Beyond Human Vision: Towards an Archaeology of Infrared Images

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES www.necsus-ejms.org Beyond human vision: Towards an archaeology of infrared images Federico Pierotti & Alessandra Ronetti NECSUS (7) 1, Spring 2018: 185–215 URL: https://necsus-ejms.org/beyond-human-vision-towards-an-archaeology-of-infrared-images/ Keywords: infrared, media archaeology, medical photography, military applications, phototherapy, resolution, surveillance Introduction: Digital infrared visual culture Infrared has an important place in contemporary society, especially since the 1990s, with the introduction of new military display and detection technology and increasingly sophisticated tracking and control systems. In the military field, these uses were quickly followed by the pursuit of various digital image practices in photography, cinema, video art, and computer art, serving to establish what could somewhat be defined as a real ‘infrared visual culture’. It is not an overstatement to say, therefore, that infrared images have become a rather common feature of contemporary visual culture, especially thanks to the use of night vision devices, which capture their typical images with a greenish tint. Since these images were broadcast worldwide by CNN during the Gulf War from 1990-1991, they have circulated widely in both artistic and mainstream circles. In his famous series Nacht (Night, 1992-1996), the Ger- man photographer Thomas Ruff deconstructs the rhetoric behind these very images, showing photographs of anonymous locations in Düsseldorf taken using night vision devices similar to those used by US soldiers during their campaigns in Iraq.[1] In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), one of the most well- known and awarded Hollywood films of its time, the serial killer finds and captures his victim using an infrared viewfinder (Fig. 1). Images produced by these devices have become commonplace for a large number of military- NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES themed films, from Black Hawk Down (2001) and Redacted (2007) to the more recent Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Fig. 1 (a-b): The Silence of the Lambs (1991, video stills). The spread of infrared images in contemporary visual culture is closely tied to aspects of digital technology and resolution. With regard to the former, infrared images are often associated with the technological and visual aspects of digital infrared, requiring an algorithmic process to transform radiation that is invisible to the human eye into visible images. For instance, in her recent study titled Chromatic Algorithms, Carolyn Kane considers digital infrared to be the clearest demonstration of an algorithmic and post-optic model, which sees the image as the result of an output, a transcoding, a simulation determined by algorithms and mathematical models.[2] Within this epistemological approach, today’s digital infrared technology may be seen as map- 186 VOL 7 (1), 2018 BEYOND HUMAN VISION: TOWARDS AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF INFRARED IMAGES ping and data acquisition systems to ensure a perceptual and cognitive ex- tension of the ability to track, store, and manage information flows. Some examples of this are the thermal map, face recognition and territory mapping methods,[3] as well as modern military applications,[4] where the relationship between the real world and the display is constantly mediated by data and information algorithms.[5] Even some of the most ardent supporters of digital technology as an on- tological and epistemological turning point have often used greenish infrared images as the effect of an irreversible process of de-realisation and loss of reality. In a passage of The Reconfigured Eye – one of the most influential studies in support of this stance – William J. Mitchell pointed out, for example, that during the Gulf War pilots and tank commanders became cyborgs inseparable from elaborate visual prostheses that enabled them to see ghostly-green, digitally enhanced images of darkened battlefields. There was no Mathew Brady to show us the bodies on the ground, no Robert Capa to confront us with the human reality of a bullet through the head. Instead, the folks back home were carefully selected, electronically captured, sometimes digitally processed images of distant and impersonal destruction. Slaughter became a video game: death imitated art. [6] Therefore, these greenish images have become symbolic of the digital break- through, perhaps even in the film that has most popularised these themes, The Matrix (1999), where the numerical codes scrolling across the Cypher’s screen – despite not having anything to do with infrared imaging – are heavily colour-coded in green, as if the dissemination of night vision images in the visual culture of the 1990s had come to assimilate the colour green with the very theme of virtuality.[7] Indeed, the question appears to be far more complex, both epistemolog- ically and historically. First, as rightly noted by the almost homonymous W.J.T. Mitchell, commenting on the passage quoted above, the infrared images produced by night vision goggles – of a spectral and seemingly de-real- ising nature – allow the human eye to see layers of visibility that would oth- erwise remain inaccessible.[8] Infrared makes it possible to gain a more de- tailed and in-depth knowledge of reality. In this regard, in addition to the subject of digital technology, infrared also entails that of resolution – or more precisely – what may be defined as the images’ resolution capacity. While infrared images seem to spring from the physiological limitations of human vision, they also show the ability to overcome these limitations through the use of apparatuses and devices. The images appear to lack information and PIEROTTI & RONETTI 187 NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES data, especially when compared to the high resolution of daytime vision (both human and mechanical), yet, at the same time, they are able to push vision beyond human limitations. Infrared images are the result of the ina- bility to see with the naked eye and the ability to see the invisible, bringing about a very unique interaction between human vision and mechanical vision and, in turn, between their varying resolution capacities. As such, the relationship between infrared images and the aspects mentioned above must be approached in a dialectic way, beyond any technological determinism and based on the various notions of reality and truth that underpin science and common sense. An image that might provide an extremely high level of information to a doctor or military serviceperson may at the same time provide impetus to what the German artist Hito Steyerl called the Lumpenpro- letariat of the contemporary iconosphere.[9] In addition to night vision, the world of images produced through infrared technology must also include the group of thermal images which – as we will address in greater depth later on – operate on a different wavelength. Introduced for military purposes like the previous ones, they too have given rise to different civilian uses from the 1990s onwards, and have also come to penetrate the field of visual arts and mainstream cinema. Let us now briefly look at two examples located at the two chronological extremes of this historical phenomenon. The first is the film Predator (1987), in which the central character (an invisible extra-terrestrial presence) has a considerable ad- vantage over humans with its vision capabilities that extend beyond the limitations of the visible spectrum. This extraordinary vision is presented through a series of thermal images, where different temperature levels are depicted through various colour gradations by way of algorithmic pro- cessing.[10] The second example is the Astro Noise exhibition by the US artist and filmmaker Laura Poitras, held at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2016. The exposition presented a number of immersive installations, com- bining archive materials and technological devices to evoke a reflection on the subject of surveillance in post-9/11 America. One of the installations (Bed Down Location, a term borrowed from military vocabulary to indicate a target) invited viewers to lie down on a kind of large sofa to observe time-lapse images of a starry sky projected above their heads. In the hall, there was a hidden infrared camera which visitors only discover shortly before leaving the exhibition, as they see a screen showing the live thermal images captured by the camera. Here, the use of infrared images as surveillance devices is explicitly thematised. 188 VOL 7 (1), 2018 BEYOND HUMAN VISION: TOWARDS AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF INFRARED IMAGES Why an archaeology of infrared media? Despite its cultural importance, until now infrared imaging has not been particularly successful from a historiographical point of view. Indeed, in tech- nical terms, there is an increase in the number of manuals and websites ded- icated to these practices,[11] whilst in historical and cultural terms, there are no major contributions retracing the visual history of infrared, which started at the beginning of the 19th century with the discovery of radiation beyond the two limits of the visible spectrum: infrared and ultraviolet. The visual history of infrared is particularly topical and relevant given that digital infrared may now be seen as a post-optic culture paradigm where the key role of information algorithms calls into question the subject of vision. In this regard, infrared images are a chapter still very much to be written within that set of practices that Thomas Elsaesser defined through the formula of the three S/Ms: surveillance and military applications; surgery and medicine; and sen- soring and monitoring.[12] As we shall see, the history of infrared appears to be intimately connected to this triple set of visual practices. Based on the premise briefly introduced above, this article aims to outline what may be defined as an ‘archaeology of digital infrared’. The use of the word ‘archaeology’ is obviously not by chance; in the specific context of this study, it will refer in particular to the need to construct alternate histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point teleologically to the present media-cultural condition as their ‘perfec- tion’.

Load more