Eye/Machine by Harun Farocki Originally uploaded by caterina.

I went to Post CS to the World Wide Video Festival (also home of Mediamatic, which I had a subscription to back when they had a print version). I finally got to see a Pierre Huyghe piece, he of the Big International Reputation, but I was most interested in seeing the Harun Farocki piece that was there, having read the detailed description of another work of his in The Threshold of the Visible World which centered around war and the cultural gaze.

The piece that he had showing at Post CS was called Auge/Maschine I-III which consisted of three double screens shown simultaneously along a wall. The images had been culled from the technology of war, specifically the images generated by the machine "eye". Some of the images were from the Gulf War in 1991, but the images show the arenas of war as seen through the eyes of machines, and the complicity of the human eye in their viewing. The images, originally intended for viewing by war technicians, were broadcast on the international news daily while the war was happening. It was a fascinating and deeply troubling piece. Whose eye is the machine's eye?

LINK | 3:19 AM | TB

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