Harun Farocki: "Auge / Maschine I-III" - Filmpräsentation

Harun Farocki "Auge / Maschine I-III", 2001-2003

The film cycle "Eye/Machine I-III" by Harun Farocki gathers visual material from both the military and civilian sectors. In doing so, he addresses the difference and similarity between humans and intelligent (weapons) technologies, computer-controlled image processing, the use of global and tactical early warning systems, such as C3I (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence), and the use of special software to produce operational images.

Harun Farocki (*1944) has made some eighty award-winning cinema and television productions over the past thirty years. With his discourses on images, cinema and politics, he is considered one of the most important representatives of contemporary documentary film.

Harun Farocki: Auge/Maschine I

"Auge/Maschine I", 2001, 25 min.
The film centers on images of the Gulf War, which caused a worldwide sensation in 1991. In the shots of projectiles approaching the target, the bomb and the reporter were identical, according to a thesis by philosopher Klaus Theweleit. At the same time, the photographed and the (computer) simulated images were indistinguishable. With the loss of the "authentic image," the historical testimony of the eye was also annulled. It is said that in the Gulf War it was not new weapons that were used, but a new image policy. Here, the foundations of electronic warfare were laid.

"Auge/Maschine II", 2002, 15 min
How can the distinction between "man" and "machine" still be grasped in today's state of technology? In modern weapons technology, the categories are shifting: The intelligent is no longer a matter for humans alone. In Eye / Machine II, Farocki assembles footage from both the military and civilian sectors that shows how machines operate intelligently, and what they see when they work on the basis of image processing programs. The traditional man-machine distinction is here shortened to that of "eye/machine," with eyes implanted in the machines themselves as cameras.Still through the Gulf War, civilian production received a boost of innovation from war technologies for its own development. Farocki shows computer-simulated images like from science fiction movies: missiles head for islands lying in the glitter of the sea, apartment blocks blow up, fighter planes bombard each other with missiles and light virtual flares for defense.... These battlefields from the computer, are they enough - or do we need next rationalization pushes for new wars?

"Auge/Maschine III", 2003, 15 min.
The third part of the eye/machine cycle is meant to organize the materials around the concept of the operative image. These are images that do not reproduce a process, that are rather part of a process. Already the cruise missiles of the 80s had stored the image of a real landscape and took an actual image during the overflight, the software compared the two images. A comparison of idea and fact, a juxtaposition of pure war and the impurity of the real. This juxtaposition is also a montage, montage is always looking for similarity/difference. Many operational images are crisscrossed by colored guide lines that are meant to represent the work of recognition. The lines communicate emphatically what is important in the images and just as emphatically what is not to be important under any circumstances. The surplus real is denied - a constant denial with a counter-effect. (HF)