ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Saara Särmä examines visual online security spectacles and spectatorship by using an art-based collage methodology. She argues that visual digital artefacts, which are produced by individuals and circulated on the internet, can at times turn into security spectacles in which the serious and not-so-serious are inseparable. An Iranian failed missile test and a surge of parody images that followed it was a short-lived spectacle, but Särmä shows how the traces of it live on years later. Because of this temporal dimension and their perceived light-heartedness, these kinds of visual digital security spectacles have escaped the attention of security scholars. However, online and offline spaces are inescapably intertwined in contemporary global politics, and thus visual digital artefacts provide fruitful avenues of inquiry into questions related to security. Using a collage methodology, Särmä investigates a specific security spectacle, that of the Iranian missile test and its humorous aftermath, and examines what kind of subject positions it invites the spectators into.
