Technologies of Violence
Four audiovisual programmes and one workshop explore the connections between art and the production of violence, digital technologies and the different methods that power uses to dominate and control territories, bodies and everyday life.
The "Technologies of Violence" series, which includes the film cycle "Transparency Machines" and the workshop "War Machines", uses anti-representation, simulation, parody and art criticism to examine the shape that violence takes in our collective imagery and the iconography and symbols of the media and entertainment industry, as well as the different ways in which the apparatuses of war and control produce, consume and utilise images (animated cartoons, video games, programs, etc.). Taking up Foucault's theories on power and Achille Mbembe and Subhabrata Banerjee's ideas about "necropolitics" and "necrocapitalism" as a global killing system, the project also takes a closer look at forms of insubordination used by artists in what could be interpreted as the implosion of the neocapitalist system itself, following the failure of the major systems of ideological "redemption".
As a system for organising, servicing and controlling power, technology wields machines, the internet, electronic systems and digital technologies as tools of global domination. After World War II and during the Cold War, these tools ushered in a "new era in political security" according to Ralf Fücks, director of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.
Digital control of airspace and cyberspace—which may well be the "terror control" identified by theorists such as Jutta Weber, Herfried Münkler, Constanze Kurz, Paul Virilio and Harun Farocki—is a goal shared by the world's major powers and countless terrorist groups which technologically deploy their zones of war, chaos and global and local domination by developing highly sophisticated programmes: digital systems and electronic operations of anonymous remote-controlled killing, increasingly accurate cameras and sensors, autonomous computerised combat systems, automated warfare, cyberspace battles, advanced telecommunications, drone attacks, satellite surveillance and policies of preventive security or mass population control by law enforcement.
The central idea of "Technologies of Violence" is not the image itself as a paralysing vehicle of terror but the fact that images have become "factories of terror", produced, distributed and ideologised for mass consumption, and violence has become means of subjecting entire populations to lethal mind control.
Cycle produced in collaboration with Arts Santa Mònica.
