For analysis of the art world’s role in money laundering, speculation, and tax evasion—and of the artists that counter-map and counteract financialization—see Max Haiven, Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (Pluto Press, 2018).
Eyal Weizman has explored the notion of a cultural shadow world by referring to research by Stephen Graham on “military urban research institutes and training centres that have been set up to rethink military operations in urban areas.” Weizman has adopted avant-garde cultural theory from the official art world to elaborate the shadow world of military intelligence. See Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso, 2007). This brings to mind what artist Trevor Paglen terms the “black world” or the “secret state” (as well as “dark geography”), which is less about the way a shadow world creates its own culture or adopts culture from the official art world than about the capacity of artistic tools to resist visibility. See Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New American Library, 2010).
See Jonas Staal, “Propaganda (Art) Struggle,” e-flux journal, no. 94 (October 2018) →; and Staal, Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective (Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2018).
See HyperNormalisation, directed by Adam Curtis (BBC, 2016); and Propaganda Theater, Video Study, directed by Jonas Staal (Jindřich Chalupecký Society, 2023).
On the relationship between the Greater Israel doctrine and the intensification of genocide in Palestine since October 8, 2023, see Francesca Albanese, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967,” filed at the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly, October 1, 2024. On further expansionist claims made by Netanyahu, see “Arab, Islamic Countries Condemn Netanyahu’s ‘Greater Israel’ Remark,” Al Jazeera, August 16, 2025 →.
Manisha Ganguly, “‘A Deadly Scheme’: Palestinians Face Indiscriminate Gunfire at Food Sites,” The Guardian, August 9, 2025 →.
An “American Holocaust,” in the words of Cherokee-American anthropologist Russell Thornton in American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that this multi-century genocide is ongoing in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2015).
P. W. Singer, “MEET THE SIMS … and Shoot Them,” Foreign Policy, no. 178 (March–April 2010).
Marc DiPaulo, War, Politics, and Superheroes (McFarland & Company, 2011).
Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed (Pluto Press, 2008).
For a comprehensive history of America’s Army as a milestone of twenty-first-century militainment, see Robertson Allen, America’s Digital Army: Games at Work and War (University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
Marcus Schulzke, “America’s Army,” in Zones of Control: Perspectives on War Gaming, ed. Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (MIT Press, 2016), 303.
Dima Saber and Nick Webber, “‘This Is Our Call of Duty’: Hegemony, History, and Resistant Videogames in the Middle East,” Media, Culture & Society 39 no. 1 (2017).
Schulzke, “America’s Army,” 307. Robertson Allen discusses the realness of the unreal composite enemy: “The unreal enemy is an enemy with minimal cultural, linguistic, or ethnic indicators and therefore one which is simultaneously anonymous yet potentially anyone. Everywhere and nowhere at once, the unreal enemy is a tabula rasa on which any enemy can be extrapolated.” Allen, “The Unreal Enemy of America’s Army,” Games and Culture 6, no. 1 (2011): 52.
Many artists have made similar observations. See, for example, Rana Anani’s lecture “Gaza Through the Looking Glass,” Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, August 24, 2025 →.
That is roughly 2.85 million years of gameplay, the equivalent of the Pleistocene, more commonly known as the Ice Age. See Matt Liebl, “25 Billion Hours Have Been Spent Playing Call of Duty,” AOL, August 10, 2016 →; and Alex Co, “Activision: Over 250M People Played Call of Duty Last Year; Monthly Active Users Grew to Over 100M in 2020,” MP1st, February 5, 2021 →.
Atlantic Council, “Atlantic Council Announces New Art of Future Warfare Project,” press release, November 19, 2014 →.
Quoted in Simon Parkin, “Call of Duty: Gaming’s Role in the Military-Entertainment Complex,” The Guardian, October 22, 2014 →.
See the official website of Red Team Defense →.
Red Team, Ces Guerres Qui Nous Attendant 2030–2060 (Equateurs / PSL, 2022), 13–70.
Red Team, Ces Guerres Qui Nous Attendant 2030-2060: Saison 3 (Paris: Equateurs / PSL, 2024), 85–151.
See Jonas Staal, “Propagating ‘Them’ in Fascist, Imperial, Liberal and Emancipatory Politics,” in Transatlantic Practices of Fascism(s) and Populism(s) from the Margins: The Cultural Politics of “Us” versus “Them,” ed. Reindert Dhondt, Monica Jansen, and Maria Bonaria Urban (Routledge, forthcoming 2026).
Claire Paccalin, “Why Macron Is Reading Sci-Fi Thrillers to Prepare for the Wars of the Future,” France 24, June 6, 2023 →.
Trevor Paglen, I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me (Melville House Publishing, 2010).
“Visible invisibility” can then function as “evidence of evidence”—as something more that we know exists, without having the capacity to access its exact form of existence. See Thomas Keenan, “Disappearances: On the Photographs of Trevor Paglen,” in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (Zone Books, 2012), 47. This bears a striking resemblance to Sven Lütticken’s idea of “the public sphere as a structural conspiracy,” which is itself a critical take on the Rumsfeldian “known unknown.” See Lütticken, Secret Publicity (NAi Publishers, 2005), 194–95.
Scott Magelssen, “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos’: ‘Theatre Immersion’ and the Simulation of Theatres of War,” Drama Review 53, no. 1 (Spring 2009).
Magelssen, “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos,’” 55.
Magelssen, “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos,’” 69.
US Army, Decisive Action Training Environment, version 2.2, April 2015 →.
Anita Stratton, “Roleplayers and Technology Enhance Soldier training,” Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, August 24, 2015 →.
A core shift was the introduction of a “One Donovia” narrative—referencing the “Greater Russia” thesis—that suggests that Donovia (Russia) is not just a threat to Atropia (Ukraine) but to Europe as a whole. See Stephen Wright, “Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE) Update: One Donovia,” T2COM G2, May 21, 2024 →.
Oliver Wainwright, “‘We’ve Got Drone Swarms, Dirty Bombs, Radar-Jamming’: The Fake Town Where America Practices for War,” The Guardian, May 15, 2024 →.
In 2025 alone the US military has organized multiple major war-game exercises in Europe, including the two-part “Combined Resolve 25” exercise at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Germany, involving thousands of troops from more than sixteen nations; the multinational “Defender Europe 25” exercise in Kosovo; and the “Saber Junction 25” exercise at Hohenfels Training Area in Germany. All followed the same script.
Weizman, Hollow Land, 205–8.
For a current account of the training facility, see the website of the Israeli occupation forces, although we cannot assume this provides full disclosure due to the largely classified nature of the facility: “Urban Warfare Training Center—Simulating the Modern Battle-Field,” October 26, 2011 →.
“In certain training sessions the military enlisted the stage-set designer of a well-known Tel Aviv theatre to provide the relevant props and organize the special effects.” Weizman, Hollow Land, 208. Media reporting and photographic evidence from visits to the facility indicate that occupation soldiers themselves perform the role of the resistance. See Oded Balilty, “Israelis Train in Ghost Town Dubbed ‘Mini Gaza,’” Associated Press, 2022 →.
As Noa Roei and Gabriel Schwake argue: “In their design of Arab urban dwellings—from the single unit to the broader distribution of space—as spaces of threat, Chicago and Al Furan work, in practice, to undermine the distinction between the enemy combatant and city dweller.” Roei and Schwake, “Pastiche of Threats: A Spatial Analysis of Military Urban Training Centres,” Amsterdam Museum Journal, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 110.
Shimrit Lee, “Simulating the Contact Zone: Corporate Mediations of (Less-Lethal) Violence in Israel, Palestine, and Beyond,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 75 (Autumn 2018): 35.
Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso, 2011), 194. The use of the term “Mini Gaza” seems to have begun in 2022, as reported by Oded Balilty, “Israelis Train in Ghost Town Dubbed ‘Mini Gaza.’”
“This convention of using the name ‘Arab,’ rather than Palestinian, effectively obscures identity, and in this sense Chicago as a ghost-town evidences the thread of denial that runs through much of Israeli discourse about relations with Palestine, towns like Ramallah and Nablus.” Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Chicago (SteidlMACK, 2006), unnumbered.
Roei and Schwake, “A Pastiche of Threats,” 109.
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Statement Regarding the Hamas Flotilla,” September 22, 2025 →.
Broomberg and Chanarin, Chicago.
Quoted in Daniel Tchetchik, “What Does an IDF Mock-Up of an Arab Village Tell Us About Israel?,” Haaretz, October 12, 2013. Note that Broomberg and Chanarin mention operations that preceded the 2003 construction of the large-scale immersive theater at the Urban Warfare Training Center. “The core of Chicago was built in the early 1980s as a small training site simulating a Lebanese village at a time when Israeli forces were occupying Lebanon.” See Eyal Weizman, “Frontier Architectures,” in Broomberg and Chanarin, Chicago.
Brendan Cole, “How Israel’s Fake City Helped Prepare for Gaza Invasion,” Newsweek, October 16, 2023 →.
Yoav Zitun, “IDF Unveils ‘Little Lebanon’ Training Facility to Prepare for Future Hezbollah Battles,” Ynet Global, May 5, 2025 →.
Yitzhak Eitan, “IDF Soldiers Use Art to Lift Spirits with Hamas Leader’s Caricature,” Hidabroot, January 21, 2024 →.
Roei and Schwake, “Pastiche of Threats,” 110.
Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as the “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations”—in short, “contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death.” Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), 86, 92.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, “The Rise of End Times Fascism,” The Guardian, April 13, 2025 →.
