Age of Visible Machines is Over

Abstract

In this paper, I explore how the Harun Farocki’s late cinematic essays engage with a variety of computer-synthesised images to critically interrogate cultural anxieties regarding the waning of the index and the ostensible ‘loss’ of the real in the era of digital filmmaking. Applying close textual analysis to the projects Serious Games (2009-2010) and Parallel I-IV (2012-2014), I demonstrate that Farocki’s sustained engagement with ex nihilo images extends the filmmaker’s career-long interest in deconstructing the technical, ideological and economic aspects of ‘operational’ imagery to the specific context of advanced digital animation. In these cinematic essays, I argue, Farocki repurposes a range of digitally simulated images extracted from different sources, including footage extracted from popular video games, 3D architectural models, and military training programs, to investigate both the aesthetic qualities of computer animation and the role they play in wider social and institutional processes. Before I examine Farocki’s late work in depth, I first address the scholarly discourse surrounding the development of digital filmmaking, which treats the split between analogue and new media in terms of a straightforward conflict between the inherent trustworthiness of the former and the unreliability of the latter. According to such a viewpoint, the fact that analogue media is based on pro-filmic light values being physically imprinted onto a photochemical surface creates an immediate isomorphic link between the referent and its cinematic record, which means that analogue footage can be relied on to function as a ‘trace’ of the real. Having established this as background, I then examine the essayistic strategies mobilized by Farocki in his late digital works to challenge the ‘truth status’ of cinematic images and encourage the viewer to think carefully about the process of production which created the image and the social context in which it was circulated. Applying close textual analysis of the projects Serious Games and Parallel I-IV, I illustrate that Farocki’s late cinematic essays offer a sophisticated examination of the nature of realism, materiality and epistemological uncertainty in the digital era. It is my contention that, instead of communicating a single, objective ‘truth’ to the viewer, Farocki’s cinematic essays reflexively call into question the truth status of the images they place under scrutiny, therefore pointing to the ways in which images may be manipulated, falsified and inflected with bias. Farocki, therefore, mobilizes essayistic strategies to realize the epistemological potential of synthesized images which hold no direct indexical connection to pro-filmic events by subjecting them to a rigorous process of critical reframing. In exploring the function, formal design, and technological constitution of contemporary simulated images, Farocki expands and reconfigures classical notions of ‘truth value’ in nonfiction cinema based on the values on transparency, objectivity and photographic indexicality.