Dr Mario Panico - Re-imagining Conflicts, Making Up Futures: AI-Generated Images and the Memorability of War

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Mario Panico delivers a seminar on their research -  This seminar will present the first results of my research project on the use of artificial intelligence-generated imagery in contemporary conflict contexts. Through examples drawing from contemporary wars, I will address two questions: (i) how these visual texts activate specific emotional rhetorics, iconographic patterns and memorial references. In this part, I will focus on the notion of the “archive of the present” and how AI images draw on pre-existing visual heritage to appear authentic and culturally credible, redefining what is perceived as “memorable”; ii) how the future is “prescribed”: looking at how temporalities are reconstructed through the representation of future scenarios, between coping, predictions and collective avoidance. For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias