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

Virtual Gaza: Notes on Martial Design
Thursday, March 14, 2024

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Bard College
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Ali Musleh, Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies

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 H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies. He is also associate researcher at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UH-M) Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies. In 2022, he received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at UHM, where he taught global politics and political design and futuristics.

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