Harun Farocki

Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such.

Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.

Face and facial pattern detection is an active research area that is useful for many practical applications. In this paper, we present an innovative technique for eye detection using Augmented Dynamic Time Warping (ADTW) algorithm. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a reliable algorithm that can perform similarity matching between two sequences but it requires supplimnetry techniques to be effective and efficient when used as a pattern detection tool. Therefore, for template matching in a facial pattern detection, the DTW is augmented with proposed image processing strategy along with a proper weighting scheme to increase its efficiency and accuracy. Our proposed ADTW overcomes some of the shortcomings associated with the traditional dynamic time warping and hence improves the alignment of the warping path of the sequences. The results of the implementation of the ADTW to detect eyes in facial images of subject with and without glasses show a marked improvement in detection accuracy when compared with that of the traditional DTW. © 2012 ICIC International.

www.ijicic.org/10-08069-1.pdf

Este trabalho examina as relações que se estabelecem entre a imagem e memória quando inclinadas por um primas pós-moderno do pensamento. Essas relações aparecem no filme 'Imagens do mundo e inscrições da guerra' (Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges, Alemanha, 1988), de Harun Farocki, no qual analisamos algumas de suas estratégias visuais.

This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and videomaker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France. While the workshop videos are in colour and the camera was not required to remain static, Ehmann and Farocki’s students were tasked with honouring the original Lumière film’s basic parameters of theme and style. The fascinating result is a collection of more than 550 short videos that have appeared in international exhibitions and on an open-access website, offering the widest possible audience the opportunity to ponder contemporary labour in multiple contexts around the world.

This project reflects works by artists who have taken something from other images—whether from the sphere of art or pop culture, the museum or mass media—and who have reworked what they have taken into something new. In doing so, they tell us something about the images they have made use of. But they also tell us something about the social or institutional contexts that the images have been taken from and about the conditions under which they were produced, displayed, and traded. Appropriation, then, is a form of engaging, not just with images, but with reality itself—because
for a long time now, and today more than ever, reality has been mediated by means of mass media images. Texts referring to the works of John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers, Harun Farocki, Andrea Fraser, Nina Könnemann, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Hilary Lloyd, Michaela Meise, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman.
Kunstmuseum Basel, 2015.

Kaum ein anderes Medium scheint besser geeignet, traumatische Verletzungen zu visualisieren und zu speichern, zu kommunizieren und zu transformieren, als der Film. Er macht sie sichtbar, indem er sie als Wunden ausstellt, er öffnet sie, legt den Finger in sie hinein oder bepflastert sie. Dabei bereichert er um neue Interpretations- und Darstellungsweisen sowie symbolische Deutungsmuster.

Der internationale, interdisziplinäre und bilinguale Sammelband mit Beiträgen von Geistes- und MedienwissenschaftlerInnen widmet sich der Paradoxie scheinbar un/sagbarer und un/darstellbarer  historischer Traumata. Diese lassen ein bewusstes Erinnern und eine adäquate Repräsentation des traumatisierenden Geschehens zunächst scheitern. Abgesehen von dieser Lücke bildet das „Trauma“ jedoch eine besondere zeitliche Struktur der Nachträglichkeit und Latenz, Indexikalität und Wiederholung aus. Diese ‚traumatische Zeitform‘, die in Alpträumen, Flashbacks, Loops, Halluzinationen und anderen Geisterscheinungen Ausdruck findet, lässt Parallelen zur Zeitlichkeit und Ästhetik des Films erkennen. Entlang klinischer, theoretischer und kultureller Traumakonzeptionen werden Spielfilme aus den letzten Jahrzehnten und unterschiedlichen nationalen Kontexten untersucht, in denen individuelle und kollektive Traumata – unter anderem in Verbindung mit der Shoah/dem Holocaust, dem Vietnamkrieg, den Irakkriegen, dem Israel-Palästina-Konflikt und 9/11 – inhaltlich und strukturell sowie ästhetisch-narrativ gestaltet werden.

Taking as a reference Warburg’s iconology of the interval, this paper attempts to explore the logic of montage, editing and juxtaposition as one of the pillars of contemporary audiovisual creation and research. Warburg’s legacy, more active today than ever, gives priority to transmission, historicity and artistic empathy, and the development of a history of art that is less concerned with periods and authors than with ‘what happens to the observer’ based on the vital, emotional response to the repertoires and afterlife of gestures, the pathos formulae that have been passed down through history, escaping classification into trends. The great project Mnemosyne is an atlas of images conceived as a moving archive. His attention to time shocks and the dialectics of image is a big reference for the use of poetic and critical editing in the work of filmmakers, artists, photographers and writers. But above all, editing and juxtaposition a central tool in contemporary artistic research is its condition of laboratory.

Godard and the Essay Film offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of World War II. War-ner incisively reconsiders the defining traits and legacies of this still-evolving genre through a groundbreaking examination of the vast and formidable oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard. The essay film has often been understood by scholars as an eccentric development within documentary, but Warner shows how an essayistic process of thinking can materialize just as potently within narrative fiction films, through self-critical investigations into the aesthetic , political, and philosophical resources of the medium. Studying examples by Godard and other directors, such as Orson Welles, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Harun Farocki, Warner elaborates a fresh account of essayistic reflection that turns on the imaginative, constructive role of the viewer. Through fine-grained analyses, this book contributes the most nuanced description yet of the relational interface between viewer and screen in the context of the essay film. Shedding new light on Godard's work, from the 1960s to the 2010s, in film, television, video, and digital stereoscopy, Warner distills an understanding of essayistic cinema as a shared exercise of critical rumination and perceptual discovery.

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/godard-and-essay-film

The publication presents an overview of the research project "Art Public Zurich" and also places it within a theoretical framework. After introducing the mission statement and the Organization Art in Public Space Zurich, developed in cooperation with the City of Zürich, the methodological approach will be described that underlies the project, namely, to determine factors that will open contextual fields of reference for public art, thereby strengthening its social relevance. One section of the contribution leads to the thesis that art in public space – similar to comparable phenomena in the sciences – can trigger a profound reevaluation of the concept of art. The closing section examines artistic research and its significance in our knowledge society.

This booklet is an English-language supplement to the German publication "Kunst und Öffentlichkeit: Kritische Praxis der Kunst im Stadtraum Zürich," edited by Christoph Schenker and Michael Hiltbrunner (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2007). It includes the English version of the survey article "Kunst als dichtes Wissen: Das Forschungsprojekt Kunst Öffentlichkeit Zürich" (pp. 29–48) by Christoph Schenker. The booklet also reproduces four artworks that were completed only after the publication of the original German volume - public artworks by Harun Farocki, Zilla Leutenegger, Lawrence Weiner and Sislej Xhafa.

Après avoir défini l'ontologie du regard machinique et exploré la polysémie du terme « machine » par la confrontation des écrits de Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze et Paul Virilio, ce travail s'intéressera aux interactions entre le corps humain et la machine- caméra dans les représentations de la surveillance.

Son ambition est de soumettre les œuvres d'Harun Farocki, Jordan Crandall et Michael Haneke à une méthode d'analyse figurale spécifique, tirée de la conception deleuzienne du désir – la théorie des « machines désirantes ». Prenant le contre-pied de la méthode freudienne, Deleuze et Guattari se proposent de ré-envisager l'usine à désirs comme un complexe autonome, indépendant de la catégorie du manque et producteur. Cette matrice philosophique permettra d'appréhender les interactions entre le regard machinique et le corps humain en terme d'énergies et de flux : le contrôle et le standardisation du geste, comme la menace de l'intimité, sont autant de preuves de la propension de la machine à mettre en danger les corps filmés. La caméra y sera donc envisagée comme une entité aimantée et dense, où se recomposent les pulsions humaines – une machine matérialisant une relation avec le filmé, en somme.

Enfin, c'est vers le spectateur que le dernier chapitre de ce travail se tournera, puisqu'on y pensera la mise à l'épreuve induite par une forme empreinte par la surveillance : le plan- séquence fixe. Après avoir analysé ses implications éthiques dans le cinéma de Michael Haneke, et plus généralement dans le dispositif cinématographique classique, sa portée sera reconsidérée dans le cadre muséal, à travers des installations reconduisant le dispositif de la surveillance.

PhD thesis that reflects on the idea of the moving image as a tool for critical thought, specifically on historical events and their recorded traces. It analyses three very different films that share three distinctive characteristics: their theme is historical, the use of recycled footage, and the filmmakers gave this material an essayistic treatment; that is, the films offer an elaborate new disposition of the footage that goes beyond mere formalist concerns.

“For the last hundred years (if we except the activities of specialists) art history has been the history of that which can be photographed.” —-André Malraux

Based on the concept of theory developed in chapter one, Farocki’s and Godard’s interest can now be described more exactly: both filmmakers confront media in order to create abstraction. They develop thoughts about cinema and its representational logic through the collision of concrete film images. In the words of Eisenstein: from the impact of two visibilities, to obtain something invisible and render it visible. However, the colliding elements may be of different constitution; the images that in their combination express something about “the image” can belong to different media contexts.

The images produced by cameras mounted on the front of projectiles Farocki designates them as operative-images. The operational function of these images is to serve a automated vision machine, programmed for the detection of targets and re-orientation of the route of the missiles. The most important feature of technical images, according to Vilém Flusser, is that they materialize certain concepts about the world, precisely the concepts that guided the construction of devices that shape them. Thus, photography, very unlike automatically record impressions of the physical world, transcodes certain scientific theories into images, or to use Flusser´s own words, turns concepts into scenes. We suggest that the final stage, the perfect crime, of visionic technologies would be the production of synthetic images not intended for biological human eye, as hitherto, but for the artificial vision - vision synthetically prepared by cybernetic ideology of control. Today is impossible to describe the development of the audiovisual without also talking about the development of virtual imagery and its influence on human behavior or without point to the new industrialization of vision and the growth of a big  market for synthetic perception, with all the ethical issues that this entails. Finally, we propose that to understand a significant part of Harun Farocki's late work would also be useful the concept of neural-image as a component of a networked media practice, related to the ubiquity of digital technologies but also with the presence of surveillance devices in our contemporary visual culture.

How should one place oneself within the present iconosphere, at a time when everything seems to be hyper documented? What can be done with the plethora of images surrounding us? And is there anything left for us to read in these objects that have already been discussed over and over again? The filmmaker Harun Farocki hangs on to the belief that his documentaries can make images speak in new and different ways. Also, while traditional iconology sees the image as a crossword puzzle with only one possible interpretation, Georges Didi-Huberman argues for a critical montage aiming to restore the openness of the images in order to deploy their multiple meanings. What is at stake here is the very construction of "the eye of history," an alternative viewpoint allowing for a kind of reading that would free the document from the strictures of homogenizing interpretations. The montage as understood by Didi- Huberman restores the complexity of the visual, thus placing itself in stark opposition to traditional authoritarian ap- proaches. This paper explores the role of a "pedagogy of the document" in liberating knowledge from automatized modes of reading.

Addressing practices such as cartography and montage, this essay attempts to conceptualize the virtual and the navigational by weaving together issues of property, cybernetics, robotics, algorithmic world-building, and the destabilization of subjectivity.

From the late 1960s until his death in 2014, the filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki repeatedly returned in his work to the subject of labour. This article examines a selection of Farocki's films and video installations, delineating his recurrent chronicling of the historical trajectory of the labour process and technological development under capitalist industrialisation. In particular, it focuses on Farocki's sustained investigation into capitalism's drive to systematically displace forms of skilled craft from the production process by subordinating both manual and intellectual labour to an incremental process of deskilling and mechanisation, as well as his interrogation of the implication of various instrumental and automated visual technologies in such processes. In doing so, I underline the continuing significance of Marxist theory for analysing Farocki's critical portrayal of capitalist modernity as dominated by an abstract and alienated historical dynamic toward the increasing rationalisation and control of production and social life.

Esta tese apresenta um estudo sobre os agenciamentos estéticos e políticos do uso de imagens de arquivo na obra do artista e cineasta alemão Harun Farocki. A pesquisa propõe, mais especificamente, um planejamento teórico-metodológico que busca descrever o funcionamento diagramático das imagens de arquivo a partir de seus agenciamentos. Para tanto, foram utilizadas obras de Farocki que reúnem diferentes fontes de arquivos e formas diversas de articulação entre essas imagens: A Saída dos Operários da Fábrica (1995), Imagens da Prisão (2000), Imagens do Mundo e Inscrições da Guerra (1989) e Reconhecer e Perseguir (2003). O objetivo do trabalho é problematizar os agenciamentos estéticos e políticos do uso de imagens de arquivo na obra de Farocki, de modo a compreender os regimes que os caracterizam como elementos de diferenciação que operam de forma diagramática. A tese está estruturada em três capítulos: no primeiro é feita uma apresentação e discussão do referencial teórico; o segundo descreve as características do corpus, apresentando detalhes dos filmes e aspectos da trajetória do cineasta; e o terceiro se refere à discussão de algumas das manifestações do arquivo à luz do horizonte teórico adotado. A base teórica da tese é formada por quatro autores principais: Michel Foucault e seu princípio arqueogenealógico ajudam a formalizar metodologicamente um modo de operação frente ao corpus; Jacques Rancière e seu conjunto de questões relativas à estética e à política auxiliam na delimitação de um espaço conceitual que tornou possível tratar o arquivo enquanto processo, condição essencial para a problematização aqui proposta; Georges Didi-Huberman possibilita compreender o arquivo como sintoma, uma imagem detentora de múltiplas temporalidades; Gilles Deleuze e seus conceitos de agenciamento e diagrama permitem identificar o arquivo como elemento de diferenciação, carregado de intensidades e singularidades que operam de forma diagramática no cinema contemporâneo. Foi possível identificar na obra de Farocki um conjunto de traços da constituição de um tipo de imagem documental que provém do arquivo e se expande, de forma mais ampla, a uma cultura audiovisual contemporânea.

Jill Godmilow believes that Harun Farocki (1944-2014) was history's greatest documentary filmmaker. If one is familiar with Farocki's work-he made over ninety films, mostly German language shorts-her view is a starting point for interesting debate. However, discussing Farocki is difficult for most people since his work is not well-known by the public, is hard to access, and when seen can be confusing with its combination of experiment, document, and art. None of his films are commercial in any sense of the word, and some are seen only in museums and art galleries. Godmilow is herself a filmmaker and a writer working apart from commercial interests. She shares with Farocki a deeply political and extremely critical leftist perspective. Her most widely seen film is Antonia: A Portrait of a Woman (1974), directed with singer-songwriter Judy Collins.

Wilfried Reichart hat seit etwa 1970 in wechselnden Funktionen die Filmredaktion des WDR geprägt, von 1980 bis 2004 leitete er diese. Dort war er an der Produktion zahlreicher filmvermittelnder Sendeformate beteiligt, die dem Fernsehpublikum mithilfe von Interviews, Berichten und Kritiken das internationale Kino nahebrachten. Nicht zuletzt in dieser Funktion hat Reichart mehrere Gespräche mit Jean-Luc Godard geführt und sich darüber hinaus in Kritiken, Artikeln und Aufsätzen immer wieder mit dem Werk des Filmemachers auseinandergesetzt (s. Bibliografie). Das nachfolgende Gespräch fand im Herbst 2017 an zwei Terminen in Berlin statt.

Partant des travaux récents de Georges Didi-Huberman sur l’atlas d’images (A. Warburg) comme outil et support d’une nouvelle heuristique du montage, ce texte confronte l’installation "Histoires de fantômes pour grandes personnes" (G. Didi- Huberman, A. Gisinger, 2012), composée pour partie d’images en mouvement, à la pensée de la table warburgienne comme lieu d’une perpétuelle reconfiguration et d’une nouvelle lisibilité du monde. Se pourrait-il en effet qu’une image en mouvement, prise d’ordinaire dans un continuum clos, se dote, à travers le montage, des mêmes potentialités critiques – c’est-à-dire d’un même pouvoir inquiétant – que l’image fixe offerte au déambulateur de l’atlas ?

Often used as a synonym of ‘definition’, the term ‘resolution’ indicates the quantity of detail a raster digital image holds, and may refer to image resolution (the size of a digital image file), display resolution (the total number of pixels or the pixel density of a digital visual display), or optical resolution (the number of image sensor elements in a digital camera). Resolution may be increased or decreased, and its various degrees determine not only the visual appearance of an image, but also the conditions of its production, storage, and circulation. As a way of measuring and controlling visibility, resolution raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, and political implications, and may be tackled from the different perspective of media theory, media archaeology, and visual culture theory. Reaching back to McLuhan’s reflections on the low definition of the television screen and on its analogies with mosaics and pointillisme, this introduction examines the question of resolution in a number of film, media, and artistic practices from the 1960s to today.

Este texto se centra en In Comparison, la película de 2009 de Harun Farocki, para poner de relieve su actualidad estética, especialmente sugerente desde la perspectiva de los nuevos realismos y materialismos filosóficos, dada la particular forma de indagación que en ella emplea su autor. Farocki, gran admirador del cine de Robert Bresson, plantea la cuestión del trabajo desde una perspectiva no analítica. La propuesta metodológica que lanza será una comparación, actividad cinematográfica que realizará según su propia ética como director. Así, se detendrá a observar la labor de la fabricación del ladrillo: los «cimientos de la sociedad», en fábricas de países como Burkina Faso, la India o Suiza. No obstante, nos interesa señalar que será una exploración intensiva, en la que nada de lo directamente mostrado en la pantalla es lo relevante, solo aquello que indirectamente surge en la mente del espectador a partir del juego de las imágenes. En este sentido, la técnica de montaje se torna crucial, pues el relato que construye en torno a la técnica se desarrolla implicando fundamentalmente ritmos y temporalidades; es decir, aquellas intensidades que constituyen el hábito fabril de los operarios en las distintas realidades geográficas y culturales.

Booklet published at the occasion of an exhibition at bak (basis voor actuele kunst) in Utrecht, December 3, 2016 to February 5, 2017, conceptualized by Tom Holert. Texts by Tom Holert and Maria Hlavajova, editing by Hidde van Greuningen. Dutch/English

With essays by Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Alloa, Alain Badiou, Roland Barthes, Massimo Cacciari, Luca Caminati, Cesare Casarino, Roberto Esposito, Marcus Döller, Harun Farocki, Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Jay Hetrick, Toni Hildebrandt, Jun Fujita Hirose, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Thomas Macho, Ara H. Merjian, Pedro A.H. Paixão, Alessia Ricciardi, Vega Tescari, Lia Turtas, Giovanbattista Tusa, Barbara Vinken, McKenzie Wark, Evan Calder Williams

One hundred years after the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini, his oeuvre might best be described as “une pensé e”, as a meandering thought-provoking thought, to quote Jean-Luc Godard’s exceptional comment on Pasolini in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Pasolini scholarship has certainly increased in recent years, but mainly from the perspective of Italian Studies and with a particular focus on his poetry, prose and film. The proposed volume instead highlights the interest of his work for the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It therefore compiles key writings by philosophers who are relatively unknown even within the context of contemporary French and Italian thought. By collecting little known or newly translated essays from these philosophers, the volume aims to foster a contemporary discussion about the (in-)actuality of Pasolini’s work.

Thomas Helbig's essay analyzes the relationship between present and past in Christian Petzold's film Transit. As the title already emphasizes, the movie circulates around the topics of flight and migration. Helbig examines the narrative-aesthetic character of the movie, which transports the story of Anna Segher’s eponymous novel of 1944 to the present day. He focusses on the novel and the intellectual exchange between Petzold and artist Harun Farocki, an approach which is also reflected by an additional view on Orson Welles film adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial.

The article presents a theoretical and historiographical reflection on the links between image and truth, taking as a lens the analysis of Propaganda images that privilege their political function over others. I will approach this question through some images that were taken as part of a Nazi propaganda film, shot in Westerbork, a work camp in the Netherlands, in 1944. Despite their origin, some of these images have been integrated into the iconography of WWII, and have been used as documents in trials, documentaries, and exhibits critical of the Nazis; some others have been invisibilized, perhaps because they could not be easily integrated into the frameworks that made the event legible. Along with the reconstruction of the history of this film, I will analyze the re-montage that German filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944-2014) did in his film Aufschub/Respite (2007). Farocki invites to suspend the images to be able to see in them the traces of the human beings that went through the camp; he brings in knowledge and viewing positions that open up other meanings. His methodological approach, which is also ethical and political, deals with the dilemmas of working with and through Propaganda images, and can bring valuable reflections and strategies for the historians of education.

"Von Pasolinis Arbeit in den
1960er Jahren bis zu Salò, den frühen Filmen Farockis
und den Ernsten Spielen hat sich der kritische Brennpunkt
aber von einer Theorie des zensurierten Subjekts
zunehmend auf Beobachtungstechniken der gesellschaftlichen
Überwachung verschoben. Wenn man sich
diesen Übergang vergegenwärtigt, lassen sich die
Filme von Pasolini und Farocki erhellend aufeinander
beziehen. Michele Mancinis und
Giuseppe Perrellas "Corpi e Luoghi" (1981) kann uns auf einmalige Weise
an Farockis Blickschule (mit "Pasolini vor Augen") erinnern,
der wir nicht nur Einsichten, sondern mehr noch,
Ausblicke verdanken."

En la ponencia me propongo empezar desde una genealogía de la imagen en movimiento a partir de episodios alternativos a la historiografía clásica del cine. El objetivo es revisar el concepto d emontaje pensando en su dimensión operativa, desembrollando así algunas cuestiones asumidas como naturales en nuestra relación cotidiana con los audiovisuales. Es teniendo presente esos episodios lejanos en el tiempo, que quiero sondear el tema del testimonio descomponiendo tres eventos que se han vuelto largamente conocidos gracias, incluso, al registro y a la difusión en el soporte audiovisual :el bombardeo de Baghdad del 17 de enero de 1991, los atentados del 11 de septiembre de 2001 en Nueva York y la caída de Nicolae Ceauşescu a Bucarest el 22 de diciembre de 1989. En este sentido, analizando la operación que organiza los testimonios audiovisuales según una propuesta lógico-semiótica peirceana -el
Nonágono Semiótico-, quiero revisar los procesos de desmontaje/montaje/remontaje que posibilitan la intrincada relación de significados que subyace a cada  testimonio. Finalmente, trazar una cartografía que posibilite las relaciones que hacen significado en el testimonio deviene esfuerzo necesario al fin de comprender el valor histórico, social y culturaldel mismo evento.