Kenotaphion of the War Image:
Gender, Hyperstition, and Mirror Propaganda in the 12-Day War Image Circuit By Parham Ghalamdar
AI propaganda does not merely falsify war. It drafts the bodies, gestures, and desires through which war becomes publicly recognisable.
This essay grew out of a screening of Angels Don’t Die in Multiplayer (2025) at Xeno Futurism’s In/Human Infrastructures symposium and exhibition programme in London, held from 22 to 24 May 2026. The film was made from the image-noise of the June 2025 12-Day War on Iran: AI-generated missiles, synthetic pilots, fake operators, devotional memes, military thirst edits, martyrdom captions, and Instagram posts that turned liking, sharing, and commenting into small acts of political alignment. The screening was followed by a talk about how this imagery became script, mood, and desire for the pink military parades that appeared in April 2026 during the widening US–Israel war on Iran.
My argument is that the AI propaganda did more than misrepresent a war. It supplied a repertoire: the armed daughter, the synthetic operator, the erotic soldier, the pink weapon. That repertoire migrated from the feed into public choreography. Its movement was recursive rather than linear. The revolutionary archive gave the fantasy memory; the synthetic composite gave it a polished body; the wartime platform tested its power to produce reactions; the parade turned fantasy into public evidence; and the diaspora enemy repeated the same gender script under an opposing flag. Each chamber fed the next while retroactively changing how the previous one could be seen.
The diagram is therefore not a timeline in which one image simply causes the next. It is a topology: a way of mapping relations that survive when an image changes medium, author, audience, or political camp. An archival photograph, an AI hallucination, and a woman performing for a phone camera are materially different. They enter the same circuit when each makes the armed woman carry a claim about who belongs to Iran. Recursion occurs when the latest image returns to organise the memory from which it appeared.
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At the end of the talk, I asked the room to hold ten seconds of silence for the innocent lives lost in the present war. That silence matters for this text. These images arrive through an economy of spectacle, but their ground is death. They pass through the feed as style, joke, fantasy, meme, and patriotic ornament while remaining attached to destroyed homes, prisons, hospitals, bodies, and families.
The essay traces one figure across five image chambers: the armed Iranian woman—revolutionary, synthetic, patriotic, eroticised, veiled, unveiled, state-aligned, opposition-coded, and endlessly made useful. Across them, she becomes a carrier of war feeling. Her body turns into proof, weapon, border, icon, costume, and interface.
Fig. 1. Recursive Propaganda Topology. Five image chambers form a feedback circuit through archive, synthetic image-making, wartime platform circulation, street choreography, and mirror propaganda. Adapted from a diagram by Kristen Alvanson in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials.
Four terms orient the diagram. By the militarisation of AI, I mean not only targeting, surveillance, drones, and intelligence, but the public use of AI to make war intimate, funny, heroic, erotic, cute, or inevitable. AI becomes military when it helps produce the emotional climate around violence.
By hyperstition, I mean a fiction that helps make itself real. An image circulates, gathers belief, trains gestures, enters public imagination, and pressures bodies to perform. A fantasy begins as a post, becomes a mood, then a pose, then a choreography. By mirror propaganda, I mean the process through which enemy camps begin to resemble one another through shared symbols and desires. The slogan changes; the gender script remains. By an operational image, following Harun Farocki, I mean an image that acts: it guides, sorts, trains, recruits, or formats behaviour. It asks the viewer to react, then turns that reaction into fuel.
The governing question is therefore not simply whether an image is real. It is: what kind of body does this image-system want to produce? Across the five chambers, the answer returns: a woman who makes militarism beautiful.
I. The armed daughter in the archive
The first chamber is the 1979 archive, the memory-bank on the top line of the diagram. The photographs I draw from were taken by Akbar Nazemi, a family friend who documented the revolution through his own urgency and curiosity. They belong to the moment before the revolution was fully institutionalised. I do not treat them as politically innocent, but as images not yet stabilised into the official visual order of the Islamic Republic.
Nazemi later published four books from this work, including Women in Revolution. The first edition sold out quickly; the second was reduced by censorship. What draws me to the photographs are the details around the main spectacle: women taking pictures, delivering speeches, raising bloodied hands, mourning, organising, and making public gestures before their presence was flattened into a single state iconography.
Women appear here not only as objects of political vision but as people producing it. They hold cameras, speak from platforms, organise around prisons, and turn private grief into collective address. That double position—recording history while being recorded by it—complicates every later attempt to make “the Iranian woman” into a settled emblem. The archive contains more agency, conflict, and unfinished possibility than the state images later extracted from it.
Fig. 2. Akbar Nazemi, 10 February 1979. A young woman raises bloodied hands at a gathering of the Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrillas marking the anniversary of Siahkal. Injury becomes evidence, and the body becomes a document.
These images belong to a long history of Iranian political representation in which woman appears as a body of proof. She proves that revolution has entered the home, school, street, and family. She proves that sacrifice has gender and that the nation can speak through a daughter. Yet the archive contains a contradiction. The revolutionary woman appears as an active subject and a disciplined symbol. She marches, holds a weapon, chants, mourns, documents, speaks, and risks death. Her image can still gain permission through service to a larger order. Her agency becomes legible when it carries the nation.
After the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, that contradiction sharpened. The death of Jina Mahsa Amini in morality-police custody in September 2022 triggered a women-led revolt against compulsory veiling and the state’s authority over women’s bodies. Women moved from symbolic bodies inside the frame to bodies tearing the frame. The image-machine needed a counter-woman: a woman against women, a daughter against daughters, a feminine body able to absorb the movement’s energy and return it wearing the state’s uniform.
This is the archive horizon in the diagram. Later AI images need memory. A synthetic image works more effectively when the viewer feels they have seen something like it before. The old photograph gives the hallucination an ancestry. The armed woman enters political imagery as revolutionary evidence; decades later, AI extracts that evidence and polishes it into fantasy.
II. The state dreams of a woman who can police women
The second chamber is the seam between document and wish. In the composite below, a 2005 photograph of women at a Tehran police academy appears beside an AI-generated Instagram fantasy of Iran’s “elite female units” designed to contain female-led unrest. The real image says: this formation existed. The synthetic image says: this is how power wishes it could appear.
Fig. 3. The counter-woman takes shape. A real police-academy photograph is revived, re-captioned, and placed beside an AI fantasy of women assigned to police female unrest. The state reaches backward for a disciplined body and sends it forward as a future weapon.
The claim that such a unit existed should be treated cautiously. As propaganda, though, the fantasy is revealing. It imagines women as tools for governing other women. It says: you wanted women in public, here are women in public. You wanted female agency, here is agency with a rifle. You wanted the end of patriarchal policing, here is patriarchy speaking through a woman’s face.
This is mirror propaganda inside the state itself. It steals the force of the movement it attacks and manufactures a woman who answers feminist revolt with disciplined threat. Baudrillard’s model begins to organise the territory. The synthetic image operates as an advance sketch of a desired social body. Its bad hands, stock-image skin, polished uniform, and unreal face do not prevent it from working. Viewers mock, save, repost, dispute, and remember it. Circulation is already a form of labour performed for the image.
The title’s kenotaphion names the structure. A kenotaphion is an empty tomb: a place prepared for a body that is missing, displaced, delayed, or yet to arrive. Here it is an image chamber. Political imagery prepares the role first, then waits for a body to enter it. The body may be a martyr, soldier, daughter of the nation, woman in uniform, synthetic pilot, or pink-rifle girl. Before the body appears, the chamber has already rehearsed what she should mean.
The composite closes the second chamber by turning an archival possibility into a model. The model then moves downward through the diagram into the platform laboratory.
III. The 12-Day War and the platform laboratory
The third chamber is the AI propaganda flood around the June 2025 war, which ran from 13 to 24 June. Iran’s reported death toll was later raised to at least 1,060; Human Rights Activists reported 1,190. The precise totals remain contested, but the images analysed here emerged from real bombardment, displacement, fear, and mourning.
They did something obscene with that ground. They turned war into glamour, missiles into accessories, and the female body into the soft front-end of militarism. Women appeared beside missiles, in command rooms and pilot poses, as operators, defenders, spies, patriotic daughters, and thirst objects. Some were visibly synthetic; others hovered between AI, cosplay, recruitment image, and fan art. Their task was not to document but to travel.
Fig. 4. 12-Day War alignment bait. The image above reads, “The Islamic Republic is ready for tomorrow’s attack,” followed by “Leave them a heart.” The heart emoji becomes a small oath of loyalty attached to an image of military readiness.
The captions matter as much as the pictures: “Leave a heart.” “Say something beautiful.” “If you have honour, like this.” “What punishment should she receive?” The user is not asked to verify, doubt, or study. The like becomes a loyalty test, the comment a public alignment, and the share a small act of mobilisation. The platform is a laboratory that tests which combinations of gender, weapon, flag, mourning, lust, and rage move fastest.
In Farocki’s sense, these are operational images even when they do not guide a missile or identify a target. They organise civilian conduct around the war. The caption gives an instruction; the interface records compliance; the metric displays a crowd; and the displayed crowd pressures the next viewer to join it. Representation and operation collapse into one gesture. A post can fabricate its scene while producing a real database of loyalties, hostilities, and appetites around that fabrication. The false picture acts through the genuine reactions it solicits.
Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” helps identify the older grammar beneath the new tool: beauty, discipline, submission, athletic bodies, sacrifice, and ecstatic collective feeling. Walter Benjamin’s account of the aestheticisation of politics also returns. The public is granted expression while power retains the frame. The phone updates this arrangement by measuring each expression and returning it to the image-maker as data.
One recurring post attached the name “Mahsa Amini” to a synthetic air-defence operator who supposedly worked without rest. It asked viewers to praise her. Jina Mahsa Amini’s name was detached from the revolt her death had ignited and returned as a loyal, militarised, sleepless avatar. The image attempted synthetic erasure through symmetry: another Mahsa, another story, another sacrifice. It did not need to convince everyone that the character existed. It needed to make the substitution available.
This is necropolitics with blush. The death-machine acquires smooth skin, fan-edit music, and a comment prompt. Having tested the figure in the feed, the circuit moves into the fourth chamber, where the street begins to resemble the model.
IV. The pink rifle enters the street
The fourth chamber is the April 2026 pink parade. On 17 April, women linked to Basij formations moved through Tehran with Iranian flags, military vehicles, rifles, and pink-painted weaponry. Chador, unveiled hair, flag, rifle, pink vehicle, public choreography, camera, caption: the state answered the platform in the language of the platform.
The phrase “the real Iranians” carries a history the image does not explain. After Jina Mahsa Amini’s death, the state treated a women-led revolt as a foreign-instigated security threat and answered it with lethal force, mass detention, and gendered violence. Nationwide protests beginning in December 2025 were again blamed on external enemies. During the January 2026 crackdown, human-rights organisations and activist networks reported that security forces killed thousands of protesters and bystanders. Communications restrictions made exact accounting difficult, but even the state later acknowledged thousands of deaths.
Against that history, “real Iranians” does more than praise patriotism. It draws a border within the nation. These bodies count; protesters, exiles, and frightened civilians are made foreign, corrupted, traitorous, or unreal. The phrase attempts to overwrite the women who rejected the state’s script and the bodies the state killed. To qualify as real, a person must appear in the correct pose, with the correct flag, under the correct caption, inside the correct emotion. The nation becomes a filter.
The claim draws some of its force from a loud pro-Shah, pro-Israel diaspora current that also presents itself as the authentic nation and sometimes imagines foreign bombardment as a route to liberation. State propaganda uses this alignment to collapse all dissent into occupation; diaspora propaganda uses state repression to make war look emancipatory. Between them, Iranians who refuse both projects are made difficult to see.
The parade’s gender politics are tactical rather than emancipatory. Veiled and unveiled women can appear together when their visibility serves national unity, even as the legal and coercive apparatus built around compulsory veiling remains. The state does not abandon its authority over women’s appearance; it demonstrates that it can vary the permitted appearance according to the needs of war. Inclusion becomes another form of command: you may enter the public image if your difference can be redirected toward loyalty.
The pink rifle condenses the circuit. A rifle painted pink remains a rifle, but its image-behaviour changes. Pink draws violence toward fashion, youth culture, cuteness, and toy-like spectacle. It lets the state say: this militarism includes women. It lets the platform say: this weapon is shareable. The rifle is trained to smile.
Here the synthetic figure appears to leave the screen. AI propaganda had rehearsed women as operators, pilots, guardians, and sacrificial daughters. The parade gave those figures bodies, routes, vehicles, costumes, crowds, and cameras. Once posted, the event became proof that “the people” wanted this image of themselves. The real body became training data for the next synthetic body; the synthetic body prepared gestures that real bodies might perform. This is the hyperstitional turn: the street begins to look like the feed, and the feed claims the street as evidence.
V. The royalist and Zionist mirror
The fifth chamber is the mirror return. A critique aimed only at the Islamic Republic would be easier, but it would leave the structure intact. Opposition imagery can reproduce the same gendered war-machine while speaking in the language of rescue.
AI imagery circulating through royalist, Zionist, and anti-regime diaspora networks often uses the same underlying grammar: sexualised women, weapons, flags, pink rifles, bubblegum, humiliation captions, leader fantasy, revenge, and pop-militarist editing. Woman returns as political equipment. The ideology changes costume; her body remains available for extraction.
Here misogyny appears as a promise of freedom through hypersexual availability. The image attacks a misogynistic state while building another misogynistic fantasy. One camp covers and arms her; the other sexualises and arms her. Both make her carry the nation. Neither arrangement lets the woman exceed her value as evidence for somebody else’s Iran.
This comparison does not make the two political forces identical or erase the state’s monopoly on law, policing, imprisonment, and execution. Mirror propaganda is not a claim of equal power. It is a claim about shared visual desire. An exiled account cannot coerce a woman in Tehran as the state can, yet it may still circulate a fantasy in which liberation means submitting her body to another national and military project. The asymmetry of force coexists with a resemblance of form.
Captions such as “Who’s the traitor now?” turn politics into a loyalty test. They ask who belongs, who should be expelled, who is pure, who is shameful, and who deserves to appear as the nation. Again, her body becomes the border. It stages loyalty, eroticises territory, and holds shame, revenge, authenticity, and ownership.
The pro-state image and the royalist–Zionist image therefore need one another. Each borrows energy from the other’s obscenity. Each says: look at them. Each proves itself through the enemy it performs against. The image crosses the mirror, changes costume, and returns carrying more rage, desire, screenshots, captions, and apparent proof. The return closes the fifth chamber and sends the circuit back toward the archive.
VI. The mirror stops reflecting
Across the five chambers, the recursive movement can now be stated plainly:
Archive → composite → wartime circulation → street choreography → diaspora mirror → archive.
The archive gives the fantasy memory. The composite gives it a polished body. Wartime propaganda gives the body urgency. The pink parade gives the body public proof. The diaspora mirror gives that proof an enemy. Then the circuit feeds its products back into the archive, where they become material for the next hallucination.
This does not erase the differences between the women pictured. They occupy different positions, risks, desires, and degrees of agency. Nor are the Islamic Republic and its opponents politically identical. The diagram identifies a shared image-machine that tries to make female agency legible through a narrow grammar: sacrifice, beauty, loyalty, weapon, flag.
Hyperstition here is not magic, nor is every image a prophecy that comes true. Most propaganda disappears into the feed. The concept names a selective process: images propose roles, platforms test them, institutions repeat the most useful forms, and public performances make some of those forms appear natural. The loop becomes self-fulfilling when the staged result is returned as proof that the original fantasy merely described reality.
The trap is libidinal as much as ideological. It works through attraction, shame, humour, outrage, lust, and the quick pleasure of recognition. The viewer is asked to react; the reaction becomes fuel. At that point, the mirror stops reflecting and starts producing resemblance.
The Islamic Republic, IRGC-adjacent visual culture, royalist nostalgia, Zionist diaspora media, platform AI, fan edits, music videos, and meme accounts meet on one surface. They fight over the meaning of Iran while making the same body into a weaponised sign. This is why the pink rifle matters. It is a small object and a total diagram: violence dressed as care, militarism dressed as girlhood, and national death-drive dressed as shareable content.
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VII. Ten seconds
At the end of the lecture, I asked for silence because applause felt too easy. The images had already converted catastrophe into spectacle. A brief silence could not repair that violence, but it interrupted the expected closure of the event.
This essay ends in the same place.
The question is no longer only: is this image fake?
The sharper question is: what does this image want me to become?
Does it want mourning, or the look of mourning?
Does it want thought, or reposting?
Does it want care for the dead, or desire for the weapon?
Does it let a woman speak, or does it make her body carry the flag for someone else?
The task is to expose the desire that survives across fake and real images. Propaganda’s deepest victory arrives when reality begins to imitate its fantasies.
The fake image defeats reality when reality volunteers to become its evidence.
Selected references
- CCRU, writings on hyperstition.
- Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials.
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
- Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.”
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”
- Harun Farocki, writings and films on operational images.
- Judith Butler, Frames of War.
- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography.
- Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.”
- Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, reports on the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.
- Human Rights Watch, “Iran: Growing Evidence of Countrywide Massacres,” 16 January 2026.
- Amnesty International, statement on the January 2026 protest massacres, 8 July 2026.
- Associated Press, updated Iranian and Human Rights Activists death tolls for the 12-Day War, 8 July 2025.
Contact: www.ghalamdar.com/ ︎ parham.ghalamdar