Viewing with Care: Videographic Afterlives of Extremist Media

The propaganda videos of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) captivated Western news media from 2014 to 2016, combining explicit violence with sensationalist aesthetics to advance an extremist ideology. The majority of these videos have been removed from media platforms to neutralize their potential to perpetuate further violence, but their traces can still be found in various platforms, utilized in a variety of ways. This paper presents these legacy traces through an account of the author’s documentary film Afterlives (2025). The film explores the strange afterlives of ISIS media that have been repurposed to various ends, such as: forming the basis for counter-extremist videos; providing visual evidence of human rights violations; enabling the restoration of cultural artifacts destroyed by ISIS; and serving as visual data for generative AI platforms to produce new images. The film examines these cases by employing different videographic strategies, such as on-screen film analysis, de-visibilization approaches, desktop documentary research, and physically embodied engagement with materialized media objects. By providing a dimension of critical distance through greater historical, cultural or formal contextualization, these videographic strategies aim to provide a counterpoint to both extremist media and the efforts to repurpose them. In this way, videographic scholarship provides a methodology for greater care and conscientiousness in media historical research, reflecting not only on the formal strategies but also the epistemological and ethical implications of appropriating archival media.