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Operative-Images / Phantom-Images: The Synthetic Perception Media in the late
Harun Farocki
Rui Matoso
ECATI - Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias
rui.matoso@gmail.com
Abstract: The images produced by cameras mounted on the front of projectiles Farocki
designates them as operative-images. The operational function of these images is to serve a
automated vision machine, programmed for the detection of targets and re-orientation of the
route of the missiles. The most important feature of technical images, according to Vilém
Flusser, is that they materialize certain concepts about the world, precisely the concepts that
guided the construction of devices that shape them. Thus, photography, very unlike
automatically record impressions of the physical world, transcodes certain scientific theories
into images, or to use Flusser´s own words, turns concepts into scenes. We suggest that the
final stage, the perfect crime, of visionic technologies would be the production of synthetic
images not intended for biological human eye, as hitherto, but for the artificial vision - vision
synthetically prepared by cybernetic ideology of control. Today is impossible to describe the
development of the audiovisual without also talking about the development of virtual imagery
and its influence on human behavior or without point to the new industrialization of vision
and the growth of a big market for synthetic perception, with all the ethical issues that this
entails. Finally, we propose that to understand a significant part of Harun Farocki's late work
would also be useful the concept of neural-image as a component of a networked media
practice, related to the ubiquity of digital technologies but also with the presence of
surveillance devices in our contemporary visual culture.
Keywords: Harun Farocki - Operative-Images - Surveillance - Synthetic Perception –
Neural Image
1. AN APPROACH TO HARUN FAROCKI'S WORK
Harun Farocki (1944-2014), began making films in 1966. He grew up in Hamburg, but
moved to West Berlin, where he lived from the early 1960s. He was among the first students
who entered the Berlin Film & Television Academy (DFFB), but was expelled in 1968, along
with others, due to considered subversive activities. He started working making short films
for television, but settled between 1970 and 1980 as recognized filmmaker with a political
profile, through a series of feature films in part self-financed, as: Zwischen den Kriegen
(Between Two Wars, 1978) Etwas wird sichtbar (Before Your Eyes, Vietnam, 1982) Betrogen
(Betrayed, 1985) and Wie man sieht (As You See, 1986).
The work of Harun Farocki was initially produced in the documentary film field with
political concerns that approach him, but also distinguish, to filmmakers like Chris Marker or
Jean-Luc Godard. Its production is an integrated and metamorphic corpus, constantly
adapting to the techno-aesthetic proliferation. The medium he uses depends essentially on the
critical efficacy compared to visual devices in circulation. Since its long eldest film, Nicht
löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969)1, to the most recent installations as Visibility
Machines (2013, with Trevor Paglen)2, the effectiveness and the critical potential of his works
resides in the analysis and the deconstruction of the forms of domination and
governmentability established in the multiple fields of power.
If at the beginning of Farocki's career he assumes an activist profile in the political and
social confrontation over the war in Vietnam, later confronts us with an empirical and
conceptual research around the categories, uses and effects of the images (operative-images,
phantom-images, ...) and technologies of the visible / invisible in the field of war and military
industries, prisons or in the public space in general.
The multidimensional Harun Farocki's work is linked to the critical deconstruction of
processes that constitutes the phantasmal visibility (virtual, digital, ubiquitous, …) patented in
techno-aesthetic devices, but also in its relationship with the semiotic and symbolic invisible,
that is, with the ideological and discursive formations of the image. In both cases, it is
therefore to access an underlying stratigraphy of the production of the images, for recognizing
the invisible within the visible, or «by detecting the code which is the visible is programmed»
(Elsaesser, 2004, p. 12).
His films incorporate found footage from cultural and historical image archives
1
http://www.harunfarocki.de/films/1960s/1969/inextinguishable-fire.html
2
http://www.umbc.edu/cadvc/exhibitions/VisibilityMachines.php
2
(television, press, cinema,...); but also from conventional surveillance cameras (Prison
Images, 2000)3 and operative-images as those algorithmically used in guided bombs during
the Gulf War (War at Distance, 2003)4.
A film by Michael Klier - The Giant (Der Riese, 1983)5- composed exclusively from
found footage videos, generated by surveillance cameras installed in the public space, is
considered one of his main cinematic influences, in particular for his Prison Images. The fact
that Harun Farocki was also dedicated to image theory in the context of visual culture and
media ecology in contemporary societies, does that his creative process have been called a
metacinema (Elsaesser, 2008, p. 37), where the production methods and the inclusion of new
imaging categories are questioned in terms of what can be considered as essay-cinema, ruled
by a dialectical montage appointed as Verbund (Compound). Verbund means, as a mounting
method, the symbiosis between antagonistic elements, but as further clarifies Thomas
Elsaesser:
Farocki applied the Verbund method metaphorically to his own work, to signal how he used
different media—television commissions, film reviews, political filmmaking, radio plays,
book reviews—so the work done for one assignment could feed into several of his other
projects. But Verbund is also a useful term if one wants to understand the principle behind
Farocki’s practice of separating and joining. It was typical for him to join what wants to
hide the nature of its connection (famously, security prisons and shopping centers via
spatial dispositifs of surveillance), and to separate what we are used to thinking of as
belonging together (for instance, work as wage labor) (…) by proposing a more organic or
modulated relation between things (Elsaesser e Alberro, 2014).
In the aforementioned Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki films himself sitting at a desk
while reading the testimony of Dan Thai Bihn, victim of a bombing of Napalm to his village.
After that, he launches the following questions: How can I show you the Napalm in action?
How can I make you feel the burns inflicted by Napalm? His answers excludes the use of any
iconic or indexical image that represents that reality, since the effect on the viewer would
cause the eyes shut to the visible horror, then would refuse this visual memory, and then avoid
to know the facts and understand all the surrounding context (Elsaesser, 2004, p. 17).
However, contrary to what we would consider a politically engaged cinema, Farocki
3
http://www.harunfarocki.de/films/2000s/2000/prison-images.html
4
http://www.harunfarocki.de/films/2000s/2003/war-at-a-distance.html
5
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/der-riese/ ; https://youtu.be/xLCsJuFBi_0
3
waiver emotional expressions and the supposed empathy of the viewer. Beyond to any critical
and typical revolutionary Zeitgeist from the late sixties, he develops a non-cinematographic
cinema in order to avoid any hint of melodrama or favor the manipulation of identities, in
favor of a self-critical image as a constituent of the productive forces and the power of
industrial civilization (Medina, 2014, p. 8).
The solution to provide the viewer with an approach to Napalm effects is achieved by
the performative gesture of burning a cigarette on his forearm skin (Img.1). Making use of
metonymy (the cigarette burns at a temperature of 200 ° C, Napalm to 3000º C), Farocki
transmutes abstract horror images of real Napalm burns into a visual performance of bearable
suffering. Thus refuses the sideration caused by the violent spectacle of war images offered
to the consumer's incredulous look, because it recognizes that the «violence situations of
aggression is immediately linked with the management of the visible and the transmission of
speech» (Mondzain, 2009, p. 72). In other words: «never the simple reproduction of reality
can say something about the reality, because the true reality became functional reality»
(Benjamin, 1987, p. 106).
Harun Farocki is not intended to prevent or censor the violent images 6 but rather cancel
the mediations produced by the “market of the visible” and disarm the stereotypes, the bad
conscience and the defenses of visual reception; for so, says Georges Didi-Huberman, «open
eyes to the violence of the world that is inscribed on the images» (2013, p. 35). In
Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki prescribes another distribution of the sensible1 when he choose
to transmit the invisible speech8 of the victim, giving to the voice «the place where it can be
heard» (Mondzain, 2009, p. 71).
6
Also because «thinkink the image is to answer the fate of violence» (Mondzain, 2009, p. 73).
1
Cf. Ranciére, Jacqes (2000). Le Partage du sensible: Esthetique et politique. La Fabrique Éditions.
8
«The invisible, the image is the word order. This does not produce any evidence ... »(Mondzain, 2009, p. 30)
4
Img.1. Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire (1969) - video still. [Courtesy Harun Farocki GbR]
The above mentioned works allow us to understand that Farocki´s work is focused
mainly on criticism of brutal and symbolic violence / symbolic power, in various sociopolitical environments, in the society of the spectacle, in the disciplinary society or control
society, particularly in the spheres of war, labor, entertainment or surveillance. For the
construction of a critique of violence is crucial to know it, to describe it and be able to
observe it, i.e., deconstruct their artifacts, identify and analyze the relationships, which
implies disassembling and reassembling the state of things. This arduous task then is to
challenge three social areas defined by Walter Benjamin in For a critique of violence:
Questioning the technology, history and the law (Didi-Huberman, 2013, p. 35). After
Inextinguishable Fire and Vietnam war - the first war mediated by television 9- the director
will again focus on the starting point of his research, but in another war and in another issue
of the images.
Harun Farocki was not only director, artist, theorist of the media, image philosopher,
but also a writer and professor. The presentation of his work was not confined only to the
spaces of the movie theater, that becames an increasingly limited space in a market context
driven by commercial theaters. His first installation in art galleries and museums dates back to
1995, with the Schnittstelle project commissioned by the Lille Museum of Modern Art, which
examines the question of what it means to work with existing images rather than producing
9
http://www.museum.tv/eotv/vietnamonte.htm
5
his own new images10. Later, in year 2000, he developed three multi-channel installations:
Eye / Machine, Music-Video and I Thought I was seeing Convicts11.
2. OPERATIVE-IMAGES / PHANTOM-IMAGES
It is evident that the nature that addresses the camera is not the same as that goes to the eye.
Walter Benjamin
Compared with phantom-shots12 from the beginning of cinema in the 20th century,
vulgarized in the sequences filmed in trains where the camera is set in a place inaccessible to
the human eye (unsubjective), Harun Farocki notes that nowadays there is a new category of
phantom-images with subjective properties: «We can interpret the film that takes up the
perspective of the bomb as a phantom-subjective-image. The film footage from a camera that
is plunging towards its target, a suicidal camera, stays in our mind.» (Farocki, 2004, p. 13).
This new category of phantom-images, mediated massively during Gulf War (1991), emerged
with the cruise missiles in the 1980's (smart bombs).
The television broadcasts of the first war in Iraq (started with the operation Desert
Storm), marked by the monochrome images on TV screens, puts several questions to several
philosophers, Jean Baurdrillard or Paul Virilio are two of them who more profoundly studied
the phenomenon13. Farocki, for its part, maintains that those never seen images14 made the war
similar to a computer game for children (Farocki, 2004, p. 13). Images without people,
uninhabited war scenarios, as if it were possible the permanence of a war without human
beings, only between machinery and their technical images, in a cycle of incessant cybernetic
feedback loops.
The images produced by cameras mounted on the front of projectiles, Farocki
10
http://www.harunfarocki.de/installations/1995.html
11
http://www.harunfarocki.de/installations/2000s/2000.html
12
Cf. "Phantom rides" http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1193042/
13
Noam Chomsky (Gulf War Pullout), Paul Virilio ( Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light), Jean Baudrillard (The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) Or Laymert Garcia dos Santos (The TV and the Gulf War), among others.
14
Although unpubished in this context, the relationship between technical images and the war has been effective
since the First World War. The photography was immediately used for aerial reconnaissance of enemy´s territory with
cameras installed in airplanes. In World War II, the British allies who were first manned their bombs with cameras for
monitoring purposes of the success or failure of the bombing. However the German V2 missiles were also equipped with
cameras and telemetry systems to allow for correct routes of missiles in flight.
6
designates them as well as operative-images. The operational function of these images is to
serve a automated vision machine programmed for the detection of targets and re-orientation
of the route of the missiles. Search-Target Program is one of those computer software
designed to discover, remember and recognize pixel patterns, and has been also used for
various industrial purposes, particularly in the field of automation and robotics.
Marie-José Mondzain asks if the image can kill? (Mondzain, 2009). Harun Farocki
responds decisively that there are images (operative-images) serving the annihilation of
human beings. The answer lies in the film Erkennen und Verfolgen1515 (War at distance,
2003), whose images were also used in the installation series Eye / Machine (2000-2003).
Just within the context of a synthetic and spectral vision system, where the mediated
images to the public were the same as the machines used to kill people and destroy cities, Jean
Baudrillard states that Gulf War did not take place, because the visual and mediated
representation of the war was only addressed to the "vision" of the digital computer
algorithms. Images of a ghost war circulating abundantly in the public sphere and in the
domestic space, a pixelated and sanitized war, displayed without traces of meat or bloodshed.
After all, the cold gaze of the machine is also the «Medusa’s look: mortifying what it
sees, making images transitive, turning them into objects, specimen, evidence» (Elsaesser,
2008, p. 43). It is already another mythology, different from that of the archaic Medusa, that
instead of raising the paralyzing horror evident in the heinous events of history (Shoa), and
for which the greatest merit of Perseus was not to have severed her head but to exceed the fear
of looking through the reflection in the shield of Athena; thus allowing the unspeakable horror
is reflected, extended and reconstructed as an image, and may be a source of conscious
awareness not just of daze (Didi-Huberman, 2012, p. 223).
The Cybermedusa (operative medusa) does not allow representational mediation by
the technical image, it is now a metamorphic digital-being and is outside the scope of
representation, constructed through code, algorithms and software, and born from a pact
between the high-tech industries, security experts and the new military-entertainment
consortium that long ago supplanted the military-industrial complex.
We are thus in a paradoxical ambiguity. On the one hand, there are no images that do
not relate to the human eye; but on the other, a computer in their task of processing visual
information does not require images, as its input are the electrical signals given by the binary
encoding of each pixel. When we ask who are, in spite of all, the recipients of these images
produced for algorithmic consumption? We should have to respond that are computers, not
15
War at distance. http://www.worldcat.org/title/erkennen-und-verfolgen-war-at-a-distance/oclc/775783077
7
humans. This novelty in the field of production and reception is a new milestone in the social
history of technical images, as well as in the history of visual culture, because operativeimages are not produced to the human eye as had hitherto been the "conventional" technical
images produced for scientific, aesthetic, educational or entertainment purposes. Thus formed
a new scopic-machinic regime, in which the images are re-materializing themselves, wishing
to become operational and proactive, not just superficial and passive. How would say W.J.T.
Mitchell, it is necessary to go beyond the dominant issues surrounding the rhetoric and
interpretation of images, it is now necessary to know what the images want, by moving the
issues from the field of uses and effects, to the field of desire: «What pictures want is not the
same as the message they communicate or the effect they produce; it's not even the same as
what they say they want. Like people, pictures don't know what they want; they have to be
helped to recollect it through a dialogue with others» (Mitchell, 1996, p. 81).
In the installation Eye / Machine (img.2.), Farocki reveals a deeper reflection on the
operative-images, images although not being abstract does not comply with the
representational function, they only form part of an operation that is used to store and
recognize visual patterns. Operative-images are the product of the development of a new
generation of intelligent machines capable of defining a new visual space and a post-human
vision.
In his essay entitled Phantom Images (2004), Farocki calls Roland Barthes's
Mythologies for an approach to the distinction between the two types of images, and between
the object-language and metalanguage (Barthes, 2009, pp. 237-239). The object-language is
one that emerges from the operational relationship and transitive to the issue - the language of
man producer/operator - is therefore an operative language that calls for the modulation of the
transforming action in the world (political language); the lumberjack tells his gesture with the
tree and not the tree's image, in this case the words tend to mean the gesture instead of
representation. The metalanguage does not speak of the exploitation of the tree, it is no longer
the subject of labor, is just one more among many available images by which the mythology
develops as mediation and narrative.
As the axe of Barthes's lumberjack is not a simple objectification of rationality –
because is also a tool that communicate with the human senses; likewise operative-images,
used as data input for software, concomitantly generate phantom-images, ie, images that
come into being in the public sphere as potential generating narratives, mythologies or
ideologies. About this paradox, David Tomas (2014) explains that:
8
These purely instrumental images had no actively cultivated visual properties or aesthetic
assets. The fascination they sponsored in a television audience resided in the logic and
precision of the alien intelligence they served: its automatic and relentless capacity to
navigate through space and time in order to attain its objectives, and the final seconds of
transmission with its implacable premonition of impact, destruction, and death. (Tomas,
2013, p. 234)
In Farocki's opinion, if we currently have interest in images that are part of an operation
is because we are tired of non-operative-images (allegorical, metaphorical, mythological) and
because we are exhausted from dealing with metalanguages. That is, weary of systematic
practice of re-mythologizing daily and saturated life by constant change of images, diffused
by programs tailored produced and presumably designed to mean something to the audience.
After all, perhaps the film and television industries have been exhausted themselves due to
overproduction of audiovisual material.
The operative-images challenge the artist interested in the production of non-authored
or unintentional meaning. However, Farocki points out that the US Army has exceeded all
artists on the ability to see and recognize the visible unconscious (Farocki, 2004, p. 18). With
reference to the Walter Benjamin's idea of optical unconscious, Farocki positions the military
industry at the forefront of the production of the phantom-operative-images, the same way as
psychoanalysis has provided us with the experience of pulsional unconscious 16. So, we must
not only see technical images as the extent possibilities of knowledge, nor the cameras just as
an expansion of vision, but as a method to effectuate visual information operations.
Img. 2. Harun Farocki, Eye / Machine I (2001) - video still. [Courtesy Harun Farocki GbR]
16
"The camera takes us to the optical unconscious, as psychoanalysis to unconscious of impulses" (Benjamin, 1992,
p. 105).
9
3. DOUBLE-BIND AND TECNO-AESTHETICS
Militarism is a kind of visual organization of social energies.
Marshall McLuhan
In Walter Benjamin's understanding there exists between the two unconscious –
pulsional and optical – the most closer relations:
The multiple aspects that the camera can register of reality are located largely outside the
spectrum of a normal sensitive perception. Many distortions and stereotypes, changes and
disasters that the visual world may suffer in the film really affect this world in psychosis,
hallucinations and dreams. Thus, the camera procedures are equivalent to the procedures
through which the collective perception of the public appropriates the individual modes of
perception of psychotic or dreamer (Benjamin, 1992, p. 105).
Thus we may understand that the operative-image performs a double-bind shortcircuit, that fulfills the dual schizophrenic function. An instrumental, machinic and coded
relationship, as a destroying tool in the service of smart bombs; but also as the function of
media coverage, spreading phantom-images as a new mythology and an upgrade for visual
culture drawn from unintentional images, non-authored but "subjectivated" by the receiving
act. Thus contributing to the formation of a visible unconscious giving visible aspects of
tangible reality but mediated through images that are inaccessible to natural vision, thereby
transforming the human eye in an anachronistic vision organ, declared overtaken by the
demands and acceleration of technoscience.
In the series of installations entitled Serious Games17, project that began in 2009,
Harun Farocki investigates how those computer games, created with virtual images of the Iraq
war and developed by specialized companies in simulation design 18, are also used in
therapeutic processes based on immersive psychotherapies - Virtual Reality Exposure
Therapy.
17
http://www.harunfarocki.de/installations/2010s/2010/serious-games-i-watson-is-down.html
18
One of these simulators created for therapeutic purposes is rightly referred to as Virtual Iraq and marketed by
the company Virtually Better, Inc. (http://www.virtuallybetter.com/virtual-iraq/)
10
Img. 3. Harun Farocki, Serious Games - video stills. [Courtesy Harun Farocki GbR]
The relationship between the psychic unconscious and the operative-image can be
examined in war games used by the US army as simulators for various purposes, from
training and recognition (perception and cognition) to therapeutic purposes. These display
systems working-through1919 digital treatment in troops suffering from disorder of posttraumatic stress of war, thus creating an isomorphism between the phase of pre-battle training
in virtual reality simulators and post-trauma therapy also through the same technologies.
Is nonetheless disturbing that the images used to prepare soldiers for war are the same
that serve to heal the traumas, but with a small difference, is that therapeutic images have
lower quality due to the smaller budget for therapies than those for war trainings (Farocki,
2014: 116). One of the possible conclusion, says Orit Halpern, is that «we are being
conditioned to never experience war as pain or trauma» (Halpern, 2015). The affinities
between trauma and virtual reality, or between trauma and computer code, are also recognized
by Katherine Hayles:
Experienced consciously but remembered nonlinguistically, trauma has structural affinities
with code. Like code, it is linked with narrative without itself being narrative (…) This
possibility was explored in the early days of virtual reality, through simulations designed to
help people overcome such phobias as fear of heights, agoraphobia, and arachnophobia.
19
Working-through: concept introduced by Sigmund Freud in 1914 f or expressing "the crossing work" as the ability
to redraw the crisis, feelings and inner conflicts.
11
The idea was to present a simulated experience through which the affected person could
encounter the phobia at a distance, as it were, where fear remained at a tolerable level.
(Hayles, 2006, p. 141)
The alliance between military and visual culture industries is, of course, the result of a
relationship whose strong bond was built in the production and dissemination of military
propaganda. To this bridge between artistic creativity and war destruction, we should
obviously join the automation industry (cybernetics and semiotics) to have a global «ghostly
perspective of the war, a perspective of an imagined subjectivity of war» (Farocki, 2004, p.
20).
Later recovered in Visibility Machines (2013) the category of operative-images has
also its place in the Operational Art (Canales, 2014), a term used in military manuals to
designate operations other than direct war, as those that Paul Virilio refers to new strategies
based on "preventive war" allowed by the virtualization of appearances.
The computer war games industry, by incorporating image scenarios from the vast
military archives, give rise to the development of strategic partnerships founded by common
techno-aesthetic regime to war and the videogames industry. The business is made this way:
the military provides images and mapping of territories and software companies provide
augmented reality algorithms, modulation and real-time interactivity. One of these cases,
reported by Farocki, is the game Full Spectrum Warrior20, whose production was even funded
by the US Department of Defense (Farocki, 2009, p. 222).
War simulators for recreational use, for military training purposes or post-traumatic
stress therapies, takes place at the same screen that «creates a new liturgy in which new
transubstantiations have to play (...) the screen establishes new relationships between mimesis
and fiction » (Mondzain, 2009, p. 42), giving rise to a dispositif with fusional and confusional
powers in the constitution of the synthetic and phantasmic imagery in the contemporary
postmodernity, imposing a whole new logistics of perception 21 able to introduce the
invisibilities of a synthetic perception/vision, contaminating the vision/knowledge dialectics
and, consequently, the ultimate form of industrialization: the industrialization of the non-gaze
(Virilio, 1994, pp. 70- 73).
It follows the creation of a haunted reality, erected by an automated visibility, whose
20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Spectrum_Warrior
21
Despite the obvious proximities, is not exactly the correlation between war and cinema that interests us in this
article. However, to deepen this relationship is fundamental to read the work of Paul Virilio, namely: War and Cinema: The
Logistics of Perception (2009).
12
reality show is, like the phantasmagoria of the eighteenth century, resulting from a positivist
and alotechnological progress (Sloterdijk, 2010) of the high-tech industries, driven as it is
known by the increasing militarization of societies.
As industrial robotics succeeded worker, making obsolete the effort of the human arm,
the artificial vision devices are now part of the overall process of replacing the human eye and
simultaneously the industrialization of synthetic perception, as we can find in urban
surveillance systems, facial recognition and identification of individual profiles or natural
description of images22, in short, a general development framework of artificial intelligence
and perception.
4. CONCLUSION: IMAGES IN SPITE OF ALL23
Unless you are Paul Klee, it is not easy to imagine artificial contemplation,
the wide-awake dream of a population of objects all busy staring at you.
Paul Virilio
Trevor Paglen24, an artist who has closely followed the latest phase of Farocki's career,
namely in the exhibittion Visibility Machines, recognizes that currently the-operative-images
have become invisible, without, however, had ceased trading on reality: « It became clear that
machines rarely even bother making the meat-eye interpretable versions of their operational
images that we saw in Eye/Machine. There’s really no point. Meat-eyes are far too inefficient
to see what’s going on anyway» (Paglen, 2014).
This disappearance, in spite of all, brings us to a sense of expanded photography that
we can find in Vilém Flusser and Paul Virilo. The most important feature of technical images,
according to Flusser, is that these materialize certain concepts about the world, precisely the
concepts that guided the construction of devices that shape them. Thus, photography, unlike
automatically record impressions of the physical world, transcodes certain scientific theories
image, or to use the words of Flusser, «turns concepts into scenes» (Flusser, 1985, p. 45).
With digital image and its processing through software, the notion of program and
user (employee) envisioned by Flusser takes a new meaning within the operative-images, this
22
http://googleresearch.blogspot.pt/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-thousand-coherent.html
23
This title refers directly to Didi-Huberman, Georges (2004). Images malgré tout. Paris. Éditions de Minuit.
24
http://www.paglen.com/
13
kind of images no longer requires the "employee" to be produced and activated. The digital
image as vision machines - seeing machines (Paglen, 2014b) covers virtually all image
production technologies, from iphones, airport security scanners, electro-optical recognition
from satellites, QR code readers, facial recognition surveillance cameras, recognition systems
for automatic enrollment or Google Street View. This definition has yet to include a network
of actants elements (actors)25 such as the metadata associated with the images, communication
protocols, software, algorithms, and database archive systems. Or, as Jonathan Crary puts it:
Computer-aided design, synthetic holography, flight simulators, computer animation,
robotic image recognition, ray tracing, texture mapping, motion control, virtual
environment helmets, magnetic resonance imaging, and multispectral sensors are only a
few ofthe techniques that are relocating vision to a plane severed from a human observer.
Increasingly these emergent technologies of image production are becoming the dominant
models of visualization according to which primary social processes and institutions
function (…) Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being
supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position
of an observer in a "real", optically perceived world. If these images can be said to refer to
anything, it is to millions of bits of electronic mathematical data. Increasingly, visuality
will be situated on a cybernetic and electromagnetic terrain where abstract visual and
linguistic elements coincide and are consumed, circulated, and exchanged globally. (Crary,
1990, p 2).
It was already expected, since Heidegger, that the conquest of the world as image
(Heidegger, 2002, p. 117), the perfect crime of an unconditional realization of the world by
the actualization of all data, the transformation of all our acts and all events into pure
information (Baudrillard, 1996, p. 49), were made by the optimal stage of visionic
technologies (Virilio, 1994, p. 59) through the production of synthetic image not intended for
the biological human eye, but to the artificial vision built by the cybernetic ideology of
control.
Today it is impossible, if we agree with Paul Virilio, to describe the development of the
audiovisual without also talking about the development of virtual imagery and its influence on
human behavior, or without pointing to the new stage of the vision's industrialization and the
synthetic perception´s market, with all the ethical issues that this entails, particularly for
control and monitoring systems: «Having no graphic or videographic outputs, the automatic25
Cf. Actor-Network Theory. Latour, Bruno (2005): Reassembling the Social An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. New York. Oxford University Press Inc.
14
perception prosthesis will function like a kind of mechanized imaginary from which, this
time, we would be totally excluded» (Virilio, 1994, p. 60).
The relationship between the vision and the image can no longer be taken as the
guideline of the construction of knowledge as it has been promoted since the Enlightenment,
because since the image processing by computers is no longer supported by anthropological
semantics of the human eye. Consequently, Ernst and Farocki suggest to recover the media
theory of Michel Foucault's discourse analysis and Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of
communication. Because, for the first time the world archive of images can organize himself
without the use of meta-data semantics, but according to is own criteria of data structure, like
an endogenic visual memory in its own medium (Ernst and Farocki, 2004, p. 262). What new
types of knowledge will be produced from these images? What part of traditional knowledge
can be transformed and what part can just disappear altogether?
Trevor Paglen, designates as scripts the basic and obvious function in a synthetic
imaging system, as if it was its own gaze style. A script then it is a set of procedures that a
vision machine (seeing machines) produces to see, understand and operate in the world
(Paglen, 2014b). Here, the lacanian separation between the gaze of the digital camera and the
human eye makes sense, not only because the gaze of the camera clearly grasps what the
human eye can not, but the human eye also looks remarkably deficient in its historical and
institutional construction. As if the control and surveillance devices were expanding beyond
behavior, speech or body posture, in order to finally reach the sensory organs. And
consequently we can have some reasons to assert that human blindness is now confronted
with the improvement of synthetic perception.
In this context is relevant to examine the connection between Paul Virilio and Gilles
Deleuze contributions regarding the conceptual articulation around the societies of control,
time-image and the post-avant-garde cinema. Gilles Deleuze used, after Michel Foucault, the
notion of societies of control (Deleuze, 1990) to refer the societal modulation in which the
virtues of dialogue, dissent and democracy are increasingly automated, through
neuromarketing imperatives, big data and cybernetic feedback processes expanded to the
whole of life26, which are currently intensified in the configuration of telematic networks, as
stated by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker:
The network, it appears, has emerged as a dominant form describing the nature of control
today (...) Perhaps there is no greater lesson about networks than the lesson about control:
26
The pragmatic dilemmas are mainly focused on issues of privacy, intimacy, subjectivity and corporeality (data
body).
15
networks, by their mere existence, are not liberating; they exercise novel forms of control
that operate at a level that is anonymous and nonhuman, which is to say material.
(Galloway e Thacker, 2007, pp. 4-5)
About the cinema's developments in this cybernetic environment, we can consider that
it is constituted a new regime of immaterial image and simultaneously a new global model of
political organization. It is a paradoxical cinema, created from images transduced between
vision machines and algorithms, forming a vanishing horizon in which the images lose their
ontological basis and convey the spectral invisibility of operative-phantom-images.
Materializing images that are not intended for human gaze, but showing simultaneously the
human condition and his subjection to the global apparatus of algorithmic and neurobiopolític
governmentability27.
Antoinette Rouvroy, invokes the concept of algorithmic governmentality as one that
does not allow processes of human subjectivity: «algorithmic governmentality is without
subject: it operates with infra-individual data and supra-individual patterns without, at any
moment, calling the subject to account for himself.» (Rouvroy, 2012).
The power that deals with neuroplasticity is designated by Warren Neidich as
neuropower (cognitive power), an homogenizing power of the subjectivities (noopolitics) via
modulation of neuroplastic potential of the human brain, and therefore it has a fundamental
role in the production of attention processes, which in turn traces certain memory circuits,
thereby stabilizing certain neural networks -and not other ones- in a mechanism analogous to
neurofeedback procedures. On this last point, says Neidich, the new focus of power would not
be just the false reproduction of the past (analogous to manipulating files) because the new
territory of neuropower is not so much the handling of past memory, but the development of
future memories (Neidich, 2013, p. 226).
Cultural production is, of course, in a constant state of transformation as it responds to
a changing environment, determined by the cumulative effect of an unstable multitude of
immaterial and cybernetic relationships. To answer these assimilation crisis, culture creates
new remediations28 in the field of optical technologies. Warren Neidich (2006) suggests that a
similar process is currently happening with the brain, something like a brain intensive
27
«Neurobiopolitical: the ability to sculpt the physical matter of the brain, and its abstract counterpart, the mind.»
(Neidich, 2006)
28
The theory of remediation by Bolter and Guisin proposes the history of the media as a complex process, in which
all media, including new media, rely on older media and are in a constant dialectic with them. Cf. Bolter, Jay David and
Richard Grusin (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
16
remediation, through which the brain redirects and seeks alternative cultural connectivity on
the images, language forms or social contingencies that end up being important in the
processes of visual and cognitive ergonomics: activation of neural networks adapted and
synchronized with the high-intensity of high-tech environments, saturated stimuli and
emphatic images. It is in this brain and empathic images synchronization that the feedback
mechanisms are now concentrated, generating a linguistic (coded) interface, between cultural
consumption, brain and digital technologies.
In the time-image cinema, in which Deleuze (1989) recognizes a rupture from the
sensory-motor schema inaugurated by the movement-image cinema of the silent movies, the
image emerges as purely optical and aural, establishing relationships with virtual digital
image and the mental image or mirror images. This new post-avant-garde cinema, formed by
electronic images should transform the cinema, replace it or even mark his death:
The electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into
being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death (…) The new
images no longer have any outside (out-offield), any more than they are internalized in a
whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse, reversible and non-superimposable, like
a power to turn back on themselves. They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in
which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image (Deleuze,
1989: 265).
Nevertheless there is a film aproach29 - which include Harun Farocki installations in
museums and galleries30- that results from a critical examination of the conjunction between
ideology and technology or between cinematic forms and surveillance policies. A cinema of
the globalized world duplicated by the virtual spectrum of information, that is also submitted
to the militarization of cyberspace31: «The extent of the world has become, for military
purposes, a network of images and information provided by planetary-wide satellite systems
29
Not to be confused with the so-called Surveillance Cinema, in which belong films that somehow represent the
proliferation of surveillance devices in everyday life, such as Enemy of the State , Minority Report,Panic Room or The
Truman Show. A more complete list of the same film genre can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_surveillance See: Dietmar Kammerer, Video Surveillance in Hollywood
Movies (http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2%282%29/movies.pdf ) and Zimmer, Catherine (2015).
Surveillance Cinema. NYU Press .
30
http://www.harunfarocki.de/installations.html
31
The Cybernetic project has been, since the second half of the 20th century fed by the media industries and
network technologies, but primarily by the military infrastructure, corresponding to what Julian Assange describes as a
militarization of cyberspace: it is like having a tank inside the room or a soldier under the bed, quips Assange for evidencing
the infiltration of the military intelligence agencies in our most intimate sphere (Assange, 2013, p.10).
17
and data processors» (Roberts, 2014).
Finally, we propose that to understand a significant part of Harun Farocki's work, like
Eye/Machine 32 or War at Distance33, would also be useful to call the concept of neural-image
(Pister, 2012) as a component of a networked media practice, related to the ubiquity of digital
technologies but also with the presence of surveillance devices in our contemporary visual
culture. Research into the neural-image still requires the recognition of constituent properties
in the modes of affection, overlapped between the neuroscience studies of affects and
affective computing34 developments. Therefore, it is important to note that the formation of
the neural-image - operative images at the neural level - results from a transductive interaction
between technological devices and the neural bases of affection.
32
http://www.harunfarocki.de/installations/2000s/2000/eye-machine.html
33
http://www.harunfarocki.de/films/2000s/2003/war-at-a-distance.html
34
Cf. http://affect.media.mit.edu/ and Affective computing: challenges (Rosalind Picard - MIT Media Laboratory).
18
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