This article approaches conceptual documentary-maker, Richard Mosse’s Incoming (2017) project which turns military-grade thermal imaging technology on migrants at Europe’s southern borders and asks ‘what does it mean to the epistemic figure of the refugee when a thermal imaginary is added to the technologies of bordering?’ It concludes that, although the thermal imaginary amplifies a wider biopolitical logic of dehumanization, it also provides vectors of perception – entropy, conductivity and intensity – which encourage us to re-examine Hannah Arendt’s old trinity of ‘state-territory-people’ that sustain the Westphalian construction of the refugee in relation to bounded territories. In focusing on heat as both index and metaphor, Mosse’s project alerts us to the thermal vectors that propel bodies towards borders, but also to the necessity of finding a place for heat within the tools available for imagining political responses to the challenges posed by a warming world. The thermal borders in Mosse’s project point us to a post-Westphalian redistribution of the sensible in which borders have become simultaneously technologies of separation and markers of proximity, intimacy and touch.
What is drone culture? If we were to survey some of its more recognizable manifestations, we might draw up a list which includes the diffusion of the conventional battlefield, the supposed precision of surgical strikes, and a system of seeing and killing from thousands of miles away. These are the activities of a power that – to us at least – remains largely invisible, for political as much as technical reasons. There is, then, a certain paradox to drone culture: the drone communicates something that *must not* be communicated. The drone is redacted: hidden in plain sight, present but opaque. Accordingly, though we can describe a culture in which the drone, and the consequences of the drone, are normalized, are integral to an increasingly dominant logic of power, the task of expressing this culture in its material, experiential terms proves to be more difficult. So if we had to search for images, we might seize upon the officially sanctioned: Predators, Reapers, military control rooms. But if these images simply underline the invisibility of what takes place behind and beyond them – if they are essentially failures – then we can find different kinds of failure in different cultural expressions of the drone. Specifically, we can find images that are less interesting for their attempts to represent a hidden object and more interesting for the extent to which they draw attention to hiddenness *in itself*. Again, paradoxically, we find this expressed in the drone as zeitgeist, as the omnipresent object of a surveillance culture, of a culture of big data, of a computational culture. This is the drone that appears in pop videos, in marketing campaigns, in political advertisements. Here, our images might be more speculative. They might be generated in the fever dreams of entrepreneurs, they might come with brand names, like ‘PrimeAir’, as in Jeff Bezos’s latest vision, or else they might be dystopian, they might come with slogans like ‘YES WE SCAN’, and ‘1984 is now’, they might take the form of fluorescent peace-drones circling a group of dancers in a tower block courtyard, as in the new video released this week by M.I.A. How, then do we respond critically to both types of image? How do we engage with a phenomenon that is simultaneously invisible and utterly visible? How do we map the middleness of this experience? These are the questions that have motivated this project.
There is a technique for analysing films of National Football League (NFL) games that is known to football coaches as the cut-up. Footage of various offensive and defensive plays are cut, reordered and spliced together to reveal communications, patterns and techniques unseen by the eye in the course of a game. Using this technique, aspects of a specific individual or team’s performance can be more closely studied. In the late 1950s, author William Burroughs used a similar, identically named, technique to cut and rearrange text, audiotape and film, to extend the nervous system of the human body into technology. Both cut-up techniques either expose events past or those yet-to-pass. Similarly, this communique, in response to new technologies, is composed through a cut-up technique that is comparable to a drone-operation: a search for significant patterns in background information, undertaken by employing augmentative technology (search engines) to foreground past and future events. These patterns might be, likewise, selected and employed as a motor to further a pre-existent and perhaps unclear political agenda. The communique ends with a fiction.
Book Review: Gehl, R. (2014). Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism.Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
The relatively short history of satellite technology has illustrated the fact that the space stretching from earth to about 60,000 km above, from traversable airspace through low earth orbit (LEO) up to geostationary orbit (GEO), has become a highly contested and inequitably regulated site of ‘international public affairs’ (Parks, 2013). This space may be considered a ‘natural resource of advanced global civilization’, but it is one without ‘an equally advanced public order for its regulation’ (Wiessner cited in Parks, 2013: 65). Regulation of earth’s vertical publics, for Lisa Parks, has been tied to the often competing interests of scientific innovation, national security, telecommunications and the reconfiguration of ‘the televisual’. Inevitably, what may have been considered by legal scholar Sigfried Wiessner as a natural resource in 1983, has seen successive waves of colonization by wealthy nations and powerful global corporations. Opaque transnational treaties and governing bodies secure decisions far from public scrutiny about how access to the infrastructures of telecommunications and visuality from above is to be allocated and controlled.
