Data: April 24, 2025, from 5 to 8.00 pm

 Location: Conference room 55.309 - 3rd floor building 55. Tànger - Campus del Poblenou, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

About the event

In an era of rapid acceleration and self-representation shaped by popular fiction and social media, political iconography—and the analysis of how power represents itself—has become more essential than ever. As Generative Artificial Intelligence increasingly blurs the boundaries of credibility, it is urgent to critically engage with the visual forms of politics and how events are constructed and perceived.
Instances such as the AI-generated video depicting a potential future for Gaza, conceived by Donald Trump, exemplify both a dystopian project of colonization and a profound disruption of traditional modes of interaction and representation. These are gestures capable of reshaping the collective mental framework through a psychopolitics of shock, or—as theorist Andrea Colamedici suggests in his collaborative experiment with ChatGPT and Claude, under the pseudonym Jianwei Xun—a new regime of “hypnocracy.”

Are we witnessing genuinely new forms or the acceleration of long-standing logics and iconographies? How does contemporary power stage its self-image? How can we imagine a counter-narrative or visual vocabulary of resistance? And how do technology and the economy—including war, as one of its driving forces—fuel the production of these images? How are such dynamics appropriated by populist, far-right, and ethno-nationalist movements?

This seminar explores contemporary psychopolitics through an iconological and iconographic lens, seeking to unpack the afterlife of the visual grammar of power in the age of generative technologies. This seminar is organized by the MUMOVEP project "MUTATIONS OF VISUAL MOTIVES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE. REPRESENTATIONS OF POWER IN SPAIN 2017-2021: PANDEMIC, CLIMATE CHANGE, GENDER IDENTITIES, AND RACIAL CONFLICTS" (REF: PID2021-126930OB-I00).

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