Activist techno-aesthetic translation Analysing assemblages of dissenting bodies, images and distributed technologies in contemporary Lebanon

This article proposes the concept of activist techno-aesthetic translation to study how artists, design tools and platforms (particularly Instagram) reconfigure protest images into platform-native visual forms that reshape how dissenting bodies are made visible, perceived and circulated. We developed this conceptual framework through an examination of the visual artistic communication of the 2019 protest movement in Lebanon. Through discourse analysis, social semiotic visual analysis and platform analysis, we examine 9 curated images, selected from a set of 2137 images, on the Instagram account Art of Thawra. The paper identifies three modes of translation: humanization, restoring narrative coherence and empathy; iconicization, elevating dissenting bodies into revolutionary symbols; and redistribution, reversing surveillance and resignifying contested objects. We show how these modes operate as assemblages of aesthetic work and technical affordances in which Instagram, through its then-dominant square format, carousels and caption-image interplay, is a key actor. Drawing on affect theory and platform studies, we approach affect not as audience response but as orientating the formal and material choices through which images reconfigure how dissenting bodies are composed, staged and made available for circulation. Unlike memetic template logics that flatten distinction through reversible binaries, techno-aesthetic translation anchors meaning in historically situated bodies through aesthetic variation that resists replication. We demonstrate how artists, technologies and platforms in interaction co-produce the conditions under which dissenting bodies appear as legitimate political subjects, converting fear into empathy, anxiety into pride and disorientation into empowerment.