ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the conceptualization of warfare in the contemporary mediascape. It argues that the dynamics organizing military spectatorship today predate the Internet, film, or photography, emerging in Napoleonic Europe as battles first came to be regarded as objects of mass entertainment. The aesthetic paradigms with which the battlefield would be evaluated would be articulated by the military as much as by civilian observers. The chapter looks at the unique form that watching war has taken today, when it has become almost impossible not to be an onlooker in one capacity or another. It concludes with an analysis of some contemporary artists who have sought to craft representations of warfare that can be distinguished from the military's own self-representational products. In unsettling the very premise that the battlefield is best understood as something that one can observe, these projects challenge the notion that social media have enhanced the ability to pierce the fog of war.
