, and a fellow of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (2024–2025), where she investigated the networked visuality of violence during the Russo–Ukrainian War.

Dr. William Merrin, Swansea University

The age of environmental necro-tech

William Merrin is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Swansea University, UK. He is the author of: Digital War (Polity, 2018), Media Studies 2.0 (Routledge, 2014), and Baudrillard and the Media (Polity, 2005), co-author of Sharded Media: Trump’s Rage Against the Mainstream (Palgrave, 2025) and co-editor of Trump’s Media War (2019) and Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories (Routledge, 2009).