Thursday, March 14, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT - in person at Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, Bard College, 30 Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Middle Eastern Studies Program, Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and Art History and Visual Culture Program Present

Virtual Gaza: Notes on Martial Design

Siege warfare and occupation as conducted by the Israeli state are in permanent beta phase. AI-powered systems of targeting, remote and robotic weaponry, terraforming munitions, algorithmic governance, mass shock-and-awe assaults—these, among other forms of violence, are all treated as tests in an endless iterative loop. With each incursion into Palestinian lifeworlds, new terrains of intervention are opened up to the power and forces of design, from the nervous system of the occupied to the subterranean spaces of armed insurgency. With a focus on Gaza since the turn of the 21st Century, this talk explores design as a spirit of approach to settler-colonial warfare. It shows how conceptualizing design as war can offer new insights into settler colonialism’s virtual potential to generate new and emergent forms of horror. Imprisoned within Israel’s iterative design abyss, a virtual Gaza is formed and reformed without telos or end, one where the designers of armed violence give themselves up to an open-ended process of becoming with weapons that implicates the entirety of settler society.

ALI MUSLEH is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies. 

For more info, click here. 

To see if the event will be recorded call 845-758-6822, or e-mail zdallal@bard.edu.