The program includes three full-length films—As You See, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, War at a Distance—and single-channel versions of the video installations Serious Games and Parallel.
All of these videos are part of the broad circle of works in which Farocki correlates the paradigms of war and industrial production with the development of the (moving) image, showing the role of virtual worlds in the cycle of production of violence and demonstrating the at times contradictory influence of digital images on the entire visual paradigm.
Operational images is a term proposed by Harun Farocki for describing a new type of image (not always accessible to the human eye) that ensures the calculation, modeling, monitoring, and functioning of technological systems. In other words, it produces actions that change reality. Facial recognition equipment in cities, military and civilian drones or self-driving cars create, use, and preserve this type of image.
The medium of production and distribution of contemporary operational images, which is based on calculations and algorithms, gives them hidden but universal power in the techno-social space. The methods of analysis proposed by Farocki, which allow us to carefully examine the politics of images and their infrastructures, remain an effective instrument for creating language for living through and opposing catastrophes.
Admission is free with prior registration.
Lettering: Evgeniy Artsebasov
Discussion of Harun Farocki’s films
December 7, 19:30–21:00
Participants: Alexey Artamonov, Boris Klyushnikov, Lera Kononchuk, Maxim Seleznev
The discussion will take place online ( via Zoom).
Free with advance registration.
As You See
December 10, 18:00
1986. 72 min. 18+
An important work by Harun Farocki in which he considers the history of technology and the image through the interaction of military and civilian inventions, the problems of automating labor, and the interaction of the body, technology, and rationality. Film is a method or technology of thought in which the viewer undertakes intellectual labor together with the author.
The film will be screened in German with Russian and English subtitles.
Images of the World and the Inscription of War
December 13, 19:30
1988. 75 min. 18+
A video essay about the politics of the visible and that which is excluded from the field of vision: the disguised, the invisible or the unrecognized. The film raises questions about how media and their aesthetics are connected with violence and their role in its production and distribution. Various technologies producing visuality—photography, measurement and scientific modeling, military intelligence—are linked to a lack of freedom of vision in conditions of the automization of labor and heavily recorded or objectified environments.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
War at a Distance
December 15, 19:30
2003. 58 min. 16+
The film War at a Distance is based on visual materials from the war in the Persian Gulf (1990–1991) and a description of the technologies of that time—such as missile guidance systems, virtual environments for training soldiers, and automated analysis of images for identifying targets—and their connnection to industrial production and technologies in everyday life. In considering the events of that war, which at the time was the conflict with the most ever mass media coverage, Farocki concludes that images stop being simply representations and become an active force in processes of destruction and production. The contemporary image becomes operational.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Serious Games
December 17, 18:00
2009–2010. 32 min. 16+
The four parts of this film, shot on a military base in the USA, tell of the role of simulation and game environments (both virtual and real, recreating, like theater sets, entire settlements) in military actions: from teaching battle skills to therapeutic work with combatants with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The film will be screened in English with Russian and English subtitles.
Parallel
December 20, 19:30
2012–2014. 43 min. 16+
The cycle Parallel is an analytical overview of the story of computer graphics—from abstract visuality to photo realism—and an observation of the principally new ontology of the image and virtual space, their limitations and possibilities, and of how the roles of producers and viewers change within them. Such an image is more than operational. It creates an autonomous reality according to its own rules.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.