## INHABITING THE HYPER-AESTHETIC IMAGE

## Eyal Weizman (in conversation with Jacob Lund)

## JACOB LUND:

I would like to talk to you about the role of images in the work of Forensic Architecture in general, and more specifically, about the notion of 'the hyper-aesthetic image' that you develop in your forthcoming book co-authored with Matthew Fuller, Investigative Aesthetics (Verso). 1 In  the  book  you  argue  for  the  function  of aesthetics beyond perception. We, along with animals, plants and other living organic cells, are not only sentient beings. We may also act as sensors for -or traces of -events at levels other than sentience. I am very intrigued by this idea about 'aesthetics beyond perception.' What are the implications of this expanded notion of aesthetics for our conception of images and how they are generated?

## EYAL WEIZMAN:

Effectively, this notion of aesthetics and of the photographic that we developed comes to confront the modernist and, to a certain extent, colonial or imperial legacy of photography which is based on  the  interdependent  relation  between  a  frame  and  a  viewer. The frame cuts things from the context, isolates them and lends them to classification. So, the idea of looking photographically at  things  that  are  not  photographs  is,  to  a  certain  extent,  an attempt  to  decolonize  the  photographic  process  through  a certain theoretical reworking of aesthetics. Humanistic aesthetics predates photography by a few dozen years, not too long, but to a certain extent they are co-temporaneous, connected to the idea of contemplation and judgment, i.e. to a Baumgartian and Kantian sort of aesthetics.

When  aesthetics  is  re-connected  to  the  sentience  of  the environment, of things, it opens up a way to understand it as a relational practice between people and things, breaking it out from judgment. So, the very idea of aesthetic judgment and the history of photography are somewhat aligned at the turn of the 19th  century -aesthetics  being  that  kind  of  relation  between yourself, a viewer, and a photograph in a relation of judgment. The idea of sentience and aesthetics as a mode of relation between things, that all things in the world exist in an aesthetic relation, is  connecting  them  to  a  premodernist  or  often  to  indigenous conceptions of aesthetics. So, in a sense, it decolonizes both aesthetics and photography. The thing that is important about the photographic for Matthew Fuller and I, and also in Forensic Architecture, is that the photographic is a way of inscription, in  which  surfaces  are  inscribed  with  events  that  happened near them, in relation to them, etc. It's a process of continuous inscription and erasure, in which there is no privileged surface. All surfaces do that inscription and erasure continuously. You know,  silver  salt  halides,  fixers  and  the  like  are  built  upon phenomena that exist in all material surfaces, from the skin of your body to the forest in the tropics.

## JACOB LUND:

This has already led us to your reflections on 'how to inhabit the hyper-aesthetic image.' In Investigative Aesthetics you write of the emergence of a photographic milieu or image space where digital images join with material surfaces functioning as images in their own right, and propose the hyper-aesthetic condition to be an image-making process in itself, stating 'Inhabiting an image means accepting the image-being of all material surfaces, and one's own actions, and constitution, within them.' You also argue that we need to read reality as a self-referential image, a metaimage -which seems to resonate with your thoughts elsewhere on re-enactment as a method for turning reality into a model of itself, whereby it becomes an object of negotiation, you could say. Could you explain the notion of the hyper-aesthetic image, and how your work might be regarded as ways to inhabit such image?

## EYAL WEIZMAN:

In Mengele's Skull (co-authored with Thomas Keenan, Sternberg, 2012) we were regarding aesthetics as a process -any process -of inscription and registration on material surfaces. We wrote that the bones function as a kind of photographic surface in long exposure, in which the life of the person is the image exposed onto the bones and registered within them. So there is a kind of fascination that started there. But there is a problem also, because if every material does it, where is the act? And where is politics? If registration is ubiquitous, sentience is ubiquitous -between materials, organic or non-organic, minerals, codes, papers, surfaces, metals, human memory -it becomes a world that lacks decisive action. To engage with that Matt and I came up with a category of hyper-aesthetics, which is a practice, to hyper-aestheticize something. It works when you have accepted not only that aesthetics is ubiquitous in relations between things in  the  world,  but  also  that  politics  operates  in  increasing  the sentience of surfaces or your ability to read into them. It's like turning  things  into  more  tuned  senses  or  regarding  them  as more tuned surfaces. The first aspect of hyper-aesthetics is that you actually say: well, everything registers, but the wall of that building in Gaza after this attack registers, right now, something crucial for our political strategy, that which needs to be hyperaestheticized in order to confront some sort of dominant narrative or force: everything registers, but in hyper-aesthetics you need to amplify. Second is that you need to network sentient surfaces into other senses. You need to multiply, not only amplify. The second part of hyper-aesthetics -again,  it's  a  political  act -is to say that that surface of that building in Gaza that registers a particular chemical residue from an attack could be connected to the material surface of other sentient surfaces: a video, could be connected into the sensation and memory recollection of a witness, into the blurry, still blurry, satellite images over Gaza at that time, or indeed to chemicals in the sea. That connecting and bringing together unlikely sensors is that kind of political act of hyper-aestheticization, with always a danger of that flipping into what we call hypersthesia where an over-registration basically starts racing the signals that are accrued otherwise.

When we are speaking here about Gaza, it's very topical. It's a very painful time. We are speaking now a week or so after the end of yet another gut-wrenching bombing. Again, things are denied. Again, the truth is also a casualty of the war, and the interpretation of the facts are a casualty, in the way that Israel and its supporters claim that no crime has been committed.

What  we  are  doing  there  now  is  understanding,  and  quite directly in reference to your question, we are not looking at the rubbles of homes destroyed. We are looking at cracks in buildings very far away from the source of bombings. What happened in Gaza during this attack is that the subsoil has been blown. Groundpenetrating bombs enter into the subsoil and blow up some tens of meters under the surface, creating -and in one day in particular on the 14th of May with half of the Israeli Air Force, hundreds of planes dropping ammunition over a very small area -an artificial manmade earthquake, basically liquefying the ground, turning it into a kind of gelatinous thing. It's no longer a scratch as a trace. But the consequence of the earthquake in a place that was not built for earthquakes could be cracks in buildings miles and miles away from the place of the impact. Cracks that would remain there and that at some point would surrender to the force contradiction that exists on any built fabric and would tear apart and bring the building down. These cracks are also evidence for a war crime, for  the  indistinct  subjugation  of  an  entire  population  to  the colonial rage of Israel at that moment. It exists in those faraway cracks, rather than in the nearby piles of rubble that you see. It exists in the most unexpected small things.

These cracks as registration, as a hyper-photographic record, if you like, means that Gaza now inhabits that image of the war, and not only the sort of image of the war as in what the war has sensed in the material surface of the city. It's precisely those things that are far that could allow us to claim for the indistinct subjugation of an entire population rather than the pinpoint accuracy that Israel wants to claim in doing so.

So, everybody has become forensic architects recently: New York Times, The Washington Post. They adopt our methods. And it's wonderful: they should. But we are already somewhere else. No, we don't want to analyze those piles of rubble. We are looking at and checking the leaves along the border to find banned munitions. Because leaves are excellent sensors. We hyper-aestheticize the leaves of all sorts of local vegetables; they -for  instance  variations  of  lettuce -are  very  sensitive surfaces when herbicide fall on them. Mobilizing the wind, Israel sometimes spray herbicides along the border waiting for the wind to carry them into Gaza. They register that. They are senses, they are photographs in that sense. (Fig. 1) During that war, and again checking with plants, Israel has bombed several chemical facilities in Gaza, creating also airquakes: the kind of clouds of lethal substances that move quasi-unpredictably across the strip and posit their toxic residue across buildings and kindergartens, streets and mosques, etc. But the leaves register it best, and we have a connection from previous work with a network of farmers in Gaza that allow us to take those measurements. We have the sensors and we have the measurements. So here you have a kind of hyper-aestheticization of the ground, of the crack and of the leave as a political act.

## JACOB LUND:

So, you hyper-aestheticize the ground, the cracks, the leaves, etc. in order to generate an image. You are the agents of this imagegeneration, and that image is then addressed to different forums: to  visitors  to  the  places  where  you  do  exhibitions,  to  lawyers and judges in courts of law, etc. It seems to me that there are two different levels of the image here. There is the field and the lab or the studio where the hyper-aesthetic image is being generated; where  you  investigate,  build  operative  models,  etc.,  but  after that you also address the image to someone and thereby reinstall human perception and the human mind in the equation. You could say that 'aesthetics beyond perception' belongs to the lab and the studio, whereas the findings are exhibited/addressed to a public; even though you strive to collapse the two in a process of 'Open Verification' (cf. Becoming Digital, e-flux architecture, June 18, 2019).

Fig. 1 Forensic Architecture, Herbicidal Warfare in Gaza . A farmer in Gaza holds a leaf showing the damage done by herbicide. Image: Shourideh C. Molavi

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Saying this I realize that I was maybe too bleak in my Debordian description of the contemporary image-space, leaving only little room for agency and resistance, in the questionnaire I wrote for this issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. The questionnaire's point  of  departure  is  the  observation  that  traditionally  we have considered images to be relatively discrete and delimited phenomena, which are presented to our minds and our apparatus of perception. But nowadays there seems to be an intensification of ways in which images enter into networks along with a spreading use of machine imagery whose operations escape our perception and cognition. I would claim that a decisive characteristic of our contemporary image-space is its increasing integration of what Harun  Farocki  calls  operational  images  and  machine  vision; that machine vision and operational images more and more seep into and penetrate our image-space and co-constitute it. There is  a  sort  of  closing  down  on  the  image-space  as  a  lot  of  this machine imagery is used for strengthening the existing regime of visuality. This is important, I think, because, as our culture becomes more and more digitalized and screen-based, images seem to become more and more decisive in the distribution of the sensible, in determining what can be seen and sensed, and what makes sense (what constitutes our common sense), and therefore in forming and transforming our social relations. They inform our  imaginative  capacity  to  create  and  represent  possibilities other than the actual; our ability to probe and counter the truths and facts that appear within the dominating regime or complex of visuality (as Nicholas Mirzoeff calls it).

Everyone  interested  in  these  matters  would  of  course immediately  think  of  the  work  of  Forensic  Architecture  as  a way to actually counter suppressive regimes of visuality, a way to  produce  counter-images  or  counter-narratives;  making  use of  images,  video,  etc.  available  online  or  'belonging'  to  or stemming from state and corporate authorities, which you then

## EYAL WEIZMAN:

They are completely relevant. It's very interesting, what you say, but I have to start with a slight disagreement with the notion of images being immaterial. A kind of body mind of soul division. Images  are  material  relations  in  my  world.  Everything  about them is material and you can crash against them, but let's go to the beginning of your comment when you said, 'and then all that goes into one of the forums,' like legal, human rights, media or art,  which  are  the  main  forums  we  are  talking  about.  But  the work is not so teleological in the sense that it validates itself by the product that it produces. Socializing image practice creates what I called elsewhere 'open verification.' It's a community of practice that is varied and that is big and diverse, that includes people scattered all over the world, led by the people that are at the forefront of struggle. It includes the participants, that is, the activists and lawyers and investigators and perhaps the curators that amplified, but it also includes the lettuce leave and the crack on the wall and the AI algorithm that you perhaps communicate

make testify against themselves (to paraphrase Farocki -who was actually working on a film on Forensic Architecture when he sadly passed away in 2014).

But when we talk about images there is also this distinction between  pictures  and  images.  A  picture,  according  to  W.J.T. Mitchell, is a material object, which can be destroyed or broken, whereas an image is what appears in a picture, and what survives its destruction. The picture is the image as it appears in a concrete material support or a specific place, it is the embodiment of an image. To this I would add, that an image is dependent on recognition -in line with Walter Benjamin's notion of 'the image in the now of its recognizability' -an image is dependent on the involvement of a human agent; it is something that develops out of the spectator's relation with the image. The spectator, the one who is being addressed , is invited to take part in a process of signification and sense-making (this means that machines, for instance, do not see images, they merely register and process pictures...).

What I am aiming at is some kind of constant oscillation in your work between the forensic research, related to an aesthetics beyond perception, and the generation of images and counterimages that are addressed to recipients of different kinds, a turning of pictures into images, in a sense. Are such distinctions relevant to you?

with. So, aesthetic practice in the way that we see it, and thinking about aesthetics as a relational thing, is what allows a political work to be done in the way you undertake the investigation. To investigate politically (as opposed or in addition to investigating politics), to paraphrase the sort of distinction Godard put in the mouth of one of his characters when speaking about filmmaking, means that at every stage of the work -at the stage of harvesting the signal, what we call the field, at the stage of the lab, studio, the process, and at the stage of presenting, of socializing the evidence -there are relations that are being built and they are all very important.

For  example,  the  work  on  the  assassination  of  Ahmad Erekat that we have done recently in Palestine, also with the participation of Angela Davis, created a really unlikely group that  cut  across  both  black  liberation  movement,  Palestinian liberation movement, lawyers everywhere in the world, an auto car, a forensic specialist from the US west coast. 2 What did those different things have to do together? That is the composition we got. It's not only about what goes into the image, but the composition of a social productive practice relation that enable that to happen in the first place. The process of making becomes a sort of political act in itself.

It's always about extending the conversation. When we put this  work  with  AI  at  the  Whitney,  the Triple-Chaser work, 3 obviously  it  was  built  based  on  relations  with  activists  in Tijuana and with Emily Jacir, another activist in Palestine who collected things for us. We had like a big hoovering machine: from all over the world people were sending us images of those canisters. (Fig. 2+3) But, when we composed that film, we said that it  has  two  viewerships. We always said that very clearly. It's put in a museum. You cannot avoid the fact that it's made for those people that would go to the museum, would hear about it through the media, and whatever that would activate. But the video was built to include most of the training set necessary for the algorithm itself to learn how to see. There are thousands and thousands of still images. That is why it strobes so fast. We trained the algorithm classifier to learn how to see the triplechaser, what is not a triple-chaser, what is, etc., against different backgrounds. Like teaching a child to identify images. So, it has a viewership, which is algorithmic in as much as a viewership that is human.

The idea is always to extend that conversation. By the way, an interesting thing for you might be that we realized when we were strobing that image that we were going close to the legal threshold of how fast you can strobe things. They have regulations in different countries because there are people who are 'photo-sensitive'. Epilepsy is only one part of it, photosensitivity is kind of a medical condition, but photo-sensitivity is also our work condition. This is what we are all about, photosensitive,  increasing  our  sensitivity  to  images.  Rather  than take this message out of the film and put it on the wall, we put it  in  the  film  because  photo-sensitivity is interesting for us  conceptually,  it  is  the  condition  of  inhabiting  the  hyperaesthetic image. This is a condition of our reality, like being flooded, strobed with endless images, and in seeing images through images; images being doorways into other images, an image only being a link, a hinge between multiple, sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of images, clouds of images that need to be linked together in order to see things and perceive things. We use models as ways of viewing. Models are optical devices for us in the way that they allow for a navigational viewing that places images in a simultaneity. You don't cut, you move in-between them. Sometimes we build those spaces physically ourselves in order to create the reenactments that  are  necessary  to  interrogate  the  image  itself.  You  were talking about reenactment, probably you were referring to the Halit Yozgat case. The reenactment was a way to examining an image. There was a video reenactment produced by the police. We thought the reenactment as manipulative. We considered that video is not a representation of a crime, like a reenactment is  a  mode of representation. That video was itself the crime because we thought that this secret service agent was lying. The crime is in the image making, the making of the video. In order to interpret that image, we had to enact it, we had to put it into practice, we had to practice that image in the real physical space in order to destabilize it and to confront it. And that is how we did it. So, we reenacted the reenactment if you like.

Fig. 2+3 Forensic Architecture, Triple-Chaser , ©Forensic Architecture, 2021

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## JACOB LUND:

Your use of machine imagery and training these algorithms to detect the canisters from tear gas grenades can be seen as a kind of counter-narrative from within. You are making use of the same tools as the state authorities and...

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## EYAL WEIZMAN:

Evil people, yes. Like with satellite images, like with photograph, like with video, these things have all military histories, or at least repressive use in colonialism, or in military, or in policing, etc. This is why we have a very important principle in Forensic Architecture, which is, when we use technology, we will simultaneously use it as part of a composition for our case -in a kind of nest building, to refer again to Farocki. 4 But we will also use the case in order to shed critical light on that technology. So, we use satellite images to  show  us  what  they  can,  but  we  interrogate  the  threshold  of detectability: what they don't show and why. What's the political theory of resolution? For example. (Fig. 4) With AI it's the same. We followed the Triple-Chaser with a piece called Model Zoo at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, 5 where we said, okay, if we can control the machine vision and machine learning process by feeding training sets synthetically produced, models looking like realistic objects, to tell a computer how to see things: What is it? Like a child as I mentioned earlier. You see this? This is a train. This is also a train. This is a train. That's also a train. This is not a train. Right? You have this kind of process of training, and then you have the results on the other side. Now, what that gives you, creating synthetic training sets, is being able to interrogate, or what we call introspect, the algorithm itself. So, we put like systems  of  variations,  and  we  see  when,  in  the  variation,  the machine stops seeing. How does it learn faster? We realized very interesting things in this piece called Model Zoo : if we create 'wild' variations, extremely colorful, bizarre, tear gas canisters, tear gas canisters that have zebra stripes on them, or that are imprinted with images and twisted out of shape, those outliers, what we call extreme images, make the identification of 'normative' images easier. If you are operating an AI surveillance system or predictive systems on people, what you need as training set is not just the kind of 'normative' behavior by many people. You need extreme variations in behavior. You need people to act 'crazy' in different ways. That allows you to predict, not the behavior of the outliers, but to predict also the behaviors of the mainstream. We realized that that is the perfect logic to validate why internet companies encourage extreme behavior online, because extreme behavior online provides the predictive algorithm with those outliers. We therefore did two things using machine learning: We interrogated human rights  violations  in  a  physical  material  world,  and  we investigated  human  rights  violations  in  the  algorithmic  world. That's how one needs to operate across those fields.

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Fig. 4 Forensic Architecture, Model Zoo , ©Forensic Architecture, 2021

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EYAL WEIZMAN is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of over 15 books, he has held positions in many universities worldwide including Princeton, ETH Zurich and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the Centre for Investigative Journalism. In 2019 he was elected life fellow of the British Academy.

- 1 This text is a transcription of an online meeting that took place on 1 June 2021.
- 2 See https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/ the-extrajudicial-execution-of-ahmad-erekat.
- 3 See https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/ triple-chaser.
- 4 When Harun Farocki was collecting source material for a film on Forensic Architecture, he wrote to Eyal Weizman to ask for the found media they were working with: bits of blurry user-generated video and screen grabs of software in action, documentation of physical traces and aerial and satellite images, stating: 'Instead of designing a film in the way a building is designed I prefer to build a film in the way birds build a nest.' See Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (London: Verso, forthcoming).
- 5 See https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/ model-zoo.