3 questions for Occitane Lacurie und Barnabé Sauvage

In many ways, the “Trump Gaza” video struck us as one of the opening salvos of a new era of AI-enabled political communication. Coinciding with the resurgence of imperialist aggressions in Palestine and Iran, this era of slopaganda is characterized by the proliferation of memes, frenetically edited videos and deepfakes constantly posted and reposted by fake accounts on social media.
At the same time , this video is exceptional because it is not merely part of the constant noise on these platforms: from the moment the US President reposted it on his Truth Social network in February 2025, it came to define the style of propaganda that would henceforth be associated with him. Beyond the images themselves, it acquired the status of both a war aim and a genuine political project.
This imagined projection of the future particularly interests us, as it seems to engage with the long history of relations between the West and the Middle East, from the Crusades for the Holy Land to the British Mandate in Palestine in the 20th century and until the present days. We therefore sought to reconnect this project to an older history by undertaking a cultural archaeology of media representations of the Gaza Strip, which the American historian Annabel Wharton has termed “simulations of the Holy Land” intended to “make it accessible to the West”, in her book Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (2006).

This archaeological approach led us to compare images produced today – such as the “Trump Gaza” video, as well as countless other examples we have gathered from YouTube, Reddit and Instagram – with historical precedents: Orientalist photographs taken by members of the American Colony Photo Department in Jerusalem, footages captured by the Lumière operators or models of the Temple Mount produced by the Swiss architect Conrad Schick in the late 19th century, as well as early 20th-century advertising posters that projected the dream of a “new Riviera” onto the colonized territories.
In doing so, we sought to reaffirm the need to consider the generative image within a cultural continuum broader than that of instant political communication. The layout we chose, which formally echoes the plates of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne compiled by the German art historian Aby Warburg in the 1920s, thus enabled us to reverse-engineer these images using the tools of iconology: what symptoms of our era do they reveal?

The images projected onto the second screen are more abstract, but no less evocative. They represent a formal exploration of the latent space of the Grok model, conducted in collaboration with computer scientist Paul Kronlund-Drouault. Despite their apparent formal differences, all these projections are based on the same topological representation of the model’s ideological encoding.
In each of the four sections of this projection, this landscape – composed of “mountains,” “valleys,” and “rivers” – uses “ force fields” to guide the generation of an image according to the parameters entered: these figures reveal the changes the image undergoes during the generation process. For example, the first section allows you to observe the variation of an image generated in response to the prompt ‘child playing in the street’ according to different values of the “Palestinian” parameter relative to the “Neutral” parameter.
In addition, the two projections – as well as the voice-over narration, performed by the Franco-Austrian media theorist Christa Blümlinger – offer an iconographic, technical, and historical interpretation of the cultural context underlying the so-called automatic generation of images. At the end of each of the three parts of our installation, the array of clues we have gathered enables viewers to see the “Trump Gaza” video in a new light and to provides tools for its political interpretation.

While working on this piece, we noticed the resurgence of Christian imagery in media discourse, particularly within the powerful evangelical movement surrounding President Trump. The most striking example is undoubtedly a generated video posted by Republican MP Andy Ogles, depicting Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense (now renamed “secretary of war”) and author of the book American Crusade, as a soldier of the Knights Templar.
This temporal collision is, however, merely an apparent paradox: as with the American Colony, the use of an audiovisual medium emblematic of technological modernity (yesterday photography or cinema, today AI) sits comfortably alongside the invocation of a mythologized past, going hand in hand with a “biblified” representation of contemporary geopolitical issues.
More generally, it seems to us that the far-right’s use of AI thrives on the very logic of platform capitalism, with its commodification of images and recommendation algorithms. Far-right slop materializes a nationalist fantasy stripped of any historical context, finding refuge in a sloppy folklore that serves both supremacism and imperialism.
As a similar logic was already evident in religious theme parks such as “The Holy Land Experience” (which was in Orlando, Florida until its demolition in 2023), we used it as an emblem revealing the negative relationship with history and geography that is prevalent in modern fascist thought. It seems to us that AI is now an even more explicit political project than the propaganda of yesteryear.