The Control Room: A Media Archaeology (original) (raw)
Related papers
THE SCREEN THAT SEES ALL: THE VISUAL MOTIF OF THE CONTROL ROOM IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos , 2020
The visual motif of the security control room is an invention associated with filmmaking technol-ogy itself. Through an exploration of the different configurations of the motif in contemporary film and television fiction, this article explores the centrality of this motif in any attempt to define the contemporary image. From the master control panel to the development of the horizontal surveillance that characterises post-Foucauldian societies, the control room constitutes one of the key elements in war films, critiques of power, and bank robbery or casino heist movies. The mo-tif has also been reinvented by filmmakers like David Lynch and continues to be a fundamental vector bearing the nature of all images not necessarily viewed by the human eye, referred to by Harun Farocki as operational images or “phantom shots”.
L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos, 2020
The visual motif of the security control room is an invention associated with filmmaking technol-ogy itself. Through an exploration of the different configurations of the motif in contemporary film and television fiction, this article explores the centrality of this motif in any attempt to define the contemporary image. From the master control panel to the development of the horizontal surveillance that characterises post-Foucauldian societies, the control room constitutes one of the key elements in war films, critiques of power, and bank robbery or casino heist movies. The mo-tif has also been reinvented by filmmakers like David Lynch and continues to be a fundamental vector bearing the nature of all images not necessarily viewed by the human eye, referred to by Harun Farocki as operational images or “phantom shots”.
Where Truth Lies: Digital Culture and Documentary Media after 9/11
Where Truth Lies: Digital Culture and Documentary Media after 9/11, 2019
Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)-a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries-and the generous support of the University of California-Davis. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. Illustrations 2.1. A soldier scans the horizon in The Fog of War 24 2.2. "Overeager" sonar men 28 2.3. The domino theory in action 28 2.4. The observed and the observer in The Fog of War 29 2.5. The "number cruncher" becomes the bomber 31 2.6. Graphic superimpositions of the percentage of devastation caused by the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II 33 2.7. The database of images rendered in different aesthetic configurations 46 3.1. Robert Greenwald's "Un" Trilogy 53 3.2. MoveOn's remake of the "Daisy" ad 60 3.3. The MoveOn home page circa January 2004 61 3.4. The FoxAttacks home page circa October 2007 71 3.5. Elinor from Host an Event! 75 4.1. The Gone Gitmo space in Second Life 90 4.2. America's Army everywhere: public version and the arcade game 103 4.3. The "Medic Training" section in America's Army, version 2.5 106 5.1. The initial recovery.gov home page 131 5.2. Recovery.gov circa 2011 132 5.3. Data visualization in The River and on recovery.gov 135 5.4. Edward Tufte's "Lights-On Map" 137 5.5. Interactive IED visualization tool on The Guardian's website 152 xi Acknowled gments Like many books, this one may have a single author's name on the cover but owes its existence to many others. While the final form of the book took shape over the last two years, the questions that it seeks to address have been with me in one form or another across many years, countless conversations, and four institutions. My thinking on documentary aesthetics and the capacity of moving-image media and digital technology to explore the world has been indelibly shaped by many of the wonderful teachers and mentors with whom I have been fortunate enough to work over the years, including Marina Goldovskaya, Katherine Hayles,
‘Control Space?: Cinematic Representations of Surveillance Space between Discipline and Control’
Recent developments in surveillance practices and their related technologies suggest that the heretofore dominant Foucauldian paradigm of discipline, with its sites of confinement in which space is "segmented, immobile [and] frozen", may no longer be an adequate theoretical framework in which to discuss space within surveillance studies (Foucault 1995: 195). In his essay Postscript on Control Societies, Gilles Deleuze claims that these sites are in the midst of widespread breakdown, leading to a fundamental shift in the notion of space, characterised by the term 'modulation' (Deleuze 1990: 178-179). In the control model, urban surveillance can be said to be characterised by an emphasis on the use of digital surveillance practices, leading to a view of urban space and the city, as well as its inhabitants, which largely resides within a computer mainframe. This raises a question: if the surveillance carried out within this conception of urban space can be described as concentrated, hidden, passive, functional, mobile, and varied, how can these changes be communicated cinematically since there is an obvious problem of representation; when much of the surveillance technology is computer and digital in form, how does cinema make visible the potentially invisible? In considering the question of how film engages with urban space between the paradigms of discipline and control, two cinematic views of the (informational) city will be discussed by considering three scenes from Erasing Minority Report (2002) in order to identify some of the cinematic strategies used in communicating contemporary surveillance practices increasingly characterised as invisible and immaterial.
For the US, the period following the events of 9/11 has been one of deep suspicion and terror of its own history. However, as this chapter proposes, Hollywood has offered a way to rescue and construct another narrative—one that is more palatable—offering ‘a way out’ of contemplating actual events too difficult to face. These re-narrations take the form of revisiting events such as 9/11, thus re-enacting the “farcical spectacle of the impotency of American power.” Specific attention is given to how these re-narrations take the form of the construction of the Arab Other through a discussion of television and video installation forms. The example of Showtime’s Homeland television series reveals the prevalence of dominant narratives and media constructions of paranoia. Consideration is then given to video and installation artworks that suggest counter narratives to dominant narratives of paranoia: the art of montage in the drama-documentary forms of Adam Curtis; the discursive approach of Harun Farocki; and the adoption of un-fittedness as an act of dissensus in my own art practice. These models are explained through the image and motion theories of Sergei Eisenstein, who brought to the screen the technical, aesthetic, and ideological potentials of montage, after which other more recent models of montage are examined.
“Microwaves bounce between billions of cell phones. Computers synchronize. Shipping containers stack, lock, and calibrate the global transportation and production of goods. Credit cards, all sized 0,76 mm, slip through the slots in cash machines anywhere in the world. – – In the retinal afterglow is a soupy matrix of details and repeatable formulas that generate most of the space in the world – what we might call infrastructure space –“ These are the words by which the introduction to the dystopian story of our contemporary infrastructure called Extrastatecraft by the architect and philosopher Keller Easterling begins. In Extrastatecraft, Easterling attempts to describe the prevailing political conditions of the global digital and physical capitalist system. Whereas the word “infrastructure” typically conjures associations with physical constructs and networks, I propose, following up on Easterling’s thought, that we should treat any infrastructure, especially the vast, unseen digital one, as a powerful setting that controls our lives to a certain extent. The sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour has written that networks and infrastructure are active and composed of both social and technological actors. I propose that any activist needs to consider and reflect upon their position in this field very carefully before taking any action. I will illustrate this situation via the practical example of the images of terrorism. As Boris Groys has written in his essay The Fate of Art in the Age of Terror, “the contemporary mass media has emerged as by far the largest and most powerful machine for image production”. With Groys’s essay being originally published in 2005, only four years after the 9/11 terrorist acts, we can certainly now over 10 years later with more terrorist attacks having occurred since, extrapolate that mass media image production has indeed become the most common way we tend to treat these acts of vulgar violence. What then, is the role of critical, activist aesthetics and the critique of representation here? What about the implications of all of this for contemporary activism – and especially, political or critical art?
Introducing Paranoid Fixations Art and political discourses since 9/11
2017
Global terrorism has presaged the emergence of new security states accompanied by heightened levels of social anxiety and irrational fear. This thesis investigates how contemporary screen and digital cultures have fuelled a collective sensibility of paranoia since the September 11 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre towers—a catalyst from which spectacles of irrational fear have emerged through global media networks. I contend that the escalating culture of paranoia, animated by the screen and digital media circuits of post 9/11, has resulted in a fixation with the repetitious potential of disaster as media events, which in turn becomes part of public consciousness. The thesis considers recent work by artists alert to this dynamic such as Gregor Schneider, Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, and Jane and Louise Wilson, all of whom are increasingly conscious of the power of contemporary screen and visual cultures in escalating societal fears.
Aesthetics of Terror: Reflections on Post-9/11 Literature and Visual Culture
Doctoral Dissertation, 2014
This dissertation project investigates cultural responses to visual representations of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. I examine the aesthetics, contexts, movements, and politics of post-9/11 visual culture across a range of media with a primary focus on photography and fiction. Recent scholarly articles and book length surveys on post-9/11 culture overwhelmingly charge popular literary and visual texts with participating in the reproduction of hegemonic norms and supporting a regressive climate of anti-feminism, hyper-masculinity, and reactionary politics. I contend that many scholars have actually foreclosed alternative interpretations and the production of new knowledge regarding post-9/11 literature and visual culture in the pursuit to reveal dominant ideologies at work. This project unfolds in three main sections, each of which develops "reparative readings" of visual and literary texts in an attempt to redeem valuable political, ethical, and affective aspects of post-9/11 visual culture that scholars have previously discounted or overlooked. The first section outlines post-9/11 victory culture and American exceptionalism through corporate media suppression of Richard