Transparency Machines explores the relationship between technology and the subtle forms of violence which – based on their invisibility, social acceptance, and apparently harmless incursion into all areas of social life – come to define culture and interpersonal relationships, as well as power structures. From different points of view, four audiovisual programs will question the role of technology, and more specifically technological images, in the digital context and within the paradoxes of the technosphere: visibility and invisibility, transparency and opacity, control and optimization, utopia and dystopia.

Program 2. Image ex machina

Geopolitics and optics. The interruption of images for military use into the civilian sphere. Aerial surveillance and new devices for observation. Images created for the purpose of calculation and rationalization, which lose their representational function to be used for identification. Flyovers of the protected areas associated with incipient neocapitalism in Silicon Valley (Bureau of Inverse Technology) and discreet arms factories (Johann Lurf). Questioning the use of drones by exploring their subversive use on the border between the United States and Mexico (Adrien Missika), under an ironic and poetic perspective in the Egyptian context (Heba Amin), or as a collective metaphor for Iranian immigration (Arash Nassiri) The appropriation of Google Earth images over the Jeffersonian agricultural divisions in the United States (Gerco de Ruijter), the humanization of the robotic image created by an underwater probe, lamenting its inability to prevent environmental damage (Semiconductor) and a meteorological observation by Goethe (Silvia Maglioli and Graeme Thomson).

Bit Plane, Bureau of Inverse Technology, 1999, 14 min, United States, English

Embargo, Johann Lurf, 2014, 10 min, Austria, no dialogue

As the Coyote Flies, Adrien Missika, 2014, Switzerland, 14 min, no dialogue

Tehran-Geles, Arash Nassiri, 2014, 19 min, France, Persian, subtitles in English

Wolkengestalt, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, 2007,13 min, France, Germany, subtitles in English

Grid Corrections, Gerco de Ruijter, 2016, 3 min, Netherlands, no dialogue

Some Part of Us Will Have Become, Semiconductor, 2012, 12 min, United Kingdom, English

As Birds Flying, Heba Amin, 2016, 7 min, Egypt, Arabic, subtitles in English

Photo: Grid Corrections, 2016 © Gerco de Ruijter (LIMA, Amsterdam)

Acknowledgements
Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, París
LIMA, Amsterdam
LUX, London
Sixpack, Viena
And all the artists