Alan Kurdi’s Online Resurrections – Omran Daqneesh’s Online Reanimationk

The aim of this article is to critically analyse the Internet’s remixes of Nilüfer Demir’s photograph showing the dead body of Alan Kurdi – a 3-year old Syrian refugee – found on the beach near Turkish city Bodrum, as well as the widely-shared shot of the Omran Daqneesh – 5-years old Syrian boy sitting in the ambulance and fully covered by dust with visible traces of bruises and stains of blood – taken from the viral footage which reported damages and sufferings caused by the airstrikes on the Syrian biggest city, Aleppo, during the civil war. The main question here is: how the convergence culture ‘regards the pain of the other’ and deals with it? Semiotic analysis of chosen examples leads to a conclusion that while some artists undertake a specific visual tactics of protest and objection, more often, and even in clearly critical pictures, the ‘rhetoric of consolation’ is a predominating one and serves to both artists’ and viewers’ complacency and consoling. Terror of the pain and death is deleted from those images and replaced by tenderness or even kitsch. Moreover, author discusses not only the visual rhetoric strategies applied in those remixes, but also their ethical dimensions, especially in the reference to the category of ‘unrepresentability’