Hauntological Warfare: Explorations in Propaganda, Influence Campaigns, and Online Affect
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis, Hauntological Warfare: Explorations in Propaganda, Influence Campaigns, and Online Aesthetics, investigates how ideological power continues to shape contemporary reality through both overt and spectral means. Drawing from concepts like hauntology, psychological operations (PsyOps), and disinformation aesthetics, I examine how propaganda does not simply vanish once its immediate goals are achieved, but instead lingers—reshaping memory, identity, and cultural narratives through what I call hauntological warfare. My post-conceptual research-based art practice engages this terrain by creating site-specific installations, performances, and media works that make these invisible forces perceptible. Works such as Kill Zones (for Boeing) (2024), r/RoastMe (2024), and Flowers for Heart Mountain (2024) operate as subversive counter-narratives, summoning ideological ghosts embedded in state violence, institutional erasure, and the aesthetics of surveillance capitalism. Drawing from personal experience as a former propagandist for the U.S. Army, my work locates propaganda not only in public messaging but in material culture, digital environments, and domestic space. Alongside theorists like Mark Fisher, Günseli Yalcinkaya, and Trevor Paglen, I argue that we are living through a shift where soft and hard power converge—where algorithmic content, affective manipulation, and historical amnesia operate as forms of psychological warfare. To investigate this, I introduce the concept of provisional ethnographic installations: absurdist and poetic visual frameworks that purposefully conflate cultural phenomena to reveal their hidden interdependencies. Through this hybrid artistic method, my thesis explores how power operates through concealment—and how art can function as a method of exorcising the ideological phantoms that continue to haunt us.
abstract: This thesis, Hauntological Warfare: Explorations in Propaganda, Influence Campaigns, and Online Aesthetics, investigates how ideological power continues to shape contemporary reality through both overt and spectral means. Drawing from concepts like hauntology, psychological operations (PsyOps), and disinformation aesthetics, I examine how propaganda does not simply vanish once its immediate goals are achieved, but instead lingers—reshaping memory, identity, and cultural narratives through what I call hauntological warfare. My post-conceptual research-based art practice engages this terrain by creating site-specific installations, performances, and media works that make these invisible forces perceptible. Works such as Kill Zones (for Boeing) (2024), r/RoastMe (2024), and Flowers for Heart Mountain (2024) operate as subversive counter-narratives, summoning ideological ghosts embedded in state violence, institutional erasure, and the aesthetics of surveillance capitalism. Drawing from personal experience as a former propagandist for the U.S. Army, my work locates propaganda not only in public messaging but in material culture, digital environments, and domestic space. Alongside theorists like Mark Fisher, Günseli Yalcinkaya, and Trevor Paglen, I argue that we are living through a shift where soft and hard power converge—where algorithmic content, affective manipulation, and historical amnesia operate as forms of psychological warfare. To investigate this, I introduce the concept of provisional ethnographic installations: absurdist and poetic visual frameworks that purposefully conflate cultural phenomena to reveal their hidden interdependencies. Through this hybrid artistic method, my thesis explores how power operates through concealment—and how art can function as a method of exorcising the ideological phantoms that continue to haunt us.
author: Uptain, Roy
language: English
keywords: Propaganda, Surveillance Capitalism, PsyOps Realism, Affect Theory, Digital Rituals, Hauntology, Edgelord, Research-Based Art, Blursed Aesthetics, Post-Conceptual Art, Art and Design, Fine Arts
date published: 2025-05-07T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:12:17Z
provider: Washington University in St. Louis
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Washington University in St. Louis