In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’. By tracing visual representations of the planet across Western history and culture, Peraica provides support for a media-based explanation behind ...

Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup—including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the ...

This conversation with Caren Kaplan introduces the work she has been conducting for her forthcoming book dedicated to a genealogy of aerial photography (and painting) and its militarization leading to the ‘age of the drone’ we currently experience. We begin with the development of the balloon, the progressive learning necessary to understand this new point of view on the world and the simultaneous success of panorama paintings. We then evoke the creation of the British Board of Ordinance and its survey of Scotland as part of the counter-insurrectionist effort to control the terrain against the Jacobites. We conclude the discussion in ...

DRONE is the first issue to be published from the Unmanned, Architecture and Security Series research project and publication series. Drones are unmanned vehicles [UAV]. They are either remotely controlled or, increasingly, autonomously following a pre-programmed mission. Initially, they were developed for use in conflict situations, but the technology also lends itself to a variety of civic purposes, from urban surveillance to monitoring agricultural fields and poaching. UAVs can transport objects, from bombs to books and pizza boxes. In conflict situations they can be used for targeting and killing individuals, but also for providing medical assistance. Drones are cheap to produce and have ...

“Today one may complain that life has been reduced to points in a matrix of relations—cities, territories, and historical narratives prematurely refined into categories of known and unknown, real and virtual, concrete and abstract space.” At the time, we could not have imagined the mass migration into abstract space that would soon follow. Today, living through the planetary pandemic, the imperative to navigate the world and our own lives through computational tools has been radicalized to the extreme. The last months of Skyping, Zoom conferencing, and collaborative Google Docs writing make us feel we have no choice but to exhaust ...

Let’s be clear about something: it is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike that of art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. And compensation—which is money—is not only for feeding lavish lifestyles or taking spontaneous beach vacations. Ask anyone who has children or sick relatives in a country without good health care—which could by now be almost any country, as the administration of life is deferred more and more to the private sphere of personal finance. This only makes the question of ...

Organized in collaboration with Antje Ehmann and Doreen Mende, this issue of e-flux journal pays tribute to Harun Farocki (January 9, 1944–July 30, 2014) with a series of essays and reflections on his work and life by friends, collaborators, film scholars, and admirers. Those who knew Harun personally remember not only the epic influence of his work, but also his generosity as a friend and collaborator. As for us, we have never before dedicated a full issue of e-flux journal to a single artist… Editorial—Harun Farocki Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle A Question They Never Stop Asking Kodwo Eshun Also of Things: Notes for a Film Remembering ...

There is a tension between the requirements of theoretical abstraction and the capacities of the film medium, where everything that we see on screen is concrete: A train arriving at a station, a tree, bodies, faces. Since the complex theories of montage in Soviet cinema, however, there have continuously been attempts to express theoretical issues by combining shots, thus creating a visual form of thinking. This book brings together two major filmmakers—French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and German avant-gardist Harun Farocki to explore the fundamental tension between theoretical abstraction and the capacities of film itself, a medium where everything ...

The catalog “For Ever More Images?” gathers an interdisciplinary group of artists, thinkers, and activists to interrogate the all-seeing eyes and ever-multiplying black boxes that increasingly govern our lives. In the present moment, we use machines to capture almost everything we see; at the same time, we are constantly being photographed by machines without our consent or awareness. Our faces, emotions, habits, beliefs, and data are being collected, stored, and valued in massive and invisible ways, serving warfare, surveillance, global capital, and risk management systems whose aim is to predict the future and produce profit. Our world sometimes feels like ...

For more than thirty years Farocki has been a filmmaker, documentarist, film-essayist and installation artist. What preoccupies him above all is not so much an image of life, but the life of images, as they surround us in the newspapers, the cinema, history books, user manuals, posters, CCTV footage and advertising. His vast oeuvre of some sixty films includes three feature films (Zwischen den Kriegen/Between the Wars, Etwas wird sichtbar: Vietnam/In Your Eyes: Vietnam, Wie Man sieht/As You See), essay films (e.g. Images of the World-Inscription of War), critical media-pieces, experimental work, children’s features for television, historical film essays (e.g. ...

The im/possible images exhibition (15.7.-19.9.2021) at Lothringer 13 Halle, conceptualized by Rosa Menkman and produced by Luzi Gross, presented research-based works by international artists* that open the black box of everyday image processing technologies. Questions they asked were: how do resolutions shape images and how does the process of resolving compromise other forms of rendering? When do aberrations and translations turn into false representations? And how has the field of computer simulation expanded the rules and functioning of our imagery? The contributions gathered in this Reader continue questions and themes of the exhibition project im/possible images in essays, reflections, collections of ...

You are reading this in your browser. I don’t know what kind of device you are using, or which operating system, or which browser in particular (Chrome, Safari, Firefox etc.). But I can describe, with some confidence, a series of nested frames around these words: the TextWork title bar; the browser window, with its own title bar, tabs etc.; perhaps the edges of other programme windows or a desktop ‘behind’ the browser; the operating system menu bar, and perhaps a dock of applications; the rim of the device itself, a perimeter of metal, plastic or glass; and then, framing that, ...