Addressing the relation between war and media (broadly construed to include mass media, environmental media, etc.), this panel features papers discussing topics such as the role of war in media history, media history as warfare, and media developments for use in warfare. We have organized a session on this topic to welcome non-traditional papers that expand and diversify the definition of media in the context of warfare, as their understandings of "media" borrow from current scholarship in elemental and environmental media theories that view media as environments, more traditional scholarship that understands media as mass communications, and media as text. Each paper will have 15 minutes of allotted presentation time to allow for 15 minutes of unstructured discussion following the presentations. The primary objective of this panel is to discuss how evolving definitions of media are both cause and consequence of warfare.

Elizabeth Nicole Crawford's paper, “A Large Frightened Ear”: World War II Radio as Sonic Assault and Salvation," considers radio as a mechanism of warfare at the start of World War II within the larger context of the constant and double-edged sonic assault on English civilians. This barrage of sound, through air that Steven Connor describes as increasingly “thickening” with “signals and impulses,” provides listeners at once with threats of imminent violence and promises of salvation. A government-sanctioned tool to aid in warning systems and inform British citizens, radio cannot escape association with the whiplash experienced by an audience who feels reduced to a “large frightened ear.”

Ross Etherton's paper, “'Out of the Picture': (Dis)Appearance, Media, and the Machine Gun in Ernst Jünger’s On Pain and The Worker," explores the symbolic role that the machine gun assumes in Jünger’s extended essays Über den Schmerz (On Pain, 1934) and Der Arbeiter (The Worker, 1932). Etherton examines the gun in light of the media forms (radio, photography, x-rays, film, etc.) that often accompany it in these essays and in Jünger’s works dealing with his war experiences, showing how he uses it to prop up his narratives of war and peace.

Zeenat's paper, "(Im)mediate Field: Remediation of War in Visual Poetry" studies the technological production of the reality of the battlefield through its hypermediation and compression into visuals in the avant-garde form of visual poetry, such as Marinetti's “Zang Tumb Tumb” (1914), which attempts to reproduce a-technologically the exact simultaneity of war, and Tarik Dobbs’s “Poem Where Every Bird is Drone” (2021), which captures the compressed and reduced textuality of the technological immediacy in post 9/11 preemptive “war on terror”. Zeenat argues that the symmetrical transformation of both domains—the battlefield and the field of visual poetry into a logic of image: a thing to be immediately perceived rather than read or dwelt—inescapably bears the organising principles of the mediasphere.

Lydia Tuan and Anna Tropnikova's paper, "(Re)writing Media History: The Case of Skibidi Toilet" introduces critically needed scholarship on Skibidi Toilet by observing how the series remixes familiar tropes of power struggle while narrating a media history of the battle between old and new forms of media. The authors argue that the toilets are the new media battling surveillance cameras, clocks, televisions, and webcams: older forms of media which resist the onslaught of the skibidi toilets. Skibidi Toilet's narrative of media warring with media is a (re)writing of media's own history in ways that discursively intertwine with discussions on the death of media through the series' portrayal of literal deaths of mass media such as film and television.