record – LABS

Thesis Info

Thesis Title: Distant Wars: Seeking undestanding behind the logistics of perception of modern warfare

URL where full thesis can be found: files.cargocollective.com/764795/Final-Thesis-Version-1.pdf

Keywords: logistics of perception, media theory, afghanistan war, 3d animation, modes of history, virtual imagination

Abstract: 200-500 words: What are the of violence that we hold within us? The thesis explores the transmission and deferral of memories of armed conflict, the labor of war within us. How the violence of its history and present operates in those that have not physically experienced it. The ways we recall, in our bodies, the violence that military warfare has bestowed on the world. Mouw animates these traces through his own family history connecting to a time when entire populations of the European continent were immersed in total war. Mouw weaves together a complex network that connects the stories of a young girl – his Dutch grandmother – who was sent for groceries and returned to find rubble where her home had once stood, to a boy – his brother – turning thirteen on the day in 2001 that led to the war on terror. This was the first global war waged by a single nation against an ambiguous global “radical network”, a war against a tactic, that would be waged elsewhere, in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. It is also a war that Mouw’s generation remembers, envisioned through media coverage on screens inside their own homes. In careful interlacing different experiences of war spectatorship throughout modern history the texts aims to identify the changing role of spectatorship from physical participation to the consumption of war through the media and how this consumption constructs completely now physical places.