Fotograf Magazine

Film and media artist Harun Farocki insisted on proving that there is an aesthetic basis to the negative dialectics of the contemporary, technologically conditioned and mediated world of repression, and that this aesthetic basis is the path towards a new rationality of abandoned humaneness. He claimed that the true power of violence is cunningly veiled by the popular belief that the materials used by the global repressive systems for the surveillance of the unstructured movement of people are “boring” and technically incomprehensible. Farocki used “operational images” to demonstrate the gap between the infatuation with technological progress and the abandoned quality of humaneness. The “operational images” are photographs that testify to the power/dominance of the surveillance elites, but when interpreted by a competent observer (film or video artist, photographer) they establish themselves as the source of an optimistic, liberating and humane perspective.