Tanja Engelberts
6th July 2020
The Power of Ten: A New Turn(er) of Events by Neil Cooper
11th July 2020The images on our screens won’t stay still. But are they passive or active? At any rate, they are not just pictures. We know this –but what else do we know? What would be the consequences of their agency, for example? In the contemporary era, as Jacob Lund shows us here, we have to understand images ‘not as a rendition of reality’ (Hito Steyerl) but as active relational ‘nodes of energy’ (Steyerl) migrating incessantly through time and space with global affects.
We are currently witnessing some fundamental changes in the conditions and the status of images: More and more images are networked; cameras and screens (portable or fixed) are everywhere; image data is geotagged; databases can be navigated in real-time; the prevalence of the phenomena of operative images and “machine vision” detached from human control and sense-perception rapidly increases, etc. These transformations are of course closely connected to the digitalization and the digital production of images, which has raised a number of interesting questions about their material support and the infrastructure of their dissemination, about connectivity, circulation, distribution, formats, etc. At first sight, these changes are happening primarily at a technical and infrastructural level – the digital transformation of the image as a shift from geometry to algorithm, from projection to processing, from passive and fixed representational form to active and multiplatform[1] – but naturally they problematize also the cultural and social significance of images and the role of the human subject. In other words, they shift how we see – or do not see – the world, ourselves, and each other.
As historian and media scholar Mark Poster has remarked,
“networked computing places in the hands of the general population information machines that are linked to their existences in fundamental ways. […] [T]he assemblage of human and information machine must be accounted for as a phenomenon unprecedented in the array of media technologies, an innovation that is drastically changing the character of culture. For the human/information machine link introduces new configurations of the binaries of space and time, body and mind, subject and object, producer and consumer, indeed all the constituents that form cultures.”[2]
And because of this digitization and computerization, of which philosopher Jean-François Lyotard already spoke in The Postmodern Condition in 1979, media-enabled people all over the globe are now taking part in a new global infrastructure of the senses – an infrastructure that decisively informs the ways in which we perceive and experience the world, ourselves and each other. We – or at least the large majority of us – live in a tendentially globalized digital society where big data, algorithms and surveillance are put into extensive operation with immense political, social and psychological consequences. Today, our lifeworld – surrounding and invading the spaces of art, this enunciational framework that we are used to grant relative autonomy – is highly mediated and digitally networked.
Therefore, the conditions for politically engaged art, for questioning the present, have changed, as our present and its temporal quality is not the same. Our experience of the very categories of the present and presence has changed, and this changing status and experience of presence also affects our relation to images and how they operate. Chronological progression has been challenged by anachronic approaches to time that perceive the present as being informed by a multitude of different times and temporalities; not only by the past and the future but also by other times and temporalities on a horizontal or spatial plane, and times and temporalities are now being interconnected at a global scale. “Material” space seems to be overcome by computational technology that, for instance, allows us to talk to each other in so-called real-time across vast physical distances, via skype or FaceTime. In this way, the contemporary present is composed of a number of interconnected temporalities, “material” as well as “immaterial”.[3]
Our present, or the contemporary present, is defined by contemporaneity – understood as the interconnection of different heterogeneous times, histories and temporalities in the same present – and it is defined by contemporaneity as a condition.[4] This formation of our present by an intensified global or planetary interconnectedness of different times and experiences of time – this condition of contemporaneity – is to be regarded as something historically new; something that makes our present, the present present, qualitatively different from previous presents. The contemporaneity that the contemporary present relates to is therefore not just another period in a historical developmental narrative, where it could be seen as replacing modernity and the modern. Contemporaneity also has to do with changes in our relation to time itself, and changes in the ways in which we exist in time. The plurality of times today not only has to do with a number of times existing at the same time, in parallel to each other, simultaneously. They interconnect and are being brought to bear on the same present, making up a kind of planetary present, and – at least in principle – a globally generalized sharing of time, even though the possibility of taking part in this interconnection and sharing is most unevenly distributed. We therefore seem to live in an expanded present in which several temporalities, histories, and times take part in what is perceived as present and as presence.
As is well-known digitization technologies have not only altered the ways in which images are reproduced and consumed, but they have also made possible a global circulation of images. Images – as well as texts and sounds – are subject to almost instantaneous global dissemination and access (for instance, via the share functions of the different social media on our mobile phones and computers). The networked architecture of the Internet in particular exposes us to histories and events all over the globe playing out and unfolding in real-time. “One may argue that culture is always already mediated (by language). But,” Mark Poster remarked twelve years ago, “the increasing sophistication, multiplication, and dissemination of information machines change the experience of all culture. Every cultural object now exists in a (potentially) global context.”[5] The images carried by today’s media and computational technology therefore play a highly significant role in shaping the experience and the coming into being of contemporaneity, this temporality of globality itself. Contemporaneity and the role of the tendentially globalized image-space brought into being by the technological infrastructure are, however, double-sided: What has come and still comes into being is not only a contemporaneity of differences, but also a contemporaneity that allows for synchronization and standardization in the service of globalized capitalism.
In his 1988 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle Marxist theorist, filmmaker and founder of the Situationist International, Guy Debord remarks that “images chosen and constructed by someone else have everywhere become the individual’s principal connection to the world he formerly observed for himself,” and that – with regard to the spectacle’s instruction – “the computer’s binary language is an irresistible inducement to the continual and unreserved acceptance of what has been programmed according to the wishes of someone else and passes for the timeless source of a superior, impartial and total logic.”[6] Even if Debord writes of the global spectacle he does not – and perhaps could not in 1988 when global contemporaneity had not yet become a condition to the extent it is today – consider the wider implications of this globality and how contemporaneity affects our experience of time and history.[7] (And, considering climate change, the so-called “Anthropocene”, etc., we should perhaps now speak of planetarity rather than globality, following historian Dipesh Chakrabarty.) Debord does, of course, title the fifth chapter of The Society of the Spectacle (La société du spectacle from 1967, where he first presents his notion of the spectacle) “Time and History” and describes a society that has become detached from its capacity to consciously shape and determine its own future, and a condition in which individuals become alienated from their ability to shape and direct their own time,[8] but the historical crisis or presentism he describes is – like most notions of postmodernity – still located within a very Western context with a very Western prehistory.
What I would propose to call the contemporary society of the spectacle calls for critical attention to the workings of the networked image and the image-economy or iconomy of which it takes part, as the global circulation of images and the workings of new media realities, digital culture and network relations, rather than those of place, increasingly seem to mediate social relations and the social imaginary. The society of the spectacle not only concerns an accumulation of images: “The spectacle is not a collection of images;” Debord explains in paragraph 4 of The Society of the Spectacle, “rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”[9] Yet, as art historian Claire Bishop remarks, social relations today are not mediated by monodirectional media imagery (as theorized by Debord in 1967) but through the interactive screen, “activating” us and training us as “prosumers” who coproduce content, rather than passively consuming what is devised for them[10] – but who most of the time only act as nodes of circulation. “[W]e respond to a selfie with other selfies, one image follows another, with algorithms recording these exchanges within a vast economy of attention,” as co-curator Emmanuel Alloa writes in a catalogue text for the exhibition The Supermarket of Images recently on show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.[11]
What film scholar Pasi Väliaho calls “biopolitical screens” constitute the imagery that currently composes our affective and conceptual reality, producing and articulating our lived experience, as well as foreclosing alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Images are powerful as they modulate feelings, gestures and thinking, that bear on how we structure existence and how we define and perceive social space.[12] Images, in other words, seem to become more and more decisive in the distribution of the sensible, in determining what can be seen and sensed, and what makes sense (what constitutes our common sense). Images inform our imaginative capacity as the imagination operates as a hinge between the collective and the individual, between the material and the mental; and we use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present – including a qualitatively different future.
My point is that the question of the image and of our relation to images has gained ever more importance since Guy Debord’s classic analysis of the society of the spectacle more than 50 years ago. In relation to Debord’s Society of the Spectacle philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes: “The ‘becoming-image’ of capital is nothing more than the commodity’s last metamorphosis, in which exchange value has completely eclipsed use value and can now achieve the status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty over life in its entirety, after having falsified the entire social production.”[13] It seems, however, that our relation to images is even more complex than what it appeared in 1967. The spectacle is not merely external to us, it is part of who we are, part of our consciousness, and – as mentioned above – it strongly influences the ways in which we experience the world, our social reality, and ourselves. “We are not,” philosopher Jacques Rancière remarks,“in front of the images; we are in the middle of them, just as they are in the middle of us. The question is to know how to circulate among them, and how to get them to circulate as well.”[14]
Our relation to images and language is of vital importance as they are the media through which we are subjectified and desubjectified, individuated and disindividuated, as well as the media through which we communicate and form communities. As psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan teaches us, we receive the image of ourselves from an external image (a mirror), or – as linguist Émile Benveniste and Giorgio Agamben argue – we become subjects through appropriation of the linguistic shifter ‘I’, that is, from symbolic media that are external to us, so to speak. Reflecting upon how to think with or in continuation of Debord today, in the age of the complete triumph of the spectacle, Agamben writes in his “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle” from 1990:
“It is evident, after all, that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity and linguistic being of humans. This means that an integrated Marxian analysis should take into consideration the fact that capitalism (or whatever other name we might want to give to the process dominating world history today) not only aimed at the expropriation of productive activity, but also, and above all, at the alienation of language itself, of the linguistic and communicative nature of human beings, of that logos in which Heraclitus identifies the Common. The extreme form of the expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, in other words, the politics in which we live.”[15]
The spectacle is an expropriation of our common language and images, of our very communicativity. This expropriation calls for a re-appropriation, a re-familiarization; it calls for a creative or imaginative destruction and a puncture of the alienating spectacle in order to save our very communicativity, our community etc. A few pages later on Agamben continues: “in the society of the spectacle it is this very communicativity, this generic essence itself […], that is being separated in an autonomous sphere. What prevents communication is communicability itself; human beings are kept separate by what unites them. Journalists and the media establishment (as well as psychoanalysts in the private sphere) constitute the new clergy of such an alienation of the linguistic nature of human beings.”[16]
What we share in Common, what ties us together, that through which we individuate ourselves, that through which our human community is made possible, namely language – comprising images as well as verbal language – has been alienated and expropriated by the media establishment; has been separated in an autonomous sphere, dissociated from the speaking and communicating human subjects. This expropriation is related to what philosopher Bernard Stiegler – in continuation of his fellow philosopher Gilbert Simondon – calls a short-circuiting of trans-individuation, which leads to a dis-individuation of the individuals that take part – or that were meant to take part – in the social and the symbolic exchange.[17] Stiegler’s concept of “transindividuation” does not refer exclusively to the individuated I or to the inter-individuated we, but designates the process of co-individuation within a pre-individuated milieu or medium in which the I and the we are interdependent and in which they are transformed through one another.[18] Transindividuation takes place through an “associated symbolic milieu” where all members belonging to this milieu participate in the milieu and are functions of it.[19] Transindividuation, then, conditions all social transformation; and images – media and technologies of communication – are pharmacological, both poison and remedy, and can be part of processes of both trans- and dis-individuation.
As our culture becomes more and more digitalized, images are open to a tendentially global social distribution via the internet. The digitally produced and distributed images transform our social relations.As philosopher and art theorist Peter Osborne remarks in relation to digital photography (but I think it in many ways pertain to images in general):
“The dense and extended yet contingent social actualization of the quantitative potential of the indefinite proliferation of visualizations produces a qualitative transformation in the social space, the functions and hence meanings of the images produced. It is not just images of migrancy that exhibit the politics of a crisis-ridden globalization […], but equally the migrancy of the image itself. There is an inherent tendency in the distributive networks of the digital image to move the image on.”[20]
This continuous moving on of the image – postproducing, launching and accelerating it, what artist and writer Hito Steyerl has called circulationism,[21] – “affects not only the ontology of the image (the de-realization of which is intensified by the multiplication of its instances), but also the ontology of the social field across which it is distributed, since that field is now partly constituted by this distribution.”[22] Increasingly, the digitally produced and distributed image “lives” and has social actuality, as Osborne calls it, through its relations to and transformation into other images, within a tendentially globalized image-space – rather than through a direct relationship with “the real”, even if the content of the individual image is indexically derived.[23]
The tendentially globalized image-space and the contemporary society of the spectacle that dominates this space seem, in other words, to lead a separate life in a semi-autonomous sphere which nevertheless mediates our social relations, and gives us a sense of taking part and living in a kind of globally or planetarily shared present – the networked and distributed image is not only here and now, it is (in principle) everywhere.
As hinted at, I think this points to the need for critical artistic thematizations and articulations of this tendentially globalized, networked image-space – to a need for the creation of dynamic, “transindividuating”, if you want, relationships with the images that surround us. Circulationism makes it harder to engage with the images, but not impossible.
Image scholar W. J. T. Mitchell’s distinction between a picture and an image might be useful in this context. According to Mitchell, a picture is a material object, which can be burnt, broken or torn, whereas an image is what appears in a picture, and what survives its destruction; in memory, in narrative, in copies and traces in other media. The picture is the image as it appears in a concrete material support or a specific place, it is the embodiment of an image. An image can be thought of as an immaterial entity, a phantasmatic appearance that comes to life in a specific material support.[24] To this I would add that an image is dependent on recognition – in line with philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin’s notion of “the image in the now of its recognizability”[25] – an image is dependent upon the involvement of a human agent; it is something that develops out of the spectator’s relation with the image.Or, as filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard has put it with reference to his artistic practice of montage: “But an image doesn’t exist. This is not an image, it’s a picture. The image is the relation with me looking at it dreaming up a relation at [sic]someone else. An image is an association.”[26] The spectator so to speak animates the image.
It is therefore a decisive aspect of the work of art – as noun and as verb – that it, at least implicitly, is addressing a viewer, someone, who is invited to take part in its process of signification and production of meaning; not least with a view to the proliferation of machine imagery that operates independently of human perception and cognition.These “operative images” are in filmmaker and author Harun Farocki’s definition in the first part of his three-part installation Eye/Machine from 2001-2003 “images without a social goal, not for edification, not for reflection” – they “do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation.”[27] Today, in the words of artist Trevor Paglen,
“most of the images in the world are descendants of the ‘operational’ images in Eye/Machine: namely images made by machines for other machines. From quality control systems in manufacturing to Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) throughout cities, and from retail motion tracking systems in supermarkets and malls to automated pattern-recognition systems in military drones, images are operating upon the world on a scale orders of magnitude greater than at the moment of Eye/Machine.”
Furthermore, nowadays operational images are overwhelmingly invisible (uninterpretable to the human eye, the meat-eye), even as they are ubiquitous, actively regulating and intervening in everyday life and sculpting physical reality in ever more dramatic ways.[28] (According to Paglen, digital images are revolutionary because they are fundamentally machine-readable and can only be seen by humans in special circumstances and for short periods of time. This machine-readability of digital images allows for the automation of vision on an enormous scale.[29])
Machine vision, however, does not see an image in the Godardian sense; it merely registers and processes pictures (visible and invisible). Simply put, what Trevor Paglen does in his artistic practice is to try to let us view the world as the machines see it; through this address and communicative act he in a certain sense creates an image out of the pictures that to a large extent make up our social field. [30] For instance, in the work From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ recently on show at the Barbican in London, which is described in the following way:
“Explore the underbelly of our digital world in this exhibition revealing the powerful, and often hidden, forces at play in artificial intelligence. Artist Trevor Paglen’s new Curve commission takes as its starting point the way in which AI networks are taught how to ‘see’ and ‘perceive’ the world by taking a closer look at image datasets. Paglen has incorporated approximately 30,000 individually printed photographs, largely drawn from ImageNet, the most widely shared, publicly available dataset. This dataset is archived and pre-selected in categories by humans, and widely used for training AI networks. In some cases, the connotations of categories are uncontroversial, others, for example ‘bad person’ or ‘debtors’, are not. These categories, when used in AI, suggest a world in which machines will be able to elicit forms of judgement against humankind. Discover how the advent of autonomous computer vision and AI has developed, rife with hidden politics, biases and stereotypes.”[31]
Paglen’s work demonstrates that deciding what images mean is the root of power. Computer vision and AI operate according to image taxonomies – relationships between images and concepts/meanings – that are often highly political rather than merely objective descriptions and classifications, for instance with regard to gender and race. The norms that guide the meanings given to the images of the AI training sets are in many ways supporting the spectacle (and part of its complex of visuality in visual culture scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terminology), and the constant endeavor to extract value from us.
In fact, one of the characteristics of what I propose to call the contemporary society of the spectacle is its increasing integration of operational images and machine vision. One could here think of sociologist and architectural theorist Benjamin Bratton’s oft-quoted concept of “the Stack”. According to Bratton smart grids, cloud computing, mobile software and smart cities, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing and robotics are not unrelated genres of computation but constitute a larger aligned and coherent whole, an accidental megastructure in the form of a planetary-scale computing system.[32] Bratton’s notion of the Stack marks the interconnection of all these multiple layers and the interpenetration between digital and analogue times, and technological, material and human times – bringing into being a kind of planetary instantaneity, a present in which everyone and everything takes part. In this way “The Stack” may be seen as a way of visualizing the technological infrastructure that enables contemporaneity and the coming together of times on a planetary scale. Across the Stack, however, technical, social, human and nonhuman layers of temporality are folded together in what theorist and activist Tiziana Terranova – in the article “Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the automation of the Common” – understands as an “infrastructure of autonomization” that, in fact, does not seem to enhance but, rather, to limit our operational and imaginative potential.[33]
My point is that machine vision and operational images seep into and penetrate our contemporary image-space and co-constitute it. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, operational images and machine vision are technical Apparate that act on the human “sensorium”, and take part in configuring and organizing “the Medium of perception” (Medium der Wahrnehmnung).[34] According to Benjamin sensory experience – the forms and rhythms of perception, the extension and coordinates of the visible, the audible, the tactile, etc. – has a history that is determined by the different ways in which a historically evolving set of such technical Apparate was acting on the human sensorium. The term “Medium” here indicates the spatially extended environment, the milieu, the atmosphere, the umwelt in which perception take place.[35] So, in Benjaminian terms, the operational images take part in a reorganization of our “Medium of perception”, of the environment or milieu in which perception occurs – and which co-determines our imaginative potential.
What interests me is the agency of the contemporary networked image and its ability to shape and affect people, politics and social systems. I am particularly interested in ways in which different aesthetic and artistic practices intervene in and reconfigure our surrounding image-space and may be said to bring what Jacques Rancière has called “pensive images” into being. Pensive images invite us to pay attention to the image, to how it becomes an image, and how it functions, to what it does – what it affirms and makes seen, and what it blinds us from seeing and leaves invisible. The notion of the pensive image refers to a zone of indeterminacy between the passive and the active, between the image as duplicate of a thing – as a representation or reproduction of the world – and the image as artistic operation – as creative agent – and also to a zone of indeterminacy between non-art and art; between the image as part of society’s image-circulation, parading as a representation, on the one hand, and the image as resistance, a space for imagination, on the other. The connected and distributed images constituting our contemporary image-space allow, to give an example instead of a conclusion, for aesthetic practices such as those carried out by the interdisciplinary research agency Forensic Architecture that seeks to invert the institutionalized forensic gaze – of actors like police, militaries, secret services, border agencies that usually seek to monopolize information – and in its “counter-forensic” “image-generation” uses images, footage and other material, gathered mainly from social networks and online sources, as testimonies to political violence and human rights violations, operating simultaneously in the art world (as Turner Prize nominees and exhibiting at the Whitney, ICA, documenta, etc.) and in juridical and social activist contexts (including as expert witnesses in courts of law). It is – to paraphrase Harun Farocki – a matter of making the images testify against themselves.
[1] Aud Sissel Hoel, “Operative Images: Inroads to a New Paradigm of Media Theory” (2018), https://monoskop.org/images/7/76/Hoel_Aud_Sissel_2018_Operative_Images_Inroads_to_a_New_Paradigm_of_Media_Theory.pdf. Hoel draws upon Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie, Softimage. Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2015), pp. 3-4.
[2] Mark Poster, “Global Media and Culture”, New Literary History, 39.3 (Summer 2008), pp. 685-703: 689.
[3] Cf. also Christiane Paul, “The Myth of Immateriality: Presenting and Preserving New Media”, in Oliver Grau, ed., MediaArtHistories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 251-274: 252, regarding the material components of digital dematerialization: “[I]mmateriality is not a fiction but an important element of new media that has profound effects on artistic practice, cultural production, and reception, as well as the curatorial process. At the same time, this immateriality cannot be separated from the material components of the digital medium. A more productive approach to understanding this tension may be Tiziana Terranova’s definition of immateriality as ‘links between materialities’”.
[4] Cf. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013); Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity”, Critical Inquiry 32.4 (Summer 2006), pp. 681-707, and, of the same author, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and The Contemporary Composition (Berlin: Sternberg, 2016).
[5] Poster, 2008, 698.
[6] Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, translated by Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1998 [1967]), 27 and 28-29.
[7] Cf. op.cit., 33, where he writes of “the global spectacle’s present vulgarity”.
[8] Cf. Tom Bunyard, Debord, Time and Spectacle (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
[9] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994 [1967]), §4.
[10] Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media”, Artforum (september 2012), https://www.artforum.com/print/201207/digital-divide-contemporary-art-and-new-media-31944
[11] Emmanual Alloa, “Abstracting,” in The Supermarket of Images, ed. Peter Szendy et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2020), 73-94: 75.
[12] Pasi Väliaho, Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2014), IX.
[13] Agamben, Giorgio: “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle”, in: Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 73-90: 76.
[14] Jacques Rancière, “Die Arbeit des Bildes/The Work of the Image”, in Esther Shalev-Gerz, MenchenDinge/The Human Aspect of Objects (Weimar: Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora, 2006), 8-25: 10.
[15] Agamben, “Marginal Notes”, 82.
[16] Agamben, “Marginal Notes”, 84.
[17] Parts of the following stem from my article “Artistic Re-Appropriation and Reconfiguration of the Medium’s Milieu”, in: The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics no. 44-45 Stockholm 2012-2013, 109-128.
[18] Cf. Stiegler, Bernard; Rogoff, Irit: “Transindividuation”, in: e-flux journal #14 March 2010, 01/06, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/transindividuation/ (found 29.01.2014).
[19] Cf. Stiegler, Bernard: “Technics, Media, Teleology. Interview with Bernard Stiegler”, in: Theory, Culture & Society vol. 24 (7-8), 2007, 334-341: 335.
[20] Peter Osborne, “The Distributed Image”, in The Postconceptual Condition (London: Verso, 2018), 143-44.
[21] Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?”, e-flux journal #49 (November 2013), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/.
[22] Osborne, op.cit.
[23] Ibid.
[24] W. J. T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 16-17.
[25] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 463. In what Benjamin calls “dialectical images” “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” (Ibid.). “[I]mage is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich].” (Ibid.). It effects a counterrythm in the ordinary course of events (cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2000), 117).
[26] Gavin Smith, “Interview: Jean-Luc Godard”, Filmcomment (March/April 1996), https://www.filmcomment.com/article/jean-luc-godard-interview-nouvelle-vague-histoires-du-cinema-helas-pour-moi/.
[27] Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images”, Public no. 29 (2004), 17.
[28] Trevor Paglen, “Operational Images”, e-flux journal #59 (November 2014), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61130/operational-images/.
[29] Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures are Looking at You)”, The New Inquiry (December 2016), https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/.
[30] Also Joanna Zylinska’s Nonhuman Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2017), for instance, is ultimately addressed to perceiving human beings.
[31] https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/trevor-paglen-from-apple-to-anomaly.
[32] Benjamin H. Bratton, “The Black Stack”, in e-flux journal, no. 53 (March 2014), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/53/59883/the-black-stack/ [accessed 29 November 2019].
[33] http://www.euronomade.info/?p=2268 [accessed 1 July 2020]. See also Stamatia Portanova’s forthcoming booklet in The Contemporary Condition-series (Berlin: Sternberg, 2020).
[34] See Antonio Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016), 6-41: 7, who refers to Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (five versions, 1935-1936).
[35] See ibid., 7-8.