Date of Award
Spring 5-7-2025
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art
Degree Type
Thesis
Abstract
This thesis, Hauntological Warfare: Explorations in Propaganda, Influence Campaigns, and Online Aesthetics, investigates how ideological power continues to shape contemporary reality through both overt and spectral means. Drawing from concepts like hauntology, psychological operations (PsyOps), and disinformation aesthetics, I examine how propaganda does not simply vanish once its immediate goals are achieved, but instead lingers—reshaping memory, identity, and cultural narratives through what I call hauntological warfare.
My post-conceptual research-based art practice engages this terrain by creating site-specific installations, performances, and media works that make these invisible forces perceptible. Works such as Kill Zones (for Boeing) (2024), r/RoastMe (2024), and Flowers for Heart Mountain (2024) operate as subversive counter-narratives, summoning ideological ghosts embedded in state violence, institutional erasure, and the aesthetics of surveillance capitalism. Drawing from personal experience as a former propagandist for the U.S. Army, my work locates propaganda not only in public messaging but in material culture, digital environments, and domestic space.
Alongside theorists like Mark Fisher, Günseli Yalcinkaya, and Trevor Paglen, I argue that we are living through a shift where soft and hard power converge—where algorithmic content, affective manipulation, and historical amnesia operate as forms of psychological warfare. To investigate this, I introduce the concept of provisional ethnographic installations: absurdist and poetic visual frameworks that purposefully conflate cultural phenomena to reveal their hidden interdependencies. Through this hybrid artistic method, my thesis explores how power operates through concealment—and how art can function as a method of exorcising the ideological phantoms that continue to haunt us.
Language
English
Program Chair
Tiffany Calvert
Thesis Text Advisor
Tiffany Calvert
Thesis Text Advisor
Monika Weiss
Faculty Mentor
Tiffany Calvert
Committee Member
Heather Bennett
Committee Member
Ila Sheren
Committee Member
Joe deVera
Committee Member
Anika Todd
Recommended Citation
Uptain, Roy, "Hauntological Warfare: Explorations in Propaganda, Influence Campaigns, and Online Affect" (2025). MFA in Visual Art. 35.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/mfa_visual_art/35
Artist's Statement
I make art about specters of propaganda and the systems that summon them.
My work explores how systems of control—propaganda, surveillance, online subcultures—embed themselves in the textures of daily life. Drawing from my background as a former Army propagandist and my upbringing in a fundamentalist evangelical cult, I trace how systems of manipulation linger beyond their immediate purposes, reshaping memory, identity, and space itself.
In Giant’s Stadium Commuter Lot, I reconstruct a 9/11-era CCTV still using hundreds of sagging sheets of copy paper, a fragile shroud that mourns both personal loss and the rebranding of national grief into perpetual war. r/RoastMe translates online mockery into physical space, transforming a flood of Reddit insults into a sprawling, caustic installation that exposes how cruelty and attention-seeking collapse into one seamless logic. Edgelord Ethnography stages barren domestic spaces modeled after male internet subcultures—naked mattresses, LED-lit gaming setups, scattered Monster cans—revealing how irony calcifies into ideology. In Surveillance Erotica, I revoice corporate and policing buzzwords in an intimate, sensual tone, unmasking the way seduction and control intermingle in the rhetoric of safety to construct surveillance capitalism.
Across these projects, I create intentionally dissonant environments—seductive on the surface, unsettling underneath. The emotional texture I aim for is what the internet calls blursed: a strange, ambivalent fusion of comfort and discomfort, fascination and unease. I want viewers to feel pulled in even as they are subtly implicated, caught between the desire to linger and the impulse to run.
My work embraces contradiction, holding space for how contemporary life folds together pleasure and coercion, banality and violence. By materializing these ideological ghosts, I invite viewers to confront the persistent afterlives of propaganda—not as distant histories, but as everyday atmospheres we live and breathe.