ICON12

The Precarity of Images examines how theories of worldbuilding common to the science fiction genre are applied to the making of agitational propaganda for liberation movements. In doing so, it questions how both explicit and implicit political images—posters, games, comics, illustrations, social media posts—either light a pathway for making a more just world or limit our ability to imagine alternate futures. Focus will be applied to finding moments where visual lexicons of liberation shift — semiotically, culturally, or aesthetically. Strategies of decoding and recoding our visual world — through discursive questioning, speculative drawing, and acts of “political looking” — are used to understand how broken images are maintained or repaired. Self-reflections from the author’s teaching and illustration practice provide concrete examples of how the theories in this paper have been applied.