How the Gulf War Perverted the Narrative of War Harun Farocki's trilogy

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. In the images of the Gulf War it was impossible for the spectator to tell whether it was a real image or one taken from a simulator or the screens of a videogame. The eye-machine confrontation leads us to wonder about that duality insofar as the eye takes the real image and the machine the manipulable one. Reality versus fiction. Images of a war which is totally aseptic to our gaze, where we do not see the victims, far easier to forget. Farocki closes the piece thus: “Think of a war of autonomous machines, a war without soldiers like a factory without workers.”