Harun Farocki “Eye / Machine I-III”, 2001-2003
The film cycle “Eye/Machine I-III” by Harun Farocki brings together visual material from the military and civilian sectors. He focuses on the differences and similarities between people and intelligent (weapons) technologies, computer-controlled image processing, the use of global and tactical early warning systems such as C3I (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence), and the use of special software to produce operational images.
Harun Farocki (*1944) has made around eighty award-winning cinema and television productions over the last thirty years. With his discourses on images, cinema and politics, he is considered one of the most important representatives of contemporary documentary film.
Harun Farocki: Eye/Machine I
“Eye/Machine I”, 2001, 25 min
At the center of the film are the images of the Gulf War, which caused a worldwide sensation in 1991. According to a thesis by philosopher Klaus Theweleit, the bomb and the reporter were identical in the shots of projectiles approaching the target. At the same time, the photographed and (computer) simulated images were indistinguishable. With the loss of the “authentic image”, the historical testimony of the eye was also abolished. It is said that it was not new weapons that were used in the Gulf War, but a new image policy. The foundations of electronic warfare were laid here.
“Eye/Machine II”, 2002, 15 min
How can the distinction between “man” and “machine” still be made in today’s technological environment? In modern weapons technology, the categories are shifting: The intelligent is no longer just a matter for humans. In Eye / Machine II, Farocki brings together images from the military and civilian sectors that show how machines operate intelligently and what they see when they work on the basis of image processing programs. The traditional man-machine distinction is reduced here to that of “eye/machine”, whereby eyes are implanted in the machines themselves as cameras, and civilian production received an innovative boost for its own development from war technologies as a result of the Gulf War. Farocki shows computer-simulated images like those from science fiction films: missiles head for islands in the glittering sea, apartment blocks blow up, fighter planes fire missiles at each other and light virtual flares to defend themselves… Are these computer battlefields enough – or do we need the next rationalization boost for new wars?
“Eye/Machine III”, 2003, 15 min
The third part of the Eye/Machine cycle is intended to organize the materials around the concept of the operative image. These are images that do not depict a process, but are rather part of a process. Even the cruise missiles of the 1980s stored the image of a real landscape and recorded an actual image as they flew over it; the software compared the two images. A comparison of idea and reality, a juxtaposition of pure war and the impurity of the real. This juxtaposition is also a montage; montage always aims for similarity/difference. Many operative images are traversed by colored auxiliary lines, which are intended to depict the work of recognition. The lines emphatically communicate what is important in the pictures and just as emphatically what should not be important under any circumstances. The excess of the real is denied – a constant denial with a counter-effect. (HF)