Sensorship: the seen unseen of drone warfare

Contemporary warfare has been significantly transformed by the promotion and implementation of unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) into global military operations. Networked remote sensory vision and the drones’ capability to carry deadly missiles entail and facilitate increasingly individualised, racialised, and necropolitical military practices conceptualised as ‘surgical strikes’ or ‘targeted killings’, all in the name of ‘counterinsurgency’. In the absence of publicly accessible documentations of ‘drone vision’, images of drones themselves constitute what is arguably one of the most contested iconographies of the present. The ethical and legal problems engendered by the virtualisation of violence and the panoptical fantasies of persistent vision and continuous threat interfere with the commercial interests and the publicised ideas of ‘clean’ warfare of the military-industrial-media complex. Drones have become a fetishised icon of warfare running out of human measure and control and are henceforth challenged by activist strategies highlighting the blind spots and victims of their deployment.

Affective image operations

Affective image operations are attempts to influence behaviour and stimulate action by evoking affects through images. The paper explores their forms and uses in political conflict, from video activism to war propaganda. Drawing together interdisciplinary research, the chapter develops a theoretical framework for analysing the affective and political force of still and moving images, arguing that the affective structure of images has four layers: Political affects and emotions are triggered by the specific interplay of visual forms, worlds, messages, and reflections. On the basis of this framework, several frequent types of affective image operations can be distinguished, illustrated by brief case studies of political web videos.

Afterword

James Elkins provides an afterthought to the contributions in this volume, concentrating on five issues: the development of a research agenda, the relation between politics and aesthetics, the interconnections between images and operations, the specific role of visuality, and the awareness of conflicting perspectives on political images. He finally points towards areas and themes that might fruitfully be developed in the future.

Human rights in an age of distant witnesses: remixed lives, reincarnated images and live-streamed co-presence

This chapter explores the practical challenges and opportunities of the current moment in visual activism. Via a series of situated observations from Syria, Burma, the US and elsewhere, it focuses particularly on the ways in which videos, testimonies and imagery of human rights violations are shared from sites of crisis, remixed, and re-purposed by both ‘distant witnesses’ and NGOs. The chapter considers how these image operations reflect the increasingly porous, expanding boundaries of participation in the field of human rights and their impact on issues of representation, unexpected circulation, and other ethical considerations in human rights practice. It also explores how the concept of the live news broadcast is being up-ended and up-dated through the practice of livestreaming from situations in Egypt, Burma, Africa, and Brazil. Within this context the author discusses the possibilities of live and immersive witnessing for human rights, and the conceptual, ethical and practical possibilities of image and experience-based activism at the intersection of trends in live and immersive video, ‘co-presence’ technologies for shared experience at a distance, task-routing technologies and distributed movement technologies.

Exposing the invisible: visual investigation and conflict

This chapter looks at how artists and activists are utilising still and moving images combined with simple digital technologies to investigate political conflicts. Often working with low-tech solutions they explore, document and present complex issues through images that challenge our existing views and provoke new ways of thinking. They present views from above, afar and beyond, developing visual investigations that present slices into unknown worlds and undocumented practices. The images do not solve problems, but open new questions, expanding new possibilities for image activism and political engagement.

Images of terror

In the first part of this chapter pictorial norms that govern the reporting of terror attacks will be analysed. They constitute a frame that shapes expectations and has been in place since the emergence of the phenomenon of modern terror at the end of the nineteenth century. In the second part the question of ethics is raised. Agreeing with many writers that acts of torture and violence need full documentation, but in a form that avoids intensifying the ‘exposure’ of the victim, the author argues that there are instances where we need to actively resist image operations by not participating in their production, circulation and consumption. The chapter concludes by suggesting that in the context of terror it is important to distinguish between affective images that have the power to remind us of the pain of others and those that numb us and should be resisted.

Images that Last? Iraq videos from YouTube to WikiLeaks

On April 3, 2010, WikiLeaks and the Sunshine Press released the Collateral Murder video: a 17-minute clip showing a US Apache attack helicopter firing upon individuals in a Baghdad suburb. Amongst those killed by the 30mm cannon fire were two Reuters journalists. Rooted in the author’s earlier work on the use of YouTube by US soldiers to record everything from the criminal to the light-hearted to the banal, the chapter addresses how this clip (viewed over 15 million times on YouTube, and with myriad copies throughout the Internet) has been used and re-used for a variety of activist purposes over the past 4 years, and how it has contributed to a temporal extension of ‘the battlefield.’ Rather than a somewhat static memorialisation or transcription of war, the Collateral Murder video has been more fluid: entering and re-entering public consciousness as it is linked to news events as they unfold. This chapter discusses the flow and distribution of activist imagery as it is connected to the flow of news and current events.

Image operations: refracting control from virtual reality to the digital battlefield

This chapter examines how control in military contexts is refracted, multiplied, and circulated through the lens of the image. It looks at military developments in networking the battlefield, from visual interface technologies and recruitment games like America’s Army to the Future Combat System that aims to tie all combat forces together through graphical representation. The authors examine the development of imaging technologies that ‘dividualise’ people and tie them into circuits of power that often have little to do with the representational content of the image.

Photographic archives and archival entities

This chapter explores the modus operandi of photographic archives as well as modes of intervention in its operation. Based on the assumption that the event of photography as multiple, as something that may take place even before or without the operation of the camera, and even without photographs to be seen, it proposes and explores different photographic entities: untaken, inaccessible and unshowable photographs. These entities question common descriptions of silences in the archives and ‘missing’ or inexistent photographs, formerly understood as ‘holes’ in or silence of the archive. In the chapter, they are discussed as concrete presences that initiate deliberative processes.

Method, madness and montage: assemblages of images and the production of knowledge

This chapter surveys assemblages of images in the context of art history, anthropology, cinematic production, surveillance, and forensic science. The aim is to uncover both the logic and the flirtation with the a-logical and symptomatic in metapictures of pictorial totalities.