Beskrivelse
The history of modern warfare can be defined as one of growing remoteness. The juxtaposition of military practices and perceptual technologies of remote seeing, sensing and targeting, described by Virilio as the “perceptual logistics of war”, has thrust modern war into a paradigm of violence-at-a-distance. More recently, remote warfare (including, but not limited to drone wars), relying on complex operations that involve data surveillance, algorithmic analysis, and black-boxed practices, has further entrenched the idea that remoteness leads to less human injury by removing bodies from the physical battlefield. But for whom is war remote? Whose bodies are invulnerable to injury? And what sorts of experiences are being erased by the very notion of remote warfare?Recent scholarship has begun to scrutinize the idea of remoteness, emphasizing that the “distancing technologies” employed in contemporary warfare, while enabling long-range violence, also produce new intimacies. Yet, this notion of intimacy has a violent colonial history that the apparent newness of drone technologies is currently obliterating. This paper will discuss this equivocal notion of intimacy by engaging with Richard Mosse’s installation film Incoming (2016), which deals with the perceptual paradox and political effects of contemporary distancing technologies. Filmed with a weapons-grade surveillance technology that can detect the human body from 30.3km, Incoming attempts to subvert military usage of technologies of long-range vision to instead capture the plight of refugees. By attempting to turn a distancing device into a “technology of intimacy”, Incoming complicates current understandings of remoteness and proximity in relation to perceptual technologies of warfare. This presentation will examine how Mosse’s work probes the perceptual and ethical implications of remote violence, problematizing the colonial and gendered dimensions of intimacy at play in nominal remote violence.
| Periode | 4 apr. 2018 → 6 apr. 2018 |
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| Sted for afholdelse | University of Amsterdam, Holland |
| Grad af anerkendelse | International |