Jade Colbert reviews the underlying cultural significance and motivations of University of Toronto's war-themed exhibition Signals in the Dark: Art in Shadow of War. Identifying the "hijacker" archetype as the central trope in the mediated representation of war, Colbert draws upon Harun Farocki's Images of the World and the Inscription of War to illustrate the news media's manipulative denotation of war images to terrorism in order to justify military action and social control. Artists in the exhibition are thus negotiating responses to this doctoring of war images--in the context of post-9/11 visual culture--and asking the public to reassess their political attitudes as citizens and spectators.