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Surveillance surveyed: the effects of remote sensing technologies on perception through the films of Harun Farocki

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Surveillance surveyed: the effects of remote sensing technologies on perception through the films of Harun Farocki

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Content SURVEILLANCE SURVEYED: THE EFFECTS OF REMOTE SENSING TECHNOLOGIES ON PERCEPTION THROUGH THE FILMS OF HARUN FAROCKI by Sarah Loyer A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES May 2012 Copyright 2012 Sarah Loyer ii Dedication To my family. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Harun Farocki for creating the challenging and inspirational works that he does. Special thanks to my thesis committee: Noura Wedell, Lucy Raven, and Gloria Sutton for their insight, encouragement, and guidance throughout my writing process. I would also like to thank the MPAS program and my colleagues and friends. My sincerest thanks to my mother and father for their unconditional love and support. Finally, thanks to Andrew, my best friend. iv Table of Contents Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………iii List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………..v Abstract...…………………………………………………………………………………vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Repetition, Soft Montage and Operational Images……………………………5 Chapter 2: War at a Distance: The Autonomous Machine………………………………15 Chapter 3: Serious Games: Abstracted War………………………..……………………25 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….36 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..40 Appendix: Select films and installations by Harun Farocki……………………………..42 v List of Figures Figure 1: Harun Farocki, War at a Distance, 2003. Still from video. 17 Figure 2: Harun Farocki, War at a Distance, 2003. Still from video. 22 Figure 3: Harun Farocki, Serious Games I: Watson is Down, 2010. 27 Still from two-channel video installation. Figure 4: Harun Farocki, Serious Games II: Three Dead, 2010. Still from video. 31 vi Abstract This paper looks at three of the filmmaker Harun Farocki’s recent films, War at a Distance (2003), and Serious Games I: Watson is Down (2010) and Serious Games II: Three Dead (2010). I am interested in how these films trace the contemporary acceleration of surveillance image production and reception used for the regulation of manufacturing and the domination of populations. While theorists like Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault have written extensively on the phenomenon of increased surveillance in contemporary society, Farocki’s films manifest a critique from within film – one that repositions viewers actively and critically in relation to the images with which they are constantly inundated in our current image saturated environment. By using film itself to critically intervene in a pivotal moment in the history of the medium, I argue that Farocki’s work is able to deliver a critique that affectively repositions viewers in relation to the surveillance technologies themselves. 1 Introduction The recent exhibit Harun Farocki: Images of War (at a Distance) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which ran from June, 2011 to January, 2012, was the filmmaker’s first large solo exhibition in the United States. It featured two dark rooms on the second floor in the media galleries showcasing films made from 2000 to 2010, each displayed as a double projection. Along the back wall of the gallery were two newly translated German texts, a number of books on Farocki’s work, including much of his own writing, and a series of televisions with menus containing thirty-six of Farocki’s films which were recently procured by the museum. Much of Farocki’s critical reception has noted his incredible ability to represent the violence of the contemporary moment as it is enacted by image technologies, from the start of his career in the 1960s to the present. Describing Farocki as a “profoundly contemporary artist,” writer, critic, and curator, Christa Blümlinger affirms that he understands the “symptoms of discontent in civilization.” 1 Art historian Georges Didi- Huberman also asserts this, acutely phrasing the key question that Farocki’s works address as: “Why, in which way, and how does the production of images take part in the destruction of human beings?” 2 This thesis will look at Farocki’s depiction of recent technologies of seeing and the effects and affects they produce on the human body and on human cognition. There has recently been a proliferation of “operational image” technologies, including an expansion of surveillance video, and the development of 1 Christa Blümlinger, “Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-lines, Ed. Thomas Elsaesser, (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2004), 315. 2 Georges Didi-Huberman, “How to Open Your Eyes,” in Against What? Against Whom? Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, ed., (London: Koenig Books, 2009), 46. 2 autonomous machines, distance weaponry, and computer-simulation technologies. This is precisely the historical moment into which Farocki’s work intervenes. Like the exhibition at MoMA, this thesis centers around three of Farocki’s recent works: War at a Distance (2003, video, col., 58 min.), Serious Games I: Watson is Down (2010, 2 videos, color, sound, 8 min. loop), and Serious Games II: Three Dead (2010, 2 videos, color, sound, 8 min. loop). 3 In these films, Farocki is interested in looking at how the above technologies affect human bodies and cognition – how they shape bodies within workplaces and even how they transform the relation the body has with its incarnated reality. Finally, they present how these technologies of seeing are utilized in both warfare and military training. Considering the interface between remote sensing technologies and the body, I will first address Farocki’s mode of image production. Specifically I will explore the filmic editing techniques of “soft montage,” repetition, and appropriation of “operational images” that Farocki employs in order to show the sources of images in their originally intended viewing contexts, the editing of images, and finally how images are assigned meaning by emphasizing aspects of an image while ignoring others and through pairings with text and audio. Next, I will examine the acceleration of image production in War at a Distance, observing the similarities in remote sensing equipment used for industrial and military purposes. Highlighting the economic shift from an industrial to postindustrial economy, I will note this shift as an influential factor in the advancement of remote sensing 3 This thesis analyzes War at a Distance (2003) while the MoMA exhibit featured Eye/Machine I-III, a trilogy that Farocki later combined into one single film, War at a Distance. 3 equipment used in weapons. Along with the continued sophistication in remote sensing devices mimicking both the human eye and hand, I will map the near removal of the human body from both production and warfare. Having established the contemporary removal of the body from production, I will then move to the autonomous robot, exploring how the robot is not only created as a copy of the human eye and hand, but is also programmed with a computer “brain” that imitates aspects of human cognition, particularly the action of recognition enabled through the repetition of forms. In the final chapter I will examine the contemporary moment, in which computer- generated animations replace the role of cameras in war training in Farocki’s recent set of films, Serious Games. MoMA’s prominent display of the Serious Games films seems particularly timely: as the ten-year anniversary of the start of the ongoing war in Afghanistan occurred in the middle of the exhibition, as the official end to the American mission in Iraq occurred during the show’s final weeks, and as tensions with Iran appeared (and continue to appear) to be advancing toward war. I will begin by clarifying how such computer-generated animations function as sources of information in war operations. I will note the extreme refinement of information to the point that information now takes the form of animation for the purpose of improving soldiers’ accuracy or performance in battle. I will explore the effects this has on a soldier’s perception, the presented information so filtered from the real that it becomes an abstraction, noting the effects of this abstraction resulting in a game with the highest of stakes: death. Finally, I will conclude by considering the significance of Farocki’s use of film itself, asserting that film enables him to engage with and critique the image technologies 4 he depicts in a more powerful way than would be possible in any other medium. I argue that Farocki’s films – because they are films – are able to go beyond the level of explanation, commentary, or critique, and actually reorient viewers toward images. 5 Chapter 1 Repetition, Soft Montage, and Operational Images This chapter explores Farocki’s use of video in relation to the proliferating use of remote sensing technologies – from the use of analog video in the 1980s and 1990s to the emergence of digital technologies in the past decade – in various nonartistic ways. In order to depict the varied uses of images within this trend of the acceleration of image production I will turn first to Farocki’s filmic techniques. Farocki uses three techniques in particular to draw his viewers’ attention to the proliferation of surveillance technologies and the constructedness of images: repetition, soft montage, and the appropriation of operational images. By repeating images multiple times Farocki is able to place emphasis on them, while placing the same images with different texts allows the viewer to experience and think about them diversely and in varying contexts. Farocki frequently plays with repetition in his films, repeating language and images to create new meaning or to emphasize continuing themes. In an interview, Farocki explains: As early as my first film, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969, I worked with repetition and variations, probably influenced by reading books, including Brecht and Beckett, and listening to classical music. Because I love to work with few elements, I have to combine them in various ways. 4 Farocki’s editing technique of repetition – not only repeating an image, audio, or text more than once, but also varying the pairings of text and image in their multiple presentations – is certainly linked to the early years of his career spent in a divided Germany, where beginning in the 1960s he was commissioned to create many films for 4 Ed Halter, “Harun Farocki,” Artforum, February 21, 2011, Accessed April 24, 2011, http://artforum.com/words/id=27620. 6 television in West Berlin while he attended the Berlin Film Academy, DFFB. During this period the German film and television industry were linked. Television acted as a “weapon” in the media war between East and West Germany, each side attempting to politically influence the other’s population through television. In the 1950s and 1960s the television systems of both German states dedicated their programs to an imaginary all- German audience as an order of national politics: both the FRG as well as the GDR claimed to represent Germany at large. 5 An example of this condition was the program Der Schwarze Kanal (The Black Channel), which rebroadcast footage from West German television with new voiceovers for propaganda purposes, running from 1960 to 1989. While Farocki participated in television, he also brought a critical perspective to bear on the use of images and language in these contexts. In 1974, he created Die Arbeit mit Bildern: Eine Telekritik von Harun Farocki (16mm, col., 1:1,37, 44 min.), broadcast on the television station West 3. The segment questioned the relationship between image and text specifically in the context of television, and argued that television distances its viewers from the real world. While continuing to make works commissioned for television, in 1996 Farocki began working in a gallery setting with the video installation Interface (video - BetaSp, col., 1:1,37, 23 min.). Farocki explains his transition from cinema to gallery as something about which he had no choice, due to the difficulty in securing audiences for art-house films. Indeed, when he premiered his film Videograms of a Revolution (video transferred to 16mm, col., 1:1,37, 106 min.) in Berlin, only one person attended the screening. Furthermore, for Farocki art publics are different from movie publics in the ways they relate to his films. Farocki states that “[T]he visitors at art spaces have a less 5 Claudia Dittmar, “GDR Television in Competition with West German Programming,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 24:3 (2004). 7 rigidly defined conception of the relationship between picture and sound. They are more willing to search for the meaning of the work within themselves.” 6 Contextually, a more flexible relationship between image and language is facilitated by the gallery more so than by the film or television settings, because galleries do not inherit the genre traditions of film and television, and thus do not condition viewers to have as many formal expectations of how to read the films. Farocki describes this as a “relative lack of prejudice,” which I take to mean an amenability to do the conceptual legwork that Farocki leaves for the viewer by choosing to not include a heavy editorial voice or narrative structure. 7 Along with a continued use of repetition, Farocki’s move to the gallery with the film Interface introduced a new technique. Interface took the form of a two-channel video installation consisting of two videos shown on monitors. Farocki would term this technique of double projection “soft montage,” and would come to use it in most of his later films, including all of the films I will discuss here. 8 Describing soft montage, Farocki states, “One image doesn’t take the place of the previous one, but supplements it, re-evaluates it, balances it.” 9 Soft montage allows relationships between images to gain 6 Martin, Thomas, and Erdmust Wizisia, eds. Brecht plus minus Film: Brecht Dialog 2003 filme, Bilder, Bildbetrachtungen, (Berlin: Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, 2003). Originally published in German. Name of translator not provided by MoMA. 7 Ibid. 8 Farocki’s soft montage technique can be seen as historically linked to avant-garde montage in cinema exemplified by directors like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Farocki’s films are frequently categorized as “essay films,” a genre including filmmakers like Chris Marker and the later works of Jean Luc-Godard, while the influence of New German Cinema filmmakers like Alexander Kluge is apparent in his earlier works. 9 Harun Farocki with Rembert Hüser, “Nine Minutes in the Yard: A Conversation with Harun Farocki,” in Working the Sight-Lines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 302. 8 another dimension beyond the purely durational. Film is a time-based format, running linearly from start to finish. In a typical filmstrip, where one image is projected at a time, each given image is seen next to two other images: the one before it, and one after. In Farocki’s soft montage, any given image is immediately connected to five other images: two before, one projected at the same time, and two after. Farocki explains: “Imagine three double bonds jumping back and forth between six carbon atoms of a benzene ring; I envisage the same ambiguity in the relationship of an element in an image track to the one succeeding or accompanying it.” 10 It is the increase of ambiguity between images that affords the viewer space to form many connections between images. Because of its doubling of images, soft montage engenders a self-consciousness in the viewer. By placing two images next to one another, Farocki makes it impossible to simply escape into the camera’s gaze like one might before a single-channel video. Human sight works by combining distinct images from two separate eyes into a single composite image. In a single channel film a viewer is able to suspend consciousness of her surroundings and “escape” into the created world of the film – indeed, cinemas are architecturally designed to promote this suspension. Soft montage, however, disables this process, by giving the viewer one too many images to apprehend at a time. Faced with two simultaneous filmstrips, the viewer is forced into a condition of constant decision making between which of two images to prioritize, and thus is never able to suspend her own self-consciousness that she is watching a film. Moreover, even at moments in Farocki’s soft montages when only one image appears on screen, Farocki quite 10 Harun Farocki, “Cross Influence/Soft Montage,” in Against What? Against Whom?, ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, (London: Koenig Books, 2009), 70. 9 deliberately places it off-center, filling only part of the screen. Farocki thus draws the viewer’s attention to the screen, reminding the viewer that she is watching a film and soliciting her to take note of the filmmaker’s decisions in compiling the footage. In addition to engendering a self-consciousness of the viewing situation, soft montage also works to remind viewers of the editing process. Describing his production of Interface, Farocki explains that the concept of double projection actually occurred to him during the editing process of previous works. 11 He explains that when editing film only one image is seen, but when editing video two are seen: the projected image and a preview of the next image to come. Struck by this doubling, he became interested in producing works that would recreate it, and thus developed soft montage. It seems only fitting that Farocki would use soft montage in Interface, as the film’s subject is his own filmmaking process. The film looks at what it means to work with preexisting images rather than newly produced images, showing his editing room and comparing it to the laboratory of a scientist or workspace of an art historian. Fittingly, film historian Thomas Elsaesser refers to Farocki as an “artist-archaeologist,” 12 given his practice of unearthing and documenting the many histories of cinema beyond the movies; while writer and artist Coco Fusco compares Farocki to a forensic pathologist, “carefully examining his cinematic corpus to uncover hidden causes of crime, disease and death.” 13 Writer Volker Siebel notes the care with which Farocki treats 11 Martin, Thomas, and Erdmust Wizisia, eds. Brecht plus minus Film. 12 Thomas Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-lines, Ed. Thomas Elsaesser, (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2004), 12. 13 Coco Fusco, “Regarding History,” Frieze Magazine, 127 (2009), accessed February 23, 2012, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/regarding_history/. 10 images, and his “tendency to treat his own images as if they were ‘found’ footage.” 14 In fact, Farocki eventually would abandon his work with actors, and begin using only found and documentary footage. Farocki’s decision to use found and documentary footage is clearly tied to the conceptual content of his work: the acceleration of image production. With the recent increase in the use of surveillance equipment – extending from contexts like the prison and factory, to consumerist spaces like the supermarket and shopping mall, and even to seemingly private spaces like the home – there has been an incredible acceleration of the production of “operational images.” All of the works discussed herein, War at a Distance, Serious Games I: Watson is Down, and Serious Games II: Three Dead, reappropriate found footage that functions in its original intended context as “operational imaging.” Farocki introduces the term “operational images” in Eye/Machine I (2000, video Beta SP, col., 1:1,3), and uses it to characterize images that are captured in production contexts to monitor and provide information to managers (i.e., operators) about the functioning of workers and machinery. While these images document procedures, their role is not documentary: they function as components in the procedures themselves, with the purpose of monitoring production. Eye/Machine I provides an example of operational images in footage taken during the First Gulf War by missiles equipped with cameras. Farocki explains that the use value of these particular operational images was to determine whether a missile had been 14 Volker Siebel, “Painting Pavements,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-lines, Ed. Thomas Elsaesser, (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2004), 50. 11 successful in hitting its target. While this example is military, operational images are collected in a variety of production contexts ranging from theaters of war (where what is “produced” is violence and economic or “security” outcomes desired by a state), to sites of manufacturing, incarceration, and retail exchange. Farocki is interested in all of these spaces, and in fact uses the Eye/Machine trilogy to explore the striking commonality that spaces of war and manufacturing share in that they both use the same operational imaging technology. War at a Distance – a single work that collects footage from across the Eye/Machine trilogy – begins, for instance, with the same Gulf War footage. 15 The film proceeds, however, to present footage taken in a steel production factory, with Farocki’s commentary that the, “Images, [are] not really intended for human eyes – sometimes viewed by technicians to check functioning.” “Check functioning” here is a euphemism for the monitoring of production. In order to analyze the expansion of operational images, Farocki supplements the found operational footage he uses with documentary footage that he himself shoots on location. By filming in the spaces where his found operational images are produced, he is able to meticulously track their creation, while presenting his viewers with operational images paired with their operational contexts. Through his films, Farocki’s viewers 15 In the production of War at a Distance, Farocki was scriptwriter, director cinematographer and producer for the film. Ingo Kratisch also assisted with cinematography, Matthias Rajmann with research, Louis van Rouki with sound, and Max Reimann was editor. Unlike the other films examined herein, War at a Distance was made for television and not for the gallery setting. It was created in 2003, funded by the television producer Inge Classen for the German public television network, 3sat. It was made in a three- year period in which Farocki was also working on Eye/Machine I-III. War at a Distance acts as a compilation of the three Eye/Machine films, using the same footage and combining the arguments made in each into a single film. In order to create such a film Farocki gained access to a BMW factory in München, footage from Texas Instruments, Fort Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Bundesarchiv/Transit Film GmbH (a small German film archive), the National Archives in College Park, MD, and dozens more organizations and companies. 12 become aware of two types of operational images: fixed and mobile. The steel production example above uses a fixed camera, for instance, while the missile hurtling toward its target dramatically exemplifies the mobile camera. It is important to Farocki that his viewers recognize that operational images function not only in fixed, enclosed spaces like the prison and factory, but also can portably maneuver any and every space. Another aspect of operational images that Farocki is preoccupied by is that, precisely because they are used for such particular purposes, they neglect other information. War at a Distance, for instance, contains a scene that deals with a fixed surveillance camera in an automobile production factory, which serves as the final quality controller in an assembly line creating motors. Farocki first shows his viewer found footage from the camera’s perspective, watching the motors on the conveyer belt from its unchanging location on an adjacent wall. Farocki then presents his own documentary footage of the factory, which captures the conveyor belt and its surrounding equipment from the opposite side of the room. The surveillance camera whose eye we had just occupied is now visible on the far wall as a piece of equipment functioning in tandem with the rest in the room, staring down at the motors to complete its task. By viewing these two images in soft montage, Farocki’s viewers are made aware of their differences: Farocki’s own footage exposes what remains outside of the operational camera’s gaze, namely the remainder of the operation and the majority of the room. Along with recognizing the privileged gaze of the operational image, Farocki also shows that an effect of the increased use of operational image making technologies is a trend toward a condition of a massive and unending influx of images. This massive bank of images only operates with the aid of human or computer processing: operational 13 images are only operative when read. Farocki again demonstrates this general concept with factory footage. War at a Distance shows surveillance footage of steel rolling through its production at different phases. This footage first appears solely from the surveillance camera’s point of view. Then, the same surveillance images are shown being screened in their originally intended viewing context: the control room of the factory, where they function as operational images. Farocki’s attention to how such footage is accessed and processed allows viewers to consider how the footage is read. In order for the recipients of operational images – control room operators – to process such a constant stream of images, the footage is strategically edited to include only “exceptional” images. An image is deemed exceptional when it is out of the ordinary. In the factory, an exceptional image captures an error in the production line. While Farocki has already encouraged viewers to recognize that operational images only contain the view from one particular vantage, leaving out any representation of the remainder of the operation and space, viewers may now appreciate that exceptional-image editing effects an even greater narrowing or abstraction of representation. Just as the operational camera neglects context, exceptional-image editing, by focusing only on certain kinds of events, risks omitting information that might actually be valuable –information, for instance, that an operator wouldn’t know they were looking for beforehand. For example, in Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988, 16mm, col., b/w, 1:1,37, 75 min.), Farocki uses images taken during World War II by American airplanes that were used to capture industrial bombing targets; only years later were these same films recognized as also depicting the Auschwitz concentration camp. 14 In addition to abstracting individual scenes from context and operators (i.e., readers) from content, operational images also work to remove the body from work and increase mechanized accuracy in warfare. My next chapter will take up these issues, considering the consequent emergence of autonomous machines programmed to mimic aspects of human cognition. 15 Chapter 2 War at a Distance: The Autonomous Machine Centered on the film War at a Distance, this chapter will investigate what I take to be a key question of Farocki’s: what is the connection between production and destruction? War at a Distance approaches this question by focusing on spaces of manufacturing and warfare, with a concern to examine the surprisingly similar technologies operant in both. Farocki’s film endeavors to understand this connection through economic and technological interpretations, charting the shift from industrialism to post-industrialism, and mechanics to electronics. War at a Distance shows how industrial and military technologies follow a trajectory to machines that produce and interpret surveillance footage on their own. My interest in War at a Distance concerns the way that the film depicts a dystopic present in which such autonomous machines have come to imitate – and, indeed, replace – processes of human cognition. As I will develop in my conclusion, I believe that Farocki’s films not only document, but also respond to this moment, by restimulating our human cognitive faculties and reorienting our relation to such technologies. War at a Distance opens with black and white footage of three buildings, overlaid by target cross-hairs directed at one of the buildings as if to focus the eye. The building promptly explodes. The view now shifts to footage from a mobile operational-imaging camera attaching to the head of a missile, moving toward a different target and quickly turning to static as the missile explodes. A voiceover states, “Images like these were shown in 1991 of the Gulf War.” This footage will be repeated several times throughout the film. 16 After this striking opening scene, War at a Distance becomes a nonnarrative gestalt of images, sounds, and narrational exposition. Further wartime footage from both the First Gulf War and World War II is intercut with documentary footage that Farocki shot in a steel plant and BMW factory; images of robotic machines performing manufacturing functions of both production and inspection; aerial footage of a rural landscape overlaid with a computerized rendering that has automatically identified civilian infrastructure; and finally hand-drawn animated cartoons that Farocki has reappropriated from corporate and military contexts, where they were developed for promotional and training purposes. Throughout all of this, a female voice (familiar from many of Farocki’s other films) calmly delivers a narration that reflectively comments on the images without didacticism. In my view, War at a Distance engages three central critical issues: the removal of the body from work, the increasingly precise automation of warfare, and the consequent emergence of autonomous machines. Early in the film, Farocki’s narrator speculates on the relationship between economic history and the technologies shown on screen. The narrator explicitly asserts, “There must be a connection between production and destruction,” while a pair of images showing a missile-affixed mobile camera and a man feeding a punch machine are shown in soft montage. The narrator continues: “If one considers the connection between production and warfare, then the atom bomb must belong to the industrial age. Maximum energy, maximum effect.” Subsequent footage shows a robotic arm mechanically assembling circuit boards. 17 Figure 1. War at a Distance, 2003. Still from video. Source: Art Tattler website. http://arttattler.com/archiveimagesofwar.html (Accessed March 19, 2012) This set of images exhibits the removal of the body from production. While in the previous chapter I commented on the way that War at a Distance uses missile-affixed operational cameras to suggest the pervasion and infiltration of operational imaging into all aspects of contemporary existence – a phenomenon that the extreme portability of the missile camera serves as a troubling metaphor for – here I would like to observe how these cameras function within war to distance human bodies from violence. By transmitting images of combat to a remote monitor, mobile cameras facilitate the removal of bodies from warfare – turning the traditional soldier into a remote operator, much like the control-room technicians discussed in chapter one. Farocki’s narrator says as much at one point in the film when, while World War II-era footage is displayed of a television onboard an airplane receiving a transmission from a camera-equipped bomb, she states: “Television transmission allows you to approach the target visually whilst keeping a spatial distance.” Moreover, the missiles that such cameras are affixed to are guided, distance weapons that allow their operators “to remain at a distance from an opponent, to avoid 18 enemy fire; the opposite to a suicide attack.” Distance weapons allow combatants an unprecedented degree of physical safety from combat – a degree of safety that is only accessible to those who possess such advanced technological means. (Interestingly, technologically disadvantaged combatants have developed the opposite of a distance weapon in the strategy of the suicide attack. Suicide attackers gain an advantage through proximity, without the aid of technological distance and physical safety.) Of course, while earlier technologies of war, like firearms and later missiles themselves, facilitated the distancing of combatants from one another, mobile cameras distance bodies to quite a different degree – initiating a new age of “war at a distance” that the film’s title comments on. Similarly, Farocki’s images of a man operating a punch machine and robotic assembly indicate a shift – in the manufacturing context – from bodily to mechanical labor. While the punch-card image contains a human body, what is striking about it – and what is dramatized through Farocki’s use of repetition (the image recurs several times throughout War at a Distance) – is the automatic way the body interacts with the machine. Just as the image itself is repeated in the film, the man’s very movements are highly repetitive. In war as well as manufacturing, the historical shift from industrial to postindustrial production is characterized by a removal of the human body from the production line. While in the industrial age the body played a major role in production, each machine necessarily manned by an operator, today’s postindustrial age has replaced the human body with robots that mimic human motor skills and sight, the body now subjugated to the factory control room solely to regulate the production process. 19 We can appreciate the history and implications of this trend of removing bodies from war and production that War at a Distance recognizes by turning to the thought of French theorist Paul Virilio. Virilio invents the concept of “dromology” to refer to precedence the dimension of time takes over that of space in the era of late capitalism. It is precisely our culture’s ever-increasing emphasis on speed that has promoted the removal of bodies from scenes of both manufacturing and warfare, as the demands of capitalism have now exceeded the human body’s capabilities and we have invented machines, like the ones shown in Farocki’s films, whose purpose is to literally outpace us. While Virilio’s focus is the history of war, “dromology” helps explain the similarities Farocki explores among contemporary technologies of war and production. Like Virilio, Farocki is also interested in the history of war, and War at a Distance is concerned as much with the distancing effects of distance weaponry as it is with the increased automation of warfare that they represent. At one point in the film, while being shown images of missiles, Farocki’s narrator explains that the weapons on screen are self-guided and capable of correcting their own trajectories mid-flight. The comment resonates with a different piece of footage in the film, sourced from a fixed operational camera attached to a robot in a factory. The camera sends images to a computer that identifies materials that have been misplaced on a circular conveyor, mistakes which the robot then corrects by removing the errant pieces from the production line. In the context of this image, one infers yet another similarity between the technologies of war and production. Farocki heightens the resonance of these images with a piece of narration delivered over another segment of footage, this time displaying aerial video of a landscape superimposed with a computer-generated map of 20 infrastructure. At this point, Farocki’s narrator states: “The location systems will have to be improved or the entire world brought into line with factory conditions.” This piece of narration suggests that technological automation is following the same trajectory in the factory and in warfare, each influencing the other to increase precision. In another segment of the film, Farocki presents footage appropriated from a 1972 Texas Instruments advertisement that features a missile used in the Vietnam War, decorated with the slogan “One Bomb – One Target.” The cartoon ad advertises guided missile technology by making the argument that it is more cost-effective to use individual guided missiles than entire arsenals of less-accurate, unguided bombs – a comparison that the cartoon draws by juxtaposing a single, sleek guided missile, with a vast tonnage of unguided munitions, both dropped on Than Hoa bridge. The many bombs predictably miss the bridge, while the single guided missile takes it out on first try. Elsewhere in War at a Distance, Farocki’s narrator refers to this material with a cautionary tone: “In the words of the soldier’s song, not every bullet finds its mark. A missile which corrects its own course carries the threat of infallibility.” The suggestion of this cautionary remark is that perhaps the principal of perfection – the goal that automated weaponry pursues – is not a desirable outcome in the context of war, a context in which flawlessness and infallibility would represent a severe “threat” to humanity. Both the removal of bodies from production and the increased automation of warfare have involved and promoted the development of autonomous machines, another phenomenon that War at a Distance presents, and the final concern I would like to address in this chapter. Autonomous machines are ones that automatically perform tasks and monitor their own performance via computer processing, enabling them to function 21 autonomously from human operators. The simultaneously observing and correcting robot that works the factory conveyor above is an example of an autonomous machine, and one of many Farocki presents in the film. Elsewhere in the film Farocki uses soft montage to emphasize the way in which autonomous machines essentially perform two tasks, both operating and watching themselves operate. In Eye/Machine II, Farocki features a manufacturing robot designed to neatly place pins along a board. The viewer is first confronted with found footage from the robot’s own camera. Without context, and only a noisy industrial soundtrack, the extreme close-up of the image is impossible to place. Farocki then shows the same footage in congruence with his own footage of the robot itself; Farocki’s own footage adds context to the operational footage we have just seen, which is now recognizable in the soft montage as being footage from the robot’s autonomous eye (the two images move in sync with one another, and share the same noisy soundtrack). The robot efficiently performs the work of both the human hand and eye, producing while monitoring its own production. Yet another autonomous machine evident in War at a Distance is a robot that traverses a hallway. From the robot’s perspective, we see footage of the hallway taken by its operational camera. We see the hallway in gray scale overlaid with colored lines where the machine has identified walls, doors, hallways, and signs. By intercutting this operational footage with exterior images of the same hallway that capture the robot moving through it, Farocki forces us to remain cognizant that we are outside viewers of the robot’s video, without letting us “escape” into it. The footage from the robot’s point of view has been taken by an electronic “eye” and processed by a computerized “brain,” 22 and then translated into operating instructions, which enable it to successfully navigate the space. Figure 2. Harun Farocki, War at a Distance, 2003. Still from video. Autonomous machines thus mark a new history of operational image technology, a breaking point where operational footage no longer requires a human reader. With the aid of computer processing, autonomous machines like these robots function according to internal feedback loops. Images are captured and translated into data by an onboard computer, which then processes the data and translates it into operating instructions which adjust the machine, which then changes its course while capturing more images. In order to dispense with human operators, autonomous machines must mimic aspects of human cognition. Like the human brain, autonomous machines work by viewing their 23 environment hierarchically, and identifying patterns, points of reference, and signs from the visual field. Such robots are equipped with maps of hallways, shapes of infrastructural features, and shapes of errant bits on a conveyor, for instance, that enable them to recognize and navigate their environment. Autonomous machines imitate human perceptual habits, in that they see some things while easily ignoring others. This kind of repetition and pattern-recognition is a basic aspect of human cognition. Modeling the industrial assembly line on these habits, manufacturing quickly reduced the role of each body to the extreme repetitive task as exemplified by the punch-machine operator. Commenting on the way that industrial production has in turn affected human perception, Virilio asserts that, “Today we are no longer truly seers [voyants] of our world, but already merely reviewers, [revoyants], the tautological repetition of the same, at work in our mode of production (i.e. industrial production), is equally at work in our mode of perception.” 16 In other words, we as human beings have entered into our own feedback loop with technology and work, creating repetitious industrial workplaces modeled after our cognition, which then negatively affect our cognition. Eventually we replace ourselves at work with autonomous machines, while we have meanwhile ourselves become something like autonomous machines outside of work, no longer seeing but merely reviewing our environment. While Virilio’s sentiment may appear unnecessarily dark, the combination of disembodied and robotic workers and increasingly automated scenes of war depicted in War at a Distance indeed presents a chilling portrait of our times. As we will see in the 16 Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, (New York: Continuum, 2005), 37. 24 next chapter, Farocki’s more recent work presents the even darker realities of our present moment. 25 Chapter 3 Serious Games: Abstracted War I concluded the previous chapter on the dark note of suggesting that humans have entered into a dangerous relationship with technology, creating technologies that reduce our own cognitive functioning to something like that of autonomous machines. Farocki’s recent work Serious Games examines two computer-generated simulations used in US military training. While the notion that our reliance on production technologies is turning us into beings that are more automatic than cognitive is ominous enough, Farocki’s depiction of the way simulation is being used to train soldiers for combat, where the stakes are literally human life, represents a prospect that is indeed far more “serious.” Serious Games reveals the way in which recent technologies have a potential to effect what theorist Paul Virilio has termed “derealization,” and turn war into a game-like arena of automated protocol, rather than a realm of conscious decision making. Serious Games is a series of four films compiling found and documentary footage from US military training for (and, as we will see, recuperation from) war. In this chapter I will examine the first two films of Serious Games, both centered on training. Serious Games I: Watson is Down consists of computer-generated simulations of the landscape of Afghanistan produced by the US military, combined with documentary footage directed by Farocki of soldiers working in groups of four using these simulations during training sessions. 17 Shot in the fall of 2009 at the Marine Corps Base in 17 Serious Games I: Watson is Down, and Serious Games II: Three Dead, and Serious Games IV: A Sun with No Shadow are directed, edited, and produced by Harun Farocki, with cinematography by Ingo Kratisch, sound by Matthias Rajmann, online-editing by Max Reimann and Jan Ralske, and scripted by Harun Farocki and Matthias Rajmann. Serious Games III: Immersion was directed and scripted by Harun 26 Twentynine Palms, California, the film depicts soldiers in a training session sitting at desks in groups of four, each person manning a computer outfitted with animated simulation software. Farocki shows found footage that includes screenshots of the computer simulations, depicting, for instance, the soldiers virtually performing set tasks like placing a bomb inside a box. Serious Games IV: A Sun with No Shadow also contains footage from this same training scenario, which reveals screenshots of the commanding officer’s computer. The screenshots clarify how the simulation works, and show the officer’s cursor moving across the screen and navigating a dropdown menu of potentially explosive items that may be placed in the animation for a particular training session; it includes choices such as “cement block,” “Coke can,” and “dead dog.” (In A Sun with No Shadow, Farocki comments on the amateur nature of such “Improvised Explosive Devices” by characterizing the simulation’s combatants as, “badly armed enemies in asymmetric wars.”) Farocki with research and sound by Matthias Rajmann, editing by Harun Farocki and Max Reimann and cinematography by Ingo Kratisch. It was produced by Harun Farocki Filmproduction, Berlin, with support from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH and co-produced with the Jeu de Paume, Paris. In the short time since the films’ debut at the 2010 Sao Paulo Biennial, the installation has been displayed in several shows. It was a part of the group exhibition curated by Farocki and Antje Ehmann, “The Image in Question: War-Media-Art,” at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts in Cambridge, MA in fall 2010, at Farocki’s solo exhibition, “Weiche Montagen/Soft Montages,” at the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria in winter 2010/2011, at Àngels Barcelona in spring 2011, and featured in the solo show, “Harun Farocki: Images of War (at a Distance),” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from June 2011 to January 2012. 27 Figure 3. Harun Farocki, Watson is Down, 2010. Still from two-channel video installation. Source: Art Tattler website. http://arttattler.com/archiveimagesofwar.html (Accessed March 19, 2012) The simulations shown in Watson is Down closely resemble commercial video games, both in that they are played via a console connected to a monitor, and because they contain computer-generated images replicating three-dimensional space. Yet unlike commercial video game simulations in which players typically navigate fictional worlds, these simulations used by the military are built from information gained from operational images: they illustrate the exact topographic data and environmental details of a real- world landscape, down to the shadows cast by objects in relation to the sun’s position in the sky. In the simulations, soldiers navigate a persuasive replica of the space they will eventually occupy in combat. While persuasive, it is important to note that the simulations more closely resemble computer graphics than filmic or video footage. Nevertheless, the simulations use precise data from the actual spaces they represent, 28 incorporating massive amounts of spatially mapped information in a way that photography or video never could. In a coauthored essay containing short anecdotes about Farocki’s practice and techniques, author, curator, and video artist Antje Ehmann and theorist and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun pose the question, “The army no longer journeys into the field of battle armed with their cameras… instead they build Virtual Iraq… Is this because animation provides a better account of 21 st -century war?” 18 Ehmann and Eshun pose this question of whether animation provides a better account of twenty-first century war than the camera in reference to Serious Games III: Immersion, a film about similar computer- generated simulations used in treatment of soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The question applies equally to the footage Farocki features in Watson is Down. Ehmann and Eshun answer their question by speculating that, “Perhaps the compression and reduction of abstraction has a stronger impact on the patient than any documented reality, however extensively produced, could ever have.” 19 In other words, Ehmann and Eshun suggest that contemporary technologies of war (which abstract operators from reality by compressing it into data) have done something like permanently reprogram the way the soldiers process sensory data so that, in therapeutic recuperation from war, they may feel more comfortable in a simulated environment than in actual reality. While Ehmann and Eshun’s insight helps explain the alienating affects of recent war technologies, my own concern is to point out the way in which computer-generated 18 Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, “A to Z of HF or: 26 Introductions to HF,” in Against What? Against Whom? Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, ed., (London: Koenig Books, 2009), 208. 19 Ibid., 208. 29 simulations alienate operators from reality to an even greater degree than their photographic and filmic predecessors. In chapter one I remarked on the reductive way that surveillance cameras neglect context by focusing only on small sections of larger spaces. The computer-generated simulations featured in Watson is Down, by contrast, use vast operational data to map extremely expansive spaces (i.e., the country of Afghanistan). Still, like the exceptional- image editing applied to surveillance footage, computer-generated simulations reduce spaces to a short list of specific features and events – for example, topographic data and approaching combatants. In a recent essay on the Serious Games films, Farocki writes, “A computer animation today reproaches filmed footage for its redundant details, as much as industrial products reproached the handmade object for its irregularities.” 20 In Farocki’s characterization, computer animations “reproach” film for being redundant – that is, for capturing details that would be considered nonessential in the context of war. By reducing a landscape only to items like topographic data and objects like “dead dog,” “brick,” and “Coke can,” a computer animation indeed might prepare a soldier for combat better than a camera’s footage could. On the other hand, considering Ehmann and Eshun’s remark, I would contend that camera footage would less severely “reprogram” its operators than these simulations seem to (although it would “reprogram” them nonetheless). Like the autonomous robot piloting its way through hallways in War at a Distance, which used stored data to situate itself, plot its course, and react to certain environmental stimuli, soldiers trained with computer simulations perform in a 20 Harun Farocki, “Immersion (Working Title),” in Harun Farocki: Weiche Montagen/Soft Montages, (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2011), 50. 30 predetermined way. They are stripped of their individual agency through repetitious and ritualistic training with the simulation. A compelling illustration of the way that soldiers’ repetitious computer training translates to nonvirtual space is offered by Serious Games II: Three Dead, which reveals that the military’s computer-simulated training program is supplemented with live-action role playing. Three Dead is the final work I will discuss in this thesis, and unlike the other Serious Games films it is composed almost exclusively of documentary footage, other than short computer-graphic segments at the beginning and end. The training takes place in an artificial village built on the base and employs nearly 300 extras who role- play civilian. In one shot, a role-player is seen standing outside a fake mosque, asserting that everyone must “pray on time.” Another scene shows a soldier being asked a series of questions about his civilian life: does he play football or volleyball, does he have a girlfriend? In another shot role players line up to receive food then sit at picnic tables to eat. A man suddenly appears bearing a machine gun and opens fire on this crowd, resulting in screaming and running. Next, soldiers secure the empty mosque. The film ends before the shooter is apprehended. 31 Figure 4. Harun Farocki, Serious Games II: Three Dead, 2010. Still from video. Source: 1F Media Project website. http://www.1fmediaproject.net/2011/06/29/harun-farocki-images-of-war-at-a-distance-marks-the- artist%E2%80%99s-first-solo-exhibition-in-a-u-s-museum-moma-n-y/ (Accessed March 19, 2012) In a statement about Three Dead, Farocki describes the film’s artificial setting, “It looked as though [the military] had modeled reality on a computer animation.” 21 The structure of Three Dead itself encourages the viewer to make this association, as the film is bookended with computer-generated animated aerial views of the exact same fake village built for the live-action training. A roughly thirty-second animated aerial view opens the film, while animation of the same length, this time taking the viewer on a virtual helicopter ride down and through the streets of the village, closes the film. Both animated views contain virtual soldiers but not civilians and, interestingly, a number of 21 Harun Farocki, http://www.farocki-film.de/ accessed December 22, 2011. 32 signs for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Konka that “authenticate” the Mideast village by representing the very real presence of foreign investment in the region. 22 Set to upbeat music, the animations at first appear drastically incongruous with the rest of the film, lacking any evidence of civilian life, focused on architecture and signs, and seeming noticeably fake next to the film footage. Yet it is clear that Farocki has deliberately juxtaposed them with the role-play footage, as if to suggest similarities between the two. Having viewed Three Dead, I am persuaded by Farocki’s supposition that the film’s live-action environment was modeled on the same type of computer-simulated spaces depicted in Watson is Down (and not the other way around). Like the stimulus- response feedback loop of assembly-line production (and later of autonomous machines), modeled after the human and eventually affecting human cognitive habits, the computer simulations shown throughout Serious Games are modeled after physical spaces, then mapped back onto physical space in live-action training, reorienting trainees to approach physical space in the same way they do the computerized simulation. While Three Dead appears to contain footage of a training session that provides a better simulation of reality than computer graphics – being a live-action event, and including, for instance, 300 role- played civilians – the role-play training featured in Three Dead actually operates according to the same reductive logic as the computer animation does. Both forms of training present an unsettling glimpse of the way that operational-imaging technology is threatening to turn war into an automated version of itself. While this difficult to 22 Konka is a large sino-foreign consumer electronics enterprise, presumably with a large presence in the specific war zone this animation is made to represent. 33 comprehend notion may seem like something from science fiction, Serious Games captures the extent to which such a future may actually be on our horizon. To better understand the strange impact that the animations shown in Serious Games may have on human cognition, I turn again to the work of Paul Virilio. In his 1989 volume War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Virilio invents the concept of soldier “derealization” to describe the effects of distance weaponry on human perception. Commenting on the distancing of the soldier’s body from the scene of war, Virilio writes that: “As sight lost its direct quality and reeled out of phase, the soldier had the feeling of being not so much destroyed as derealized or dematerialized, any sensory point of reference suddenly vanishing in a surfeit of optical targets.” 23 Such an excess of optical targets that Virilio here refers to can be seen in the animations presented in Serious Games, as the simulations effectively reduce a landscape to targets. The data that produces these animations has been edited so thoroughly that it contains only information that will directly aid in military operations. The images of the simulations are so profoundly abstracted from the real world that soldiers become “derealized” – in other words, removed from the situated experience, the very reality of war. A derealized soldier may be seen at the end of War at a Distance, calmly navigating enemy engagement in a flight simulator. As the simulation ends, the pilot states nonchalantly, “I’ve been shot down. My defenses couldn’t prevent him from firing a missile and hitting.” Serious Games takes up where this scene from War at a Distance leaves off, presenting the viewer with actual graphics from a recent military training 23 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, (New York: Verso, 1989), 19. 34 session. The graphics flatten time, space, and the human scale. The simulations provide soldiers with an abridged version of war that is impressive in its level of detail, yet feels far from “real.” In an essay on his experience filming Serious Games, Farocki describes being struck by the dispositions of the soldiers he met at the base: “The Marines we observed during training were reserved, polite, and no less eloquent than…civil therapists… They resembled office workers or computer technicians more than the Marines we had seen in the movies.” 24 In the soldiers’ polite behavior, Farocki noted a lack of evidence of America’s current state of economic crisis and America’s involvement, at the time, in two wars. The soldiers depicted in the Serious Games films are derealized, evincing no emotional reaction to a condition of crisis. We now understand Farocki’s recent interest in the way that computer-generated simulations represent a new kind of operational image, even more abstracting than camera-generated images. We have also plotted the effect these computer-generated simulations have on human cognition, derealizing soldiers from the reality of war. Serious Games portrays a loop from reality to technology and back to reality, similar to the way in which humans have created workplaces (and later autonomous machines) modeled after our most basic cognitive abilities, which come to reduce our cognitive habits. In my final chapter I will conclude, by arguing that Farocki’s films, while meticulously recording and presenting these phenomena, activate a criticality within his viewers that helps reverse these negative affects of technology on human cognition, un- 24 Harun Farocki, “Serious Games,” Trafic, No. 78, Summer 2011. Originally published in German. Name of translator not provided by MoMA. 35 narrowing our perspective and leaving us with an enduring reminder that the images we are constantly inundated with are manufactured. 36 Conclusion My first encounter with Farocki was last year, when a portion of Images of the World and the Inscription of War was screened in a contemporary art history seminar I was enrolled in. The segment screened in class struck me so much that I sought the full version of the film out at the USC library, where I watched it the following afternoon. While I have always considered myself skeptical of the ways that media techniques and technologies are used, Images of the World reframed my very relationship to media images in a way I had never experienced. After I saw the film, there was a difference in the way I began to look at the images that surrounded me everyday – on my computer screen, television, and in print media. Later that year I traveled to New York City to see Farocki’s first US retrospective at MoMA, while already engaged in the writing of this thesis. In my previous three chapters, I have sought to establish Farocki’s formal techniques, his commentary on the link between industrialization and war, and his investigation of what affects operational images and computer-generated military simulations produce in human cognition. I would like to conclude by suggesting that Farocki’s work does more than comment on or critique the dystopic scenarios depicted in his films, but actively reorients his viewers’ relation toward images. Farocki’s work is able to accomplish this because the very medium he is critiquing is the medium in which he works. Through using film, Farocki is able to both present to the viewer and himself inhabit the nefarious uses of the medium he is concerned with, thus exposing and disrupting those uses from within. 37 Revealing and complicating images throughout his earlier works, Farocki questions image production, formally utilizing repetition by combining images and text in different pairings to complicate their meanings and reveal their influences on each other. Farocki’s formal technique of soft montage disables any ability the viewer previously had to overlook the fact that she is viewing film and video. Soft montage acts as a constant reminder that while Farocki’s films critique and complicate the camera, they also occupy the same medium they evaluate. Occurring at the same moment as his shift to the gallery setting in the mid 1990s, soft montage is a new chapter in Farocki’s practice: a critical moment in which the proliferation of operational images is so vast that the task of understanding them all is impossible, but to understand their basic functions – that they are produced, represent a particular vantage, and are taken and distributed with specific motives – is accomplished in his juxtaposition of found operational images and his own documentary footage of the operational images’ contexts. The viewer becomes aware of the profound importance of recognizing the abstractions created through the use of images by the ever-changing workspaces presented in War at a Distance. While Farocki enables the viewer to occupy the camera’s gaze, it quickly becomes evident that this would indeed be the perspective she would inhabit if she were the worker in the factory’s control room, her sole task to monitor the factory’s nearly autonomous production. Most jobs – whether within the factory, military, or any other space – seem to be moving toward refinement and repetition with the goal of increased and perfected production, and Farocki’s attention to this mechanization of our roles in congruence with the ever increasing precision of 38 operational images makes it clear how the two work together affecting increasingly narrowed cognitive habits. There is no better example of our emphasis on the cognitive habits of pattern recognition than the pervasiveness of the multibillion-dollar video game entertainment industry. Video games, while varying in level of complication, all consist of rules, skill, and strategy, (except for games of chance, which the video game less often embodies) their players using basic recognition, vision, and motor skills to accomplish goals. In his 2011 essay about the Serious Games films Farocki asserts that, “At present, computer games are the leading medium shaping the collective imagination.” 25 Indeed, this very idea is exemplified in the increasingly common use of computer-generated simulations in therapy to represent all sorts of traumatic experiences. 26 While describing his research for the Serious Games films, Farocki states: “We discovered that there is also a series of images used in immersion therapy for people traumatized by the burning and collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I began to imagine a film that would reconstruct the entire recent history of the United States in computer animation: September 11 th , Afghanistan, Iraq.” 27 This idea seems like something out of science fiction, Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality taken to its extreme. Yet the conjecture seems to loom in the near future when we note the increasing use of computer-generated simulations to replace filmic mediums in 25 Harun Farocki, “Serious Games,” Trafic, No. 78, Summer 2011. Originally published in German. Name of translator not provided by MoMA. 26 The US military uses this type of computer-generated simulation, and particularly a program called Virtual Iraq, to treat soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is the subject of Serious Games III: Immersion. Virtual Iraq was actually modeled after the Xbox game, Full Spectrum Warrior by Albert Rizzo at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. 27 Farocki, “Serious Games”. 39 training for war. By presenting the derealized soldier sitting at his computer dock, Farocki informs his viewer that she is also increasingly derealized, her time – for work, leisure, and even viewing Farocki’s films – is increasingly spent in front of screens. Farocki depicts this through film, the most fitting place to complicate this phenomenon, and in doing so creates self-consciousness in his viewers. He generates something like a hall of mirrors. For example, in Watson is Down computer screenshot footage is displayed alongside documentary footage depicting the scenario in which a soldier views the screenshot; meanwhile the viewer of Farocki’s film becomes aware that she is also viewing a screen and self-consciously completes the loop. She becomes conscious of herself watching the film and in doing so occupies a position like Farocki’s documentary footage: she “documents” herself watching the film, repositioned to consider her own compliance with and potential agency in viewing images. This awakened sense of agency is imperative when we recall the trajectory of images traced in War at a Distance and Serious Games becoming so far removed from their original recognizable form that they look like – and may even become – a game. The alienation effected through remote sensing technologies – surveillance cameras, distance weapons, and computer simulations among others – results in war that literally looks like a game. It is a war that resembles the video game and in doing so risks becoming entertainment itself. And yet the soldiers and “enemies” are human beings, and the video game-like wars inflict actual desolation, suffering, and death. 40 Bibliography Nora Alter, “Translating the Essay into Film and Installation,” in Journal of Visual Culture, 6:44 (2007): 45. Sabine Czylwik and Randall Halle with Harun Farocki, “History Is Not a Matter of Generations: Interview with Harun Farocki,” Camera Obscura - 46 (Volume 16, Number 1, 2001), 61. Claudia Dittmar, “GDR Television in Competition with West German Programming,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24:3 (2004). Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, ed., Against What? Against Whom? (London: Koenig Books, 2009). Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-lines, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). Thomas Elsaesser, “Introduction: Harun Farocki,” Senses of Cinema 21, July 2002, accessed April 24, 2010, <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/21/farocki_intro/>. Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann ed., Cinema Like Never Before, (Wein: Generali Foundation). Harun Farocki, Harun Farocki: Weiche Montagen/Soft Montages, (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2011). Harun Farocki, Imprint/Writings, ed. Susanne Gaensheimer et al. trans. Laurent Faasch- Ibrahim, (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2001). Harun Farocki, Nebeneinander, (New York: Walther König, 2007). Harun Farocki, Serious Games I-IV, (2009-2010, I, II, and IV: 2 videos, color, sound, 8 min. (loop)); III: 2 videos, color, sound, 20 min. (loop)) Harun Farocki, “Serious Games,” Trafic, No. 78, Summer 2011. Originally published in German. Name of translator not provided by MoMA. Harun Farocki and Kaja Silverman, Speaking about Godard, (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Harun Farocki, War at a Distance, (2003, video, col., 58 min.) Harun Farocki, accessed December 22, 2011, http://www.farocki-film.de/. 41 Hal Foster, “The Cinema of Harun Farocki,” Artforum Vol. 43, Iss. 3 (New York: Nov. 2004), 156. Coco Fusco, “Regarding History,” Frieze Magazine, 127 (2009), accessed February 23, 2012, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/regarding_history/. Tim Griffin with Harun Farocki, Artforum, 43:3 (Nov. 2004): 162-163. Ed Halter, “Harun Farocki,” Artforum, February 21, 2011. http://artforum.com/words/id=27620 Accessed April 24, 2011. Randall Halle, “History Is Not a Matter of Generations: Interview with Harun Farocki,” Trans. Sabine Czylwik, Camera Obscura, 16:46 (2001). Thomas Y. Levine, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, ed. CTRL [Space] Rhetoric of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2002). Martin, Thomas, and Erdmust Wizisia, eds. Brecht plus minus Film: Brecht Dialog 2003 filme, Bilder, Bildbetrachtungen, (Berlin: Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, 2003). Originally published in German. Name of translator not provided by MoMA. Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, (London: Wallflower Press, 2009). Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time, (New York: Red Grave Publishing Company, 1984). Hugh Rorrison trans., John Willett, ed., Bertolt Brecht journals, (New York: Routledge, 1993). “Things We Don’t Understand,” Generali Foundation, accessed December 8, 2011. http://foundation.generali.at/index.php?id=65&L=1. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, (New York: Verso, 1989). Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, (New York: Continuum, 2005). 42 Appendix: Select films and installations by Harun Farocki Select Films: Inextinguishable Fire, (1969, 16mm, black and white 1:1,37, 25 min.) Between Two Wars, (1978, 16mm, black and white, 1:1,66, 83 min.) Industrie und Fotografie, (1979, 35 mm., b/w, 1:1,3, 44 min.) Before Your Eyes – Vietnam, (1982, 35mm, b/w, 1:1,37, 114 min.) An Image, (1983, 16mm, col., 1:1,37, 25 min.) Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet at Work on Franz Kafka's "Amerika", (1983, 16mm, col., 1:1,37, 26 min.) Indoctrination, (1987, video -1-inch-VTR, col., 1:1,37, 44 min.) Images of the World and the Inscription of War, (1988, 16mm, col., b/w, 1:1,37, 75 min.) How to Live in the FRG, (1990, 16mm, col., 1:1,37, 83 min.) Videograms of a Revolution, (1992, video transferred to 16mm, col., 1:1,37, 106 min.) Ein Tag im Leben der Endverbraucher, (1993, video - BetaSp, col., b/w, 1:1,37, 44 min.) Workers Leaving the Factory, (1995, video - BetaSp, col. and b/w, 1:1,37, 36 min.) The Interview, (1997, video - BetaSp, col., 1:1,37, 58 min.) Prison Images, (2000, video col., and b/w, 60 min.) The Creators of the Shopping Worlds, (2001, video, col., 72 min.) Respite, (2007, video, b/w, silent, 40 min.) Select Installations: Interface, (1995, video - BetaSp, col., 1:1,37, 23 min.) I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, (2000, BetaSp, col., 23 min.) Eye/Machine, (2000, video - BetaSp, col., 1:1,3, 23 min.) 43 Eye/Machine II, (2000, video, col. and b/w, 15 min.) Eye/Machine III, (2003, video, col., 25 min.) Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, (2006, video b/w and col., sound, 36 min. (loop)) Deep Play, (2007, Multi-channel installation, 12 tracks, 2 hours 15 min.)

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Empty threats: the collision of aesthetic, industrial, and revolutionary imperatives in montage

Asset Metadata

Creator Loyer, Sarah (author)

Core Title Surveillance surveyed: the effects of remote sensing technologies on perception through the films of Harun Farocki

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/03/2012

Defense Date 05/03/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Harun Farocki,montage,OAI-PMH Harvest,Paul Virilio,surveillance,Technology,Video,War

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Raven, Lucy (committee chair), Sutton, Gloria (committee member), Wedell, Noura (committee member)

Creator Email sloyer@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-27479

Unique identifier UC11290459

Identifier usctheses-c3-27479 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LoyerSarah-736-0.pdf

Dmrecord 27479

Document Type Thesis

Rights Loyer, Sarah

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA