project link: Beyond the Violet End of the Spectrum
research question: How does audiovisual media’s inherent capacity to create spectral imagery contribute to processes of subjectification?
This project tackles the urgent need to foreground visual surveillance’s shortcomings in faithfully representing reality. This is done by experimenting and making artworks (films and installations) with CCTV and military Drone footage. Easy to manipulate, analogue photography fostered nineteenth century Spirit Photography’s polemic practice of allegedly portraying ghosts through a mechanical process. Criteria to ensure a faithful representation of material reality were based on photography’s inherent capacity to embody the referent, differentiating between real and fake evidence. These criteria were disregarded by the so-called “immateriality” of the digital. However, demonstrations showing that forms of digital materiality do exist also identify the presence of “digital referents”. This project stages experiments to look for digital referent-producing processes and (re)create the conditions for spectral imagery to occur.
partners: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Boston), Drones Research Centre (Bard College, NY), Harun Farocki Institute (Berlin), among others.