Aberrant flight paths: The uncertain bearings of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines MH370 through the lens of its varied non-human witnesses. By employing Harun Farocki’s notion of operative images in conjunction with the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead it plots a radically dispersed and autonomous image-making apparatus that captured the event of the aircraft’s disappearance and accelerated the expansion of the event itself. Crucially, this article proposes that these images cannot be understood in terms of vision but must be read instead as a series of tactile or synaesthetic practices between materials. Through examining contemporary image-making technologies employed in the search for the aircraft, it charts an ontological tactility within image making, one that – it is argued – has been present since the birth of the medium itself.