Students who enrolled in Syria’s College of Fine Arts in 1970, the year Hafez al-Assad came to power via a “Corrective Movement” within the Ba’th Party, found their degree studies interrupted by the 1973 war with Israel. Drafted into the military as active duty soldiers, they fought in battles that the Syrian state claimed as victories (and won medals for bravery), only to return to the studios to make art around pessimistic images of the cyborg: men and women, denuded of subjectivity, whose bodies fuse with the slickly milled surfaces of planes and bombs combined with elements of older industrial machines studded by gears and bolts. This paper will explore a small set of these artistic projects, reading them as a refraction of several distinct kinds of futurity that were active in the cultural discourse of the Ba’thist Syrian state of this era. These include a particular technological imagination in which bodily prostheses dovetail with the prostheses of the state apparatus—an imagination that, when given visual expression in Syria, tended to draw on science fiction cinema, among other popular sources—and other, more utopian ideas of ex-colonial, socialist futures based upon 1960s experiments in cognitive healing via the arts of a total sensorium. The paper aims to track the articulation of these ideas in Syrian art not as a schema of progression (i.e. industrial-military complexes replacing the handmade) but rather as a territory of contention that became recognizable in the artistic practice of this generation of Syrian makers.