Eye / Machine II, 2002
In the Eye / Machine trilogy, Farocki deals with the technology of war and how that visual technology has penetrated civilian life. In his films he brings out the fact that the human eye is losing the capacity to distinguish between real and fictional images. In Eye / Machine the lens of the camera is placed on the so-called ‘smart bombs’, replacing the human eye as the supreme witness of war.
Taking into consideration the level of development of technology today, Farocki wonders to what extent we can distinguish between man and machine. In modern military technology the intelligence deployed can no longer be reduced to human intelligence; we have to add the intelligence of machines. The ‘man-machine’ combination takes the shape, according to him, of the ‘eye-machine’ combination when he analyses the functioning of smart machines and what they ‘see’ when they are working on the basis of recognition programmes and image processing.
The thrust provided by the 1991 Gulf War for electronic surveillance devices —an intricate system of survival, detection and warning which can act on a potential enemy— made them known as C3I: Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence. Farocki establishes parallels between the military and technology industries, while bringing out the growing overlap of these new advances and their application in everyday life.
The Eye / Machine trilogy consists of three pieces, 25, 15 and 25 minutes in length. It reflects the instruments of work, war and control, the new techniques in robotics and video surveillance, which have made huge strides since the Gulf War. Images are projected simultaneously on two screens.
Eye/Machine II
In the second part of Eye / Machine, Farocki looks more deeply into the relationship between production and war. The cameras are implanted in the machines, the replacement of the human eye by the machine eye. Once again he uses the images broadcast on television during the Gulf War with images for industrial use taken on an assembly line (which he had already used in the first episode) and combines them with others taken from flight or tank driving simulators. All these images have more to do with science fiction than with reality itself. He also shows the images taken by the first bomb with a television camera which was launched from Germany in 1942, during the Second World War. As at that time electronic technology was still rudimentary, a film camera recorded the images offered by the monitor. Unlike in more recent wars, at that time images of that kind had no commercial appeal.
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Other works of Harum Farocki at the MACBA Collection:
Technical details
- Original title:
- Eye / Machine II
- Registration number:
- 2470
- Artist:
- Farocki, Harun
- Date created:
- 2002
- Date acquired:
- 2004
- Fonds:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
- Object type:
- Audiovisual recording
- Media:
- Two-channel video, colour, sound, 15 min 47 s
- Edition number:
- Ed. 3/3 + 1 P.A.
- Credits:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
- Copyright:
- © Harun Farocki
- It has accessibility resources:
- No
The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.
For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.
If you need a high resolution image of the work, you must submit an image loan request.
