User:Sara/

- What do you want to make?

On the 29th of June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) released the very first recording online claiming an all-embracing Muslim Caliphate. The general sentiments accompanying this first declaration (at least for us living within the frontiers of the so-called Middle-East) were disbelief, then horror, then a surprising and brutal sense of familiarity. As ISIS started to publish their videos online after the break of the Syrian revolution in 2011, it seemed impossible to miss the endless references to western popular aesthetics and digital platforms to emphasize the Islamic State's role in the global political imaginary.

The horrifying images that surfaced on the Internet after the declaration of the formation of the state drew my attention to the ease with which such scenes are iterated. The shocking casualeness of the online circulation of the images of a ravaged body seemed to turn suffering into a benumbing spectacle.

In today’s dense inforsphere, we are surrounded by an overload of images and the faster they circulate the more difficult it becomes to comprehend them. According to Saidiya Hartman, it is this hypervisibility that problematizes the precariousness of empathy: the feelings that consume us vis-à-vis the images of horror are either indifference or a narcissistic identification with the (humanity) of the other.* But then my question is, where does the horror come from? Does it only reside in the act of killing itself? Or does it manifest itself in our failure to extract meaning from the digital hypercomplexity we are surrounded with?

In my project, I would like to address this question by interacting with digital images outside of the realm of the visual, and outside the limitations of meaning. I would like to treat digital images as noise; as undefined utterences that are constituted beyond the finite capacity of human comprehension.

- How do you plan to make it?

Last year I took a set of recruitment videos produced by ISIS as my target material for a series of visual experiments. One of the examples involved the extraction of constitutive digital data from the video “Flames of War” and leaving it with hardly indetifiable pixelated explosions. By removing the p-frames of the video, the photographic element was removed, and the movement inscribed in the i-frames was all that remained: noises that extend beyond the limitations of verbal expression.

- Why do you want to make it?

In his 2003 book In the Break, Fred moten starts by stating that objects can and do resist. But what is an object in the age of digital reproduction? "It may seem obvious”, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman write in their 1996 essay Exploring Emergence, as an object composed of four white squares moves on the black canvas of the side screen:

“ … in fact, what appears to be an object is not really an object at all. All that is happenning is that little squares on the screen are turning “on” and “off”, following a set of simple rules. And those rules say nothing at all about objects …"

If the history of early photography is a discourse on representation and its relation to real life, then the history of digital images is rather a discourse on language and abstraction. Digital images remind us that objects are nothing but a set of abstractions performed by commands and rules that flow in a ritual of endless transformations between the written, the seen, and the spoken:

“ […] A digital image that can be seen cannot be merely exhibited or copied but always only staged or performed. Here, an image begins to function like a piece of music, whose score, as is generally known, is not identical to the piece - the score being not audible, but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed. To perform something, however, means to interpret it, betray it, destroy it. Every performance is an interpretation and every interpretation is a misuse. "

__ Boris Groys, Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction (e-flux, 2009)

- Relation to previous practice

- Relation to a larger context

Just a few years before the emergence of the Islamic State on the open web, Boris Groys wrote an elaborate essay on religion in the age of digital reproduction (e-flux, Journal #4, March 2009). As the essay draws parallelism between fundamentalist thought and today’s technological infrastructures, Groys attributes the success of contemporary religious assimilation to the "media channels that are ... products of the extension and secularization of traditional religious practices*”:

"The widespread understanding of contemporary civilization holds that, over the course of modern age, theology has been replaced by philosophy, an orientation towards the past by an orientation towards the future […]. In fact, however, the modern age has not been the age in which the sacred has been abolished but rather the age of its dissimination in profane space, its democtratization, its globalization. Ritual, repetition, and reproduction have become the fate of the entire world, of the entire culture. Everything reproduces itself — capital, commodities, technology, and art. Ultimately, even progree is reproductive; it consists in a constantly repeated destruction of everything that cannot be reproduced quickly and effectively. Under such conditions it should come as no surprise that religion — in all its manifestations — has become increasingly successful."

- What is your timetable?

- References