The Power Core
Reclaiming Sincerity
In creating The Power Core, I find myself wrestling with questions of complicity, detachment, and sincerity. The machine at the center of this work is not just a symbol of power and control it is also a reflection of how I have experienced war and its narratives. Growing up in Lebanon, war was not an abstraction but a lived reality. And yet, even in the immediacy of that experience, I saw how quickly suffering could be reframed, erased, or turned into something distant and consumable by others.
What has stayed with me most deeply, though, is not just the distortion of these narratives in the media, but how those distortions shaped the people closest to me now that I live far from the conflict, in Europe. I wanted to bring nuance to the stories I had lived through nuance rooted in my background and my personal experience. Yet, when I tried to discuss these things with family or friends, I often found the conversation impossible. They held tightly to the stories they had believed for years, stories that seemed immovable.
This lack of space for discussion pained me deeply. I couldn’t understand it how could the people around me, people I love, not see the room for complexity, for different perspectives? The rigidity of their beliefs felt like another kind of erasure, not by some distant system but within my own environment. I struggled to bridge the gap, to articulate what I saw, and it left me isolated, wondering how narratives could be so deeply embedded that they left no room for questioning.
Because of my multiple backgrounds, my access to news is more multicultural. This might give me the ability to focus on intellectuals from both local Middle Eastern critiques and Western critiques. I find myself navigating these overlapping perspectives, drawing from both sides to better understand the contradictions and complexities that have shaped my own experiences.
This struggle is compounded by another realization: in my experience, those who are oppressed often become oppressors themselves. Power is not fixed, and the roles of victim and perpetrator are far more fluid than the stories we are told would have us believe. The game of power is organic it can shift in unexpected directions, take on new forms, and reverse itself. It is never as linear as it is often narrated. I see this in my own history, in the ways individuals and groups navigate power and control, always influenced by their environment but never confined to a single role.
The machine I have drawn stands as a monument to this process: the forces that erase complexity, flatten reality, and turn suffering into spectacle. It is sleek, alluring, even beautiful just as power often presents itself. But it is also menacing, cold, and dehumanizing. It feeds on detachment, much like the systems of propaganda and control that thrive on our inability or unwillingness to feel.
I cannot avoid the influence of the other writers and thinkers who shaped my understanding of these dynamics. Baudrillard’s simulacra, Arendt’s insights into the banality of evil, and even Camus’s insistence on rebellion as a response to absurdity have all shaped the contours of my thoughts. These texts are not abstract to me; they resonate with the contradictions I have felt in my own life.
I think often about the spectator’s role, the tension Susan Sontag identified between witnessing and action. It is so easy to consume suffering, to reduce it to a fleeting emotion or a detached observation. I know this because I have done it myself. In a world saturated with images of violence, I have scrolled past the suffering of others, not because I do not care, but because caring feels overwhelming. In those moments, cynicism is a comfort a way to shield myself from being moved, from feeling the weight of my own helplessness.
But art does not allow me to stay comfortable. The Power Core is my way of confronting that detachment, forcing myself and others—to reckon with it. The act of drawing the machine, of detailing its mechanisms, became a process of thinking through these systems of control. It became a way to ask: What does it mean to look at suffering and truly see it? What does it mean to feel sincerity in a world that mistrusts it?
This project is deeply personal to me because it goes beyond the machine it reflects the systems I grew up with, the narratives that shaped me, and the contradictions I am still unraveling. It explores how I, too, am shaped by what Susan Sontag described as the modern condition of “proximity without risk”—a world where suffering is both omnipresent and distant, visible yet abstracted. More than anything, it examines power not as a fixed force, but as something fluid, organic, and unpredictable.
In The Power Core, I try to reject this detachment. I choose instead to confront the power dynamics that obscure suffering, to make visible what these systems erase, and to remind myself of the humanity at the center of it all. This is not easy it requires a commitment to sincerity that sometimes feels impossible. But for me, art is where I find that possibility again. It is where I resist.
The Black-and-White Illusion of Power
What we call reality is often a projection—a carefully crafted illusion shaped by hidden forces, designed to simplify and pacify. From conflict zones to global power halls, we are fed the same story, repeated until it becomes hyperreal: a simulation of truth. Extremists and elites alike wield this image as a tool, casting themselves as heroes and others as enemies, yet sharing the same agenda—to control our perception and keep us bound within their constructed boundaries.
Power isn’t just about dominance and defiance; it’s about who shapes the lens through which we view the world. Media, politics, and culture inject narratives that simplify life into black and white, reducing rich human experience to digestible, absolute terms. This machinery of control thrives on simplicity, flattening truth into a monochrome that is easy to accept, easy to obey.
Yet beyond this illusion, there lies a terrain of shared human experience, obscured but not lost. If we dare to look beyond this fiction, we may find shades of truth that reveal our interconnectedness—and, with it, the power to reclaim a reality no longer dictated by control.
Intellectual Sources
Susan Sontag
War is first and foremost a spectacle. Its violence is the ultimate assertion of power, yet its images are often curated for mass consumption, distorted to serve ideologies. In every age, war has not only been waged but also produced—staged as a narrative for those who will never see its carnage firsthand. For most, war exists not as direct experience but as a mediated reality, a series of images, headlines, and official statements.
What is presented as reality is shaped by ideology. Ideology a belief system so deeply embedded that it feels like common sense is what dictates whose suffering is visible and whose remains invisible. The grieving mother in a bombed-out city becomes a symbol of barbarity or collateral damage depending on which ideology frames her suffering. This is the politics of visibility. What we are shown is as important as what we are not.
In war, reality becomes pliable, bent to fit the agenda of those in power. Facts are subservient to narrative. A massacre is denied; instead, it becomes a “necessary operation” or “unfortunate error.” Propaganda is not merely falsehood but a deliberate effort to overwrite reality with an alternative one. And so, war does not only annihilate bodies; it also assaults the very idea of truth.
Yet, the photograph so seductive in its promise of authenticity can both illuminate and deceive. A picture of a child fleeing a napalm strike may evoke pity or outrage, but it does not give us the full truth of that war. It freezes a moment, erasing the context, the before and after. It simplifies, abstracts, and often absolves the viewer of deeper engagement. To look at an image of suffering and then turn away is an act of complicity masked as helplessness.
If ideology shapes the narrative, then war becomes the stage upon which the battle for meaning is fought. Victors do not merely win territory; they impose their version of reality. To the victor go the spoils, including the right to rewrite history. The ruins of war are not only physical but epistemological. They scatter debris not just of cities, but of competing truths, silenced voices, and forgotten grievances.
But there is another layer to this shaping of reality: the complicity of the audience. We live in an age of saturation, where images of conflict vie for attention with celebrity scandals and advertisements. To consume images of war in this environment is to risk reducing them to a kind of voyeuristic entertainment. It is a failure of imagination to see suffering only as content.
And so, the question arises: What is the moral responsibility of the spectator? It is not enough to “bear witness” if witnessing does not lead to understanding or action. To observe war as a distant reality is to reinforce the systems that perpetuate it. To interrogate one’s own complicity through silence, ignorance, or acquiescence is to begin the slow work of resistance.
War and ideology feed each other, creating a self-perpetuating machine. To dismantle this machine, one must resist the narratives it produces, question the truths it claims, and unmask the powers it serves. Reality, shaped as it is by ideology, is not immutable. It is fragile and contested. And in this fragility lies hope the possibility of reshaping it toward something less brutal, less indifferent.
But hope, like truth, is a struggle.
Simone Weil
War is the ultimate degradation of humanity, not merely because of its violence but because of the profound falsifications it imposes on reality. In war, the world is no longer seen as a tapestry of individual lives, each precious and unique; it becomes a battlefield of abstractions—nations, ideologies, and causes—each demanding absolute allegiance. The human being, once a reflection of the divine, is reduced to a function of power: a soldier, a victim, or a spectator.
Ideology is the mechanism by which this transformation occurs. It is the machinery that justifies and perpetuates war, cloaking it in the language of necessity, honor, or destiny. Ideologies create a distorted vision of the world, one in which complex realities are flattened into binaries: good and evil, friend and enemy, victory and defeat. They rob individuals of their capacity for clear thought and compassionate action, replacing these with slogans and symbols.
Reality itself becomes obscured in the process. The cries of the suffering—the true, raw testimony of war—are silenced by the thunder of propaganda. The fields of battle, where bodies lie broken, are invisible to those who only see flags and maps. This distortion is not merely a failure of perception; it is a moral failure, a refusal to attend to the truth.
The antidote to this lies in attention—pure, unflinching attention to the real. To see a human face, to hear a human cry, is to confront a reality that no ideology can justify or obscure. This act of seeing is a form of resistance, a refusal to let the world be swallowed by falsehood. It is, in its essence, an act of love: love for the truth, for the afflicted, and for the divine presence that resides, however faintly, in all things.
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacrum and hyperreality explore how representations and media distort, and sometimes replace, reality in modern society.
Simulacrum
A simulacrum refers to a representation or imitation of something that no longer has an original or authentic form. In Baudrillard’s view, our society is flooded with simulacra—images, symbols, or media portrayals that become more “real” than the actual objects or experiences they represent. Over time, these representations gain such authority that they obscure or entirely replace any original reality, leading us to interact more with these copies than with any underlying truth.
For example, the portrayal of a war in the media may be so heavily filtered through political, ideological, and commercial lenses that it becomes a simulacrum—a version of events that feels real to viewers, yet differs fundamentally from what people in the conflict zone actually experience.
Hyperreality
Hyperreality is a state where it becomes challenging to distinguish reality from simulated versions. This concept describes how society’s experience of reality is increasingly mediated through technology and media, blending truth with simulation until the two become indistinguishable. Hyperreality can make artificial experiences (like virtual interactions or heavily edited images) seem as real, if not more so, than actual experiences.
In hyperreality, symbols and media representations—like social media profiles, advertisements, or televised news—are so pervasive and polished that they start to construct a world that people accept as true, even if it has little grounding in actual life. This concept captures how hyperreal images and narratives can shape our understanding of complex issues, like global conflicts, in ways that may not reflect the experiences of those directly affected.
Baudrillard argued that in hyperreal society, we risk losing touch with any genuine reality, becoming consumers of prepackaged realities instead.
Byung-Chul Han
In Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the New Technologies of Power, Han examines how neoliberalism governs not just through economic means but through psychological manipulation. He argues that modern power operates by shaping desires and aspirations, effectively creating a form of control that is more subtle and insidious than traditional authoritarianism. This leads to a form of hyperreality where people are encouraged to pursue unattainable goals, often resulting in burnout and disillusionment.
Han’s analysis reflects how contemporary society shapes desires and perceptions, resonating with Baudrillard’s ideas about how simulations create a reality where true needs and experiences are obscured. Han emphasizes that the hyperreal experiences created by technology and neoliberal culture can manipulate individuals’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world, leading to existential crises.
Noam Chomsky
Manufacturing Consent
In his seminal work Manufacturing Consent, co-authored with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky argues that mass media serves as a tool for disseminating propaganda and shaping public opinion in ways that benefit elite interests. He posits that the media operates within a framework that prioritizes the narratives of those in power, effectively creating a simulacrum of reality where dissenting voices and alternative perspectives are marginalized. This ties into the concept of history being rewritten or distorted to maintain the status quo.
Critical Thinking and Dissent
Chomsky advocates for critical engagement with information and encourages individuals to question dominant narratives. This emphasis on critical thinking is crucial in recognizing and resisting simulacra that distort reality. By fostering a skeptical attitude toward the information presented by mainstream media and political institutions, individuals can uncover the underlying truths that are often obscured by constructed narratives.
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