Quoted in Teju Cole, Blind Spot (Penguin Random House, 2017), 42.
Harun Farocki proposed the notion of the “actionable image” in his lecture “Computer Animation Rules” at IKKM in Weimar on July 7, 2014, after encountering Alexander Galloway’s concept of the “actionable object” in his Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Cultures (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
In Politics and Speed (1977), Paul Virilio develops the idea of “dromology,” which he defines as the “science (or logic) of speed.” He uses the term in the context of discussions about technical vitalism and the militarization of society.
Introducing the notion of inhuman here relates to Reza Negarestani’s proposal of “inhumanism,” or the machinic, which, as I understand it, suggests an approach to unsettle the humanist imperative of European enlightenment, or the anthropos, in relation to a politics of thought as a modern system of knowledge.
Farocki, “Computer Animation Rules,” 2014.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), 38. In this book, Azoulay argues that we need to re-historize the invention of photography, seeing it as not solely a technological medium, but as an instrument of domination employed by the centuries-long, massive violent projects of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery.
Harun Farocki, “Computer Animation Rules,” 2014.
Oraib Toukan, “Toward a More Navigable Field,” in “Navigation Beyond Vision, Part 1,” ed. Doreen Mende and Tom Holter, special issue, e-flux journal, no. 101 (June 2019) →.
In February 2008, less than one year after Apple introduced the multi-touch technology for consumer products, around two hundred patents had already been filed for the iPhone alone. See Bryan Gardiner, “Can Apple Patent the Pinch? Experts Say It’s Possible,” Wired, February 2008 →.
Harun Farocki uses his hands to form a frame in many of his films—for example in Interface (1996) and The Expression of Hands (1997). The frame-gesture also plays a role in Abbas Kiarostami’s Life and Nothing More (1992).
The current whereabouts of the painting reads like a detective story of the global art trade. It was meant to be on display at the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2017. Yet so far it hasn’t turned up. Some stories say that it has been exhibited on Prince Badr’s yacht. It has also been reported that the real buyer behind Prince Badr is Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the deputy prime minister of the country.
Marco Zhanhang Liang, Michael T. Goodrich, and Shuang Zhao, “On the Optical Accuracy of the Salvator Mundi,” December 2019, arXiv:1912.03416.
Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 74.
In War at a Distance (2003), Harun Farocki shows images of a test flight involving the television bomb, and states that it was never used in combat.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Autonomedia, 2013), 118.
The art critic Brian Wallis analyzed daguerreotypes portraying slaves named Renty and Delia in South Carolina in 1850, taken by a Swiss photographer who sought to justify racial segregation by visual means. See Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: The Slave Daguerreotypes of Louis Agassiz,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 12 (Summer 1996): 102–6. (To deprive him of the valorizing economy of visibility, I cross out the name of the Swiss photographer, whose name still adorns streets and mountains in Switzerland. Thanks to antoine simeão schalk for alerting me to the latter.)
In addition to Cole’s book, see Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 1850.
Azoulay mentions but does not elaborate on Sojourner’s act of speaking truth to visual power. But she does discuss the lawsuit that Tamara Lanier brought against Harvard University regarding the 1850 photographs of Renty and Delia, who she claims are her ancestors. See Azoulay, Potential History, 146.
See Glenn Ligon, I Sell the Shadow to Sustain the Substance (2006), a neon light installation inspired by Sojourner Truth.
Jodi Dean, “Faces as Commons: Secondary Visuality of Communicative Capitalism,“ Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, 2016.
The vocabulary used here is adapted from Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012); Benjamin Bratton, “The Interface Layer,“ in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015); and Jodi Dean, “Faces as Commons.”
“Montage is noticeable as montage, editing tries not to be noticed.”—this is how Harun Farocki summarized the East-West formula for West Berlin students. Quoted in Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, 27.
Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, 28.
Hito Steyerl, “Bubble Vision,” lecture, January 28, 2018, STAMPS School of Art and Design.
Quoted in Alla Gadassik, “Ėsfir’ Shub on Women in the Editing Room: ‘The Work of Montazhnitsy’ (1927),” in Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, no. 6 (2018).
Toukan, “Toward a More Navigable Field.” Updating the frame is computed by frame-per-second (fps) as well as by the unit of “chunk” in video-gaming such as Minecraft. The higher the fps, the better the fluidity of the navigational image and the faster the action; the higher the rate of chunk the better the rendering of distance and more quickly exhaustible the memory space as well as energy.
Negarestani uses this phrase in the context of a discussion about his geophilosophical understanding of the regional-universal relation. See Reza Negarestani, “Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism,” Identities 8, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 25–54.
Thomas Elsässer, “Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12, no. 3 (2017): 214–29. Elsässer’s approach does not, however, problematize technological labor in regard to gender politics. For this, see the work of theorists and writers Sadie Plant and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who examine the proximity between invisible labor and female labor in computational technologies.
I am thinking of the video installations Serious Games (2009) and Parallel 1–4 (2014) by Harun Farocki; the desktop documentary Transformers: The Premake (2014) by Kevin B. Lee; the video essay Against the POV (2016) by Clemens von Wedemeyer; the performance In Rotation for Projection and Monitor #1 (2017) by Sondra Perry; the desktop video Nucleus of the Great Union (2018) by the Otolith Group; and the spatial audio performance ANXIETIN (2018) by Hannah Black, Bonaventure, and Ebba Fransén Waldhör, among others.
Ibid., 20.
This text is dedicated to filmmaker, writer, and friend Harun Farocki (1944–2014). I would like to thank Julieta Aranda, Kaye Cain-Nielsen, Kodwo Eshun, Brian Kuan Wood, Charles Heller, Tom Holert, Volker Pantenburg, and Susan Schuppli for conversations on navigational problematics, as well as the students in the CCC RP Master Program at HEAD Genève, specifically those participating in the Curatorial/Politics seminar researching the question “What is Navigation?”