An Axis of Intensity

igi-global.com

Technology and Culture, 1991

Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies, and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, diagrams, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together internationally renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.

2013

This thesis engages with surveillance as a pervasive theme presented in several modes of modern visual culture and is approached with particular reference to Guy Debord's theory of the spectacle. Through an historically contextualized analysis, I locate the centrality of surveillance in Western culture as a visual regime that institutionalizes spectacle. This is revealed in a number of prominent events between 1920 and 2008 that illustrate ethical shifts in the historical subject in which the presence or the absence of the witness becomes a meaningful consideration. Surveillance is thus linked inextricably to two main discourses regarding the spectacle and the witness, a theme that is expanded upon through the analysis of specific films and other representations of modern visual culture, including painting and television. The spectacle within our ocularcentric society has, as I see it, not enhanced the world so much as it has separated us from it, and has thus consistently obscured instances of moral reflection by the individual in the form of witness. I link this concept to the thinking of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and others. Starting with the 1920's, the progressive destruction of the witness has been exemplified in Western visual culture. The problems of detachment are derived in part from Anton Kaes' reading of Ernst Jünger's theoretical concepts of the development of a "second consciousness" produced by the camera, the new technical "evil eye", and Michel Foucault's reading of the "panopticon". The thesis draws on Thomas Mathiesen's expansion on Foucault by revisiting "the viewer society", further addressing the distancing effects of surveillance. The second section is devoted specifically to a discussion of the Holocaust through the analysis of selected "Holocaust films". My analysis of these films centres on their relation to memory, representation and the distinction of the embodiment of pain beginning with the witness/ survivor. The over-arching concern of the final section of this thesis is with the digital transition in visual culture and the shift away from its tradition of conceptual and contextual materiality to what is now a predominantly Internet-based digital mode, conceptualized by Katherine Hayles' work on the "post-human". As a result, I argue that this produces further distancing between the witness and the subject. From this I conclude that the further distancing between the witness and the subject has enabled the facilitation of what appears to be a society of surveillance, a society which, for ethical reasons, needs to reinstate the witness.

This essay investigates the ways of convergence of the spectacle with the surveillance, as suggested by Thomas Mitchell and Nicholas Mirzoeff. In order to ground their suggested theory in concrete visual empirical cases, I situate my analysis in the Palestinian territories. I juxtapose ostensibly disparate visual phenomena deriving from the street art and the military visualizing technologies. The first part consists of a comparison between JR's project Face2Face and the biometric passports implemented in the area. By using the same visual motif of the image of the face, street art promotes social dialogue while biometrics inscribe the borderline demarcation onto the bodily traits. Consequently, they testify for the convergence of the spectacle with the surveillance for diametrically different purposes. In the second chapter, I focus on the multiple reproduction of the stencil painting NoTitle(BalloonGirl) created by Banksy and on the visual analysis of two hacked images from Israeli drones. Referencing Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, I argue that the advancing visualizing technologies for the mechanical and digital reproducibility are being appropriated by the spectacle and the surveillance for supplementary reasons. The massive consumption of the image of the stencil soothes and absorbs the fatal dangers evoked by the illusionary nature of drone footage. The last chapter consists of the exploration of the transferability of an artwork to the Western cities and galleries. The analysis is based on Miwon Kwon's theory and begins with the transfer of JR's project in European cities followed up by the Whole in the Wall exhibition and concludes with the Astro Noise exhibition. The aim is to highlight the transitions occurred in the beholder, from the act of observing, to the bodily engagement and to ultimately becoming the observed and the surveilled.

Media, Culture & Society , 2019

The constant presence of cameras and social media has become a given during day-today military activities in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Such technologies shift the focus of warfare onto the individual, and in particular onto the faces of soldiers and Palestinians caught on camera. Due to the habitual use of mobile phones and social media by both soldiers and civilians, the face is singled out as a new battleground, where political action is substituted for individual responsibility. On one hand, the co-option of personal social media into armed conflict enables state actors to zero in on the faces and identities of Palestinian dissidents and alleged terrorists. On the other hand, the faces of Israeli soldiers are also captured and circulated on social media as digital images, posing a new threat to state authority, which depends on remaining faceless. Images of IDF soldiers' faces, once recorded and shared, figuratively strip off the improvised masks they often wear to hide their identity and preserve their impunity. In Israel and Palestine, where everyday social media habits have become inseparable from routines of security and armed conflict, the image of a soldier's face individualises his or her actions and demands accountability.

Walking into an empty room the gaze of an enormous single eye on a screen detects and follows you ( ). As you stop and stare back at this extreme close-up image, you examine the details-capillaries in the white of the eye; hair follicles on the surface of the skin; wrinkles; a myriad of blue, green, and brown pigmentation in the iris; and the speed and motion of a single blink. The eye, in return, tracks your movements with great accuracy, insisting on keeping contact until you turn away, peering at you even as you exit. While it maximizes all the features of the human eye, it behaves like a machine-one of those robotic closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras that capture all gestures, features, and actions. Unlike the mechanism in the human eye that sends visual signals to the brain, this enormous eye is completely blind. It seems to detect and follow spectators, but its gaze is directed not by its own vision but by the input it receives from separate mechanisms of detection ("sightless vision" machines) 2 that drive its movements. The movement of this eye is the mere visualization of how this network of machines targets the spectator. It parodies the icon of the divine all-seeing eye, the eye of providence appearing on the back of an American dollar bill, the telescreen in Orwell's 1984, or the gaze of the modern security state.

Apertúra folyóirat, 2021

The paper analyzes the visual and personalised implications of late modern warfare and its representation in documentary film. In the first half of my paper, I’m analyzing the cinematic representation of late modern war and its relationship to film and vision primarily from a media-historical perspective: what does the access to information mean in this context and what kind of media and mediatisation specificities has the war after the 2000s. In the second half of my study I’m focusing on the video-selfie-scenes of Nine Months of War (László Csuja, 2018) from a phenomenological and reception-theoretical perspective: what are the implications of the use of video-selfies in this documentary and what kind of new functions could this film add to these in warfare. I classify the functions of video-selfies into a three-tier typology of channel (making a video message to another person), identity affirmation and space of testimony. While at the beginning of the war the apparently superficial video-selfie-use characterizes the protagonist as a content producer and user, it then serves to identify with the military self-image and finally creates a specific, private space for the expression of traumatic experiences.

Choice Reviews Online