"What's at stake in war is a politics of vision as much as anything else."

Bodies, No-bodies, and Anti-bodies at War: Operation Desert Storm and the Politics of the "Real"

An on-line thesis project by Robert Nideffer that looks at the watershed in MIME-based visualizations of war that was Operation Desert Storm/Gulf War I. From desktop computer graphics to Pentagon press pools (the latter of which has since mutated into embedded reporting in Gulf War II).

Excerpt:

"Though footage of enemy bodies may have been scant [due to Pentagon press pools implemented during the Gulf War], the recent development, availability and potential of desktop computer graphics technologies for displaying war gave news agencies renewed hope, or at least a way of doing "craft." With no "real" news-reel footage of war to turn to (due to Pentagon censorship), broadcast media were forced to creatively recreate imaginary battle scenarios. It was a desktop publishing coup. We were bombarded by graphics of bombardment, and it was visually stunning, shot after shot after shot. Restrictive Pentagon policies helped create a situation where if there was going to be any visual representation of what was unfolding in the Gulf it was going to come from graphics departments working for and with the major news organizations back in the United States: "Maps, battlefield models, and informational graphics on weapons systems helped anchors and experts explain the war... Never before had carefully designed electronic imagery so dominated the coverage of a conflict" (MacArthur 1992:80).

The graphic design industry blossomed thanks to Pentagon censorship. Not only were designers working overtime to keep up with the networks' demand for maps, logos, simulated battlefields, weapons highlights and the like, they were working like mad to outdo their competition. So successful was this newly spawned industry that the annual awards ceremony of the Broadcast Designers' Association (BDA) and its sister organization, the Broadcast Promotion and Marketing Executives (BPME) held in Baltimore in 1991 devoted an entire session to the subject of designing war, where "in keeping with the upbeat atmosphere following the Gulf War, the convention brochure had billed the panel discussion in a humorous vein: 'The Schwarzkopfs of the nets and cable show how their strategic command centers of technological design warfare operated during the Gulf War crisis'" (MacArthur 1992:78).Of course graphic representations of war have long been part of the overall coverage, from the World Wars through Korea to Vietnam. The difference with the war in the Persian Gulf, and this is an important difference, was that the graphic images were not the bloody kind, but the digitally sanitized kind, and these became the dominant mode of representation."