Night Vision, Ghosts and Data Proxies

Abstract

In 2008 visual artist Jon Cattapan was deployed to Timor-Leste as an official Australian war artist. The fact that the Australian soldiers were conducting peacekeeping activities in Timor-Leste meant Cattapan could accompany them on patrols outside military bases. While on night patrols Cattapan, like the soldiers, wore a night vision monocle. This article addresses how, in subsequent paintings, Cattapan’s saturation of night vision green paint speaks to broader issues of accelerating developments in contemporary militarised technology. Particular attention is paid to militarised technologies designed to augment or replace the capabilities of human vision. Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of the ‘violence of the global’ are used to interrogate how Cattapan’s paintings Night Patrols (Around Maliana) (2009) and Night Figures (Gleno) (2009) pose questions about current and future ramifications of perpetual war fought in physical and virtual spaces. This interrogation is conducted through close visual analyses of the two paintings.