Table Of Content

Vertov, Snow, Farocki Vertov, Snow, Farocki Machine Vision and the Posthuman David Tomas NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © David Tomas, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tomas, David Vertov, Snow, Farocki/David Tomas p.cm Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-6915-0 (hardcover) 2012045678 eISBN: 978-1-4411-6393-6 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India For the two Ninas Contents Introduction 1 Part I Threshold—When a Ritual Process Speaks of Machine Vision and Cyborg Prototypes: A Film Document, Circa 1929 13 1 Manufacturing Vision and the Posthuman Circa 1929: Kino-Eye, The Man with a Movie Camera, and the Perceptual Reconstruction of Social Identity 15 Part II Enigma of the Central Region—A Microhistory of Machine Vision and Posthuman Consciousness, Circa 1969–72 75 2 La Région Centrale: Basic Cultural, Technical, and Formal Filiations 77 3 Toward a Cosmic Rite of Passage: External and Internal Locations and a Play of Authorship 101 4 La Région Centrale: Liminality, Knowledge Production, Pedagogy 127 5 La Région Centrale: From Cosmic to Posthuman Rite of Passage 157 6 De La (1969–71): Authorship, Automation, and the Posthuman 187 7 A Comparative Schematic Analysis of the Automated Narrative and its Mechanical Logic in Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Michael Snow’s De La (1969–72) 201 Part III The Public Deployment of Machine Vision and the Programmed Materialization of the Posthuman in Collective Social Space, Two Early-Twenty-First Century Video Documents 217 8 A Posthuman Future in the Age of the Algorithm: Harun Farocki’s Documentation of the Operational Image and its Culture of Surveillance 219 Notes 255 Bibliography 281 Index 287 Introduction Occasionally one encounters a metaphor that not only captures the essence of an individual practice but also summarizes in a provocative manner the functions and historical significance of a dedicated technology at a specific period in its development. Dziga Vertov’s metaphor of kinok eyes spinning like propellers that travel into the future on the wings of hypothesis is a striking example of this type of image. For the metaphor encapsulates the radical spirit and the utopian aspirations of this cinematographer’s practice, as well as summarizing, in a remarkably succinct, yet extraordinarily evocative fashion, the experimental character, aesthetic, sociopolitical and revolutionary potential of a new technology (the movie camera) and a new medium (cinema) when used to promote a working interface between cinematic practice and social revolution. The metaphor also serves as a concise introduction to Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, his most important visual statement on cinema’s theoretical and practical capacity to act as an articulate instrument of experimentation and revolutionary change. The metaphor constructs an equation between technologies (movie camera, airplane), vision (eye), representation (the metaphor itself), perception (eyes spinning like propellors), space, time, and visual method (flying); and it does so in a manner that highlights the eye’s—and therefore vision’s—technologically grounded and open-ended trajectory through reality, and ultimately history. The metaphor is interesting because of its articulation of biological and mechanical elements (eyes and propellers), space and time (a movement through space toward the future), and tools for thinking (hypotheses)—the latter articulated/embodied in the eye/propeller /airplane /wings metaphor. This metaphor simultaneously represents the power of thought to construct a representation of itself as an autonomous “intelligence” that can project itself beyond itself by taking the form of a compact, compound image. This image also functions as “tool” of analogical visual thinking and analysis in