Unstable witnessing: war images and the crisis of perception in the age of generative AI

This article examines how the coexistence of photographic and AI-generated war imagery reconfigures the conditions of media witnessing (Frosh and Pinchevski 2009). Today’s platformed visual culture is characterized not only by an unprecedented abundance of images, but also by the convergence of images produced through fundamentally different operations: whereas traditional photography registers light from scenes before a camera, generative AI models synthesize photographic-looking images through statistical prediction. Thus, photorealism (Hausken 2024) no longer guarantees indexical registrations of the world. Through reception-oriented analysis of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Pixel-Collages (2015–2016) and Ilkin Huseynov’s Looming Dreams (2023), the article traces how this transformation becomes perceptible in contemporary art. Hirschhorn’s collages engage with poor images (Steyerl 2013a): traditionally produced photographs whose evidentiary meanings are destabilized through postproduction, recirculation, and decontextualization. Huseynov’s AI-generated images, by contrast, depict war without detecting particular events, nevertheless retaining a genealogical relation to photography through their training data and the reproduction of the photographic form. Read sequentially, the works demonstrate that epistemic uncertainty (Chouliaraki 2015) spans rather than separates photographic and synthetic imagery: photographic registration cannot guarantee stable meaning-making, while photographic appearance no longer guarantees that registration even occurred. Bringing Wolfgang Welsch’s concept of derealization into dialogue with theories of new media, centrally the concept of digital witnessing Chouliaraki 2015) and secondary witnessing (Varvia 2024), the article develops the concept of unstable witnessing. This describes a mode of reception in which images remain indispensable to sensing and perceiving distant wars, while intensified exposure and heterogeneous modes of image production make their provenance and evidentiary status increasingly difficult to establish. The artworks do not resolve this uncertainty but render its perceptual operations visible, staging contemporary media witnessing as suspended between trust and distrust, testimony and fabrication, and sense-making and its breakdown.