"Cinematography of Devices": Harun Farocki's Eye/Machine Trilogy

Martin Blumenthal-Barby
2015 German Studies Review  
Harun Farocki's 2001 installation Eye/Machine tackles issues of surveillance surrounding the "intelligent" weapon systems deployed in the 1990/91 Gulf War. Farocki is especially interested in the image processing systems behind these weapons, their operational images that are both generated by machines and read by machines-images that require neither human creators nor human spectators. The article examines how Farocki turns these images into aesthetic artifacts even though they were never
more » ... to be seen. Concomitantly, it interrogates our own status as spectators and explores how we can avoid complicity with the imagistic logic of war that Farocki confronts. And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they
doi:10.1353/gsr.2015.0086 fatcat:4x54i2gyarbnli22hmfg3p6npy