Military techno-vision: Technologies between visual ambiguity and the desire for security facts

Abstract

Military applications of technologies for enhancing or producing vision play a key role in composing contemporary security, as such technologies are deployed to make security sense of everyday sociality, of battlefields, and of much in between these extremes. In this article, I set out to recompose militarised techno-vision through the public detritus left by its heterogenous development, use, and appropriation. I argue that as an heterogenous and amalgamated object, military techno-vision can be composed by speaking the stories of its leftovers, and that this composition is characterised by and in turn characterises a longstanding dilemma between fact and vision – between the ambiguity that is constitutive of the human practices of visual perception and image-making, and the desire for machines that can produce visual ‘actionable intelligence’ that can underpin security decisions. Discourses, practices, and regimes of visibility are deployed alongside technologies to occlude the ambiguity of technological vision and sustain the imaginary of technologically altered vision as neutral production of military or security facts.

Visual (data) observation in International Relations: Attentiveness, close description, and the politics of seeing differently

“…He does this by first noting that Wikileaks claimed that the video shows 'this is how it was' through the invocation of an 'aesthetic immediacy' via an 'indexical-iconic reading of the visual signifiers as causally connected to and resembling the signified' . 25 He then unpacks how the US government challenged this claim that the video could 'resemble' the signified, instead describing it as 'unimportant' and 'unreliable' due to a lack of context and understanding of the reality of combat. In consequence, he stresses how even videos that seem to provide unambiguous evidence of reality are encoded within a 'semiotic fog' .…”

La industria 4.0 y sus aplicaciones en el ámbito militar

“…Este factor consiste en que se pueden analizar desde un enfoque significativo los residuos de aquellos productos visuales que ya han sido desclasificados o son públicos, más allá de lo que fue interpretado durante su uso militar. Ello puede mostrar que, de los resultados infalibles del procesamiento de datos obtenidos en las imágenes, hay más historias que contar, que pueden llegar a afectar indirectamente derechos o libertades de otros individuos (Saugmann, 2019).…”

Façade

“…The building shows traces of its rapid abandonment as well as hints of its new purpose. In one way, it is what Lisle and Johnson call an ‘aftermath environment’ in which ‘the material security measures seem to declare that the space is, instead, in the aftermath, its closure aiming to obscure and prevent even the memory of what happened here’ and ‘the clearest traces of those who passed through are contained in, and produced by, material objects and infrastructures’ (Lisle and Johnson, 2019: 20; Saugmann, 2019). At the same time, the building is full of promises as rumours of its new destiny as The Hague’s biggest art studio, gallery or even a hotel buzz around.…”