Zoom
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Summary: ZOOM begins with a popular film from the 1970's that was said to define the "look of the 20th Century". We wonder about the powers of then, and the powers of now.
The look acts at collapsable distances, and varying focal lengths. The captured subjects will not know whose eyes their bodies will receive, (even though they will imagine it), in which galaxies their images will wander, in blackholes of memory or as data-stamps of unique flesh. At various levels of X, equations emerge, governing the relationship between the subject/ actor and the explicit or phantasmic, but always-powerful "viewer". We take a closer look at some of these ratios and their registers of violence: in visual anthropology, CCTV, iris scans and more.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Thank you, Sebastian and everyone at the Taipei Biennale and Dictionary of War
for inviting me to Taipei.
As Sebastian said, there are many advantages of being last, one of which is an
exhausted audience who has been waiting all day to leave.
So I won't take up much time and I will zoom through the concept with
promptness and speed.
But first I'd like to show you a video.
It's from a little over 30 years ago and it's from the United States of
America.
The picnic near the lakeside in Chicago is the start of a lazy afternoon early
one October.
We begin with a scene one meter wide which we view from just one meter away.
Now every 10 seconds we will look from 10 times farther away and our field of
view will be 10 times wider.
This square is 10 meters wide and in 10 seconds the next square will be 10
times as wide.
Our picture will center on the picnickers even after they've been lost to
sight.
100 meters wide.
The distance a man can run in 10 seconds.
Cars crowd the highway.
Powerboats lie at their docks.
The colorful bleachers are soldiers field.
This square is a kilometer wide, 1,000 meters.
The distance a racing car can travel in 10 seconds.
We see the great city on the lake shore.
10 to the 4th meters, 10 kilometers.
The distance a supersonic airplane can travel in 10 seconds.
We see first the rounded end of Lake Michigan, then the whole Great Lake.
10 to the 5th meters.
The distance an orbiting satellite covers in 10 seconds.
Long parades of clouds.
The day's weather in the Middle West.
10 to the 6th, a one with six zeros, a million meters.
Soon the earth will show as a solid sphere.
We are able to see the whole earth now, just over a minute along the journey.
The earth diminishes into the distance but those background stars are so much
farther away that they do not yet appear to move.
In the interest of time, that's not in the original film.
10 to the 8th, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3,
2, 1.
We are back at our starting point.
We slow up at one meter, 10 to the zero power.
Now we reduce the distance to our final destination by 90 percent every 10
seconds, each step much smaller than the one before.
At 10 to the minus 2, one one-hundredth of a meter, one centimeter, we approach
the surface of the hand.
In a few seconds we'll be entering the skin, crossing layer after layer from
the outermost dead cells into a tiny blood vessel within.
Skin layers vanish and turn, an outer layer of cells, filthy collagen, the
capillary containing red blood cells and roughly lymphocyte.
We enter the white cell.
Among its vital organelles, the porous wall of the cell nucleus appears.
The nucleus within holds the heredity of the man in the coiled coils of DNA.
As we close in, we come to the double helix itself, a molecule like a long
twisted ladder whose rungs of paired bases spell out twice in an alphabet of
four letters the words of the powerful genetic message.
At the atomic scale, the interplay of form and motion becomes more visible.
We focus on one commonplace group of three hydrogen atoms bonded by electrical
forces to a carbon atom.
Four electrons make up the outer shell of the carbon itself.
They appear in quantum motion as a swarm of shimmering points.
At 10 to the minus 10 meters, one angstrom, we find ourselves right among those
outer electrons.
Now we come upon the two inner electrons held in a tighter swarm.
As we draw toward the atom's attracting center, we enter upon the vast inner
space.
This is Powers of 10, a documentary by Charles and Ray Eames, 1977.
Its full title, The Powers of 10, a film dealing with the relative size of
things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero.
This film and the creators of the film have been credited by in defining the
look of the century.
Charles and Ray Eames, you can say, were early concept persons.
The duo were designers, artists, filmmakers, architects, educationalists,
cultural ambassadors.
To quote from their own website, American visionaries who transformed decades
of American everyday life through design and media.
To some, they are better known for their consumer products that range from high
-quality ultra-modernist chairs to prefabricated homes.
To us in India, the Eames are generally revered as gurus of modern design.
They were invited to India by the Nehru government as consultants in the 1950s
and authored a report called the India Report, which led to the formation of
the country's first and for a long time only and largest design school, the
National Institute of Design.
Back to Powers of 10, the film's PR talks about the mysteries embedded in an
everyday picnic.
The promotion goes on to say, the Power of 10 also represents a way of
thinking, of seeing the interrelatedness of all things in our universe.
It is about math, science, and physics, about art, music, and literature.
It is about how we live, how scale operates in our lives, and how seeing and
understanding our world from the next largest or next smallest vantage point
broadens our perspective and deepens our understanding.
This hugely popular and powerful film has been watched in high schools across
America and continues to show in museums around the world.
Watching this today right here at the Dictionary of War in Taipei, we have a
number of examples of other such powers to compare and to historicize a film
like this.
Powers of 10 creates a kind of idealized impossible I, a phantom viewer who
actually cannot exist.
Yet, over the past 40 years, the people that have come closest to occupying
this viewer's position have been obviously the military, and then in the more
public peacetime I, companies like Google.
In fact, we all acknowledge that the majority of advancements in optics,
imaging, microphysics, and biology have been driven and utilized by the
military first.
An obvious example would be the early experiments in live broadcast.
The first images were from a prison and then a bomber plane.
And of course, the Eames were not innocent of this.
This was not just their blank canvas of imagination.
In the decade before this film, most of their projects had been underwritten by
companies such as IBM, Polaroid, Westinghouse, and Boeing.
IBM funded Powers of 10.
Charles did a number of projects for the Nixon administration.
He was part of the National Council for the Arts and also the United States
Information Agency, for whom they did the maximum of commissioned work.
Their commitment to post-Depression era populism of modernity, post-war
commodity culture, and later on as Cold War cultural ambassadors, in particular
to Moscow in 1959, where they actually pioneered the multi-screen multimedia
extravaganza.
There was a seven-screen extravaganza called Glimpses of the United States of
America.
2,200 pictures of supermarkets, highways, skyscrapers, and factories.
Life on the same earth, so different in the land of the free.
And I quote here from a film critic, a feminist film critic, Amy Valerio, who
was writing about a review of a major retrospective of the Eames work, a
Library of Congress retrospective.
Glimpses of the USA stitches the rhetoric of the later powers, that stitches
the rhetoric of the later powers of 10 to the Cold War.
Americans and Russians wake up under the same stars, travel through the days
under the same physical organizations of time and space, and feed themselves
from the same earth.
This literal American grain is assured in its social progressive vision.
The narration, male voice of God, as with much of their other work, confidently
bolsters the powers of its multiple projection, which, said Charles, was simply
a method to employ all the viewer's senses in order to make the American way
seem credible.
Like Sebastian said yesterday, it is when he introduced the Dictionary of War,
Taipei Biennale edition, that it is true that the military and the media create
most of the concepts and indeed the conditions for war.
And so, shocked and awed by the powers of 10, the powers of then, and the
powers of now, I propose for Tao a concept of war, the Zoom.
I will look at just four powers of the Zoom, but this is a concept in a
lexicon, in formation, so it's open to be expanded to include maybe all the
registers of Zoom we have here.
This Zoom is the typical scope of aerial photography.
You could say 1000 meters to 100 meters.
We could call the Zoom the preemptive Zoom.
So we have the preemptive Zoom at 10 raised to the power of 3.
Preemptive Zoom presumes that the subject is about to attack and speedily zeros
in to obliterate it.
The scope of vision is the scope for capture or attack.
The eye is lined up with the firing arm.
A preemptive Zoom does not guarantee accuracy and knows that there will be
errors and great extents of collateral damage.
The relationship between the eye and the subject is an abstract one based on
subtle binaries fed into the system of the eye.
For the viewer, preemptive Zoom makes the landscape of war look not just far
away, but also small.
We go to the next Zoom at 10 raised to the power of 2.
That is 100 meters to 10 meters.
And the next set of images you will see is from the kingdom that sleepwalked
into a surveillance society.
We can call this one the preventive Zoom or the preservative Zoom.
A preservative Zoom tries hard to preserve property.
A preventive Zoom tries hard to prevent any sort of untoward or unnecessary
behavior of subjects.
The statistics, however, show that this has not been successful.
So in future references, if you ever say it wasn't there at the time, we've got
a pitcture of him which is like, there you go, the time and the day when It was
taken.
So it is quite good.
He's just harassing students and things and he's just found a can there...
beer.
That's where he hides his beer
So that's how
clear it is.
At a distance, you can't really see people's faces and things.
At night, she used to visit Fridays.
Quite a lot happens.
This is footage from a project that I did in Manchester in March this year,
where we opened up CCTV control rooms to members of the public.
About 40 people came into this particular one on the hour.
So what you hear is interactions between the operators and members of the
public.
Identification code.
In the kingdom, there is one zooming eye for every 10 subjects, who under its
brotherly gaze become performers to varying degrees, either consciously or
subconsciously.
In the control room, the scopic regimes, and here scoping in the United
Kingdom, is very evocatively defined as social context of pathways into crime.
In the control rooms, the scopic regime follows basic markers of conformity and
difference.
Preventive zoom systems are growing each day.
They now include automated systems that can recognize faces and detect errant
body language.
This desire to replace the numerous five-pound-an-hour human operators or the
human eyes has been around for a very long time.
Entry-level preservative zoom systems are now showing up by the hundreds of
thousands in my city with its growing private property to protect.
Often capturing sound as well as video, the local preference clearly is for the
ones made in Taiwan and not the ones in mainland China.
There are also many dummy ones.
Sometimes just the perception of the zoom does the job.
Entry-level preventive zoom systems cost about the price of a meal for two in a
decent restaurant.
But back to the kingdom.
Preventive and preservative zoom footage in the kingdom and its allied nations
itself is not preserved.
It is written over, as Man Ray was telling us, it is written over every 30
days, unless an event occurs that validates the infinite and continuous
capture.
The viewer then is not just the police and the law.
In fact, there are many TV programs now, including live program in certain
localities of East London, for example, where citizens, homeowners can actually
watch the city, their neighborhood surveillance on one of their cable channels
and in turn have a hotline back to the control room.
And I do wish Man Ray had shown you Jill Maggott's work, because as an artist,
the work she's done in Liverpool does its best to really complicate this
distance that the preventive and preservative zoom has and tries to really
muddy it by making it a personal zoom, a proximate zoom and, you know, just
trying to collapse this distance between the CCTV operator and her body.
But you can see that film.
Is it in the Biennale?
No.
And so talking about Jill Maggott and the personal and proximate zoom, we move
on to our next zoom, which is the proximate zoom.
And that's 10 raised to the power of one.
One meter to 10 meters.
Proximate zoom occurs in the same space as the subject.
The eye and the subject are separated by an imaginary line, which for those who
remember the tradition, the traditional conventions of filmmaking, you are
never to cross the imaginary line.
Proximate zoom allows the eyes, allows the eye, the powerful eye.
Proximate zoom allows the eye a sense of intimacy over her subject, an intimacy
which is often presumed by the author of the eye.
Proximate zoom is a thinking zoom.
The eye behind it is changing the distances based on an imagined mood or
emotions that that the imagined viewer of this material may inhabit.
The proximate zoom borrows tricks from the pornographic zoom, which is also
proximate and, as we all know, anticipates and constructs the money shot.
Proximate zoom understands that this material is captured as rushes or footage,
which sometimes often reveal something about the people shooting it.
And this eventually gets lost in its editing process.
However, and this is true, the proximate zoom we cannot live without.
It succeeds in transferring the intimacy of the captured soul to the viewer.
So I am talking about the numerous documentary films that we all love to watch.
The example I'm going to show you is another one from my own archive.
This is from 11 years ago when I was assistant director on a documentary film
where we traveled by road through every state in India for six months.
It's a longish bit of footage, so do give it patience.
The translation will be up on the other wall.
This is proximate zoom.
So the proximate zoom also assumes sort of the benevolent neutrality, very
benevolent gaze on part of the author.
It assumes a kind of sensitivity towards the other.
It also assumes that the author has extremely well-meaning intentions and is
seeking in some way to empower his or her subject, is seeking to offer them
some agency.
It assumes a lot of things.
A little bit of background.
These are Siddhis.
You find some African tribes in about four regions in India and one in
Pakistan.
There are various unknown histories as to how they have come to India.
These Siddhis, and they're all generically called Siddhi, which actually means
master.
The Siddhis in Karnataka are most obviously assumed to be slaves brought in
from Mozambique, which is also a Portuguese colony, and brought to Goa.
At some point they've either escaped or were freed and retreated to the forests
in the neighboring state.
But they've collectively lost their history.
Here we are trying very hard through all our persistent questioning, that's my
voice there 11 years ago, to get them to reveal and to tell us about a very
obvious racial discrimination that we assume they face and we want you to know.
So what Sunita has revealed to me in an offline, off-camera conversation.
So again, a director's benevolent gesture to, and a desire to include them.
In the grand idea of a nation, it's again persistent kind of questioning.
Again, well-meaning intention.
Can the subaltern speak?
So you provoke them and believe that that offers some kind of agency.
And if eyes are the windows to the soul, let us zoom a little further.
But before I go there, I do want to say that the proximate zoom and the
preventive zoom both call for serious critiques.
And I think as artists and filmmakers, we need to really, I mean, those are the
levels which we can address and really try to think of far more equitable ways
to tell these stories, to critique both systems of documentary and visual
anthropology and surveillance.
But let us go to the last zoom, which
is the permanent zoom.
It begins at 10 raised to the power of zero, and then goes into the negative
powers, passing into the thresholds of the human body.
The permanent zoom is a form of biometrics that does not need physical contact
with the subjects.
All it needs is an infrared assisted image of the subject's eye.
As a post zoom, because the permanent zoom is also a post zoom, it reads into
seven layers of the eye and the iris.
The eye of the viewer now needs only the eye of the subject.
The permanent zoom inverts the logic of the field of view and expands such that the carceral extends from the individual's eyes to the entire world. It is a permanent zoom making the captured one a prisoner forever, not just in their own lands. So it can also be called the prison zoom.
I end here and take, I end here and as the dictionary of war, Taipei Biennale draws to a close and as we zoom out of the last image of the day, out from the eyes or the eye of an Iraqi soul in a freedom operation and as we zoom out to include new topologies of violence, further out so we see India to the east and Africa to the west and further out as we pass the blank waiting space of Europe and then further out past the second lives and second cities of the kingdom and as we zoom right out to see the sun going down in Taipei and over the sun rising in New York with the opening of the Dow Jones exchange and as we zoom back to our homes, our real or imaginary homelands, let us stay troubled by the powers of zoom. It contains us and within us, the limits of our own worldviews and loss of control and yet, all I can say is at least when we create concepts, we are trying to do something. Thank you.
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