The Death Stack: The Aesthetics and Imaginaries of Next Gen Warfare
Lecture by Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar
This lecture explores how the military and
defense sector constructs immersive aesthetic and sensorial worlds through arms fairs, speculative design, technical manuals,
and strategic visualizations, producing a distinct cosmology of control, futurity, and threat.
It examines how these spaces function not just as sites of commerce and policy, but
as stages for narrating geopolitical power and technological destiny. Alongside critically tracing the ‘worldbuilding’ and
aesthetic sensibilities of the defense sector, the lecture will also trace how contemporary artists have appropriated, mimicked,
and engaged with these visual and conceptual languages – exposing their assumptions and contradictions, whilst also at times
allowing violence to proliferate beyond the arms fair and battlefield. By situating military and defence aesthetics within
broader cultural and artistic practices, the session invites students to critically engage with the blurred boundaries between
simulation, spectacle, and real-world next-gen violence.
Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar is a Postdoctoral
Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science’s Department of Knowledge Systems and Collective Life. Zsuzsanna
received her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and has previously held positions
as a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) in Munich, a Research Fellow at the Consortium
for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), and a Knowledge Management Fellow at the International Center for
Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). In addition to her current Max Planck project, Dual-Use Knowledge: A
Critical History of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, Zsuzsanna is working with Demilitarise Education UK on
an online demilitarization course, funded by Antipode’s Right to the Discipline grant.
https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/people/zihar
Organized by Ryan Crawford in the context of his Cross-Disciplinary Strategies seminar Extinction,
Disappearance and Loss in Contemporary Philosophy
Mehr Informationen: https://base.uni-ak.ac.at/courses/2026S/S05823/
An event organised by the departement of Cross-Disciplinary Strategies.
https://crossdisciplinary.at/ 
