3 - Programmed Life and Racialized Technesis

Summary

Abstract: In chapter 3, I revaluate the models of interpellation (Fanon, Althusser) from the point of view of Big Data ideology (Rouvroy) to consider the implementation of programmed life and “premature death” (Gilmore) in today's digital society. The chapter engages debates in surveillance studies and questions the making of racialized bodies by telling the story of Thierry Kuntzel's work of art Hiver, la mort de Robert Walser presented at the MoMA in 1991, which focuses on the themes of terror, death, eroticism, and sexuality. In this chapter, I engage the pre-emptive models of data extraction to question the racialized technology of societies of incarceration and control. Kuntzel's piece usefully addresses the subjects of history that are written upon by technology and the wider consequences of technologically driven narratives of survival and resistance. I argue that race in relation to video technology is a problem of discerning the cause from the conditions of implementation of racist politics in societies.

Keywords: racism, surveillance, technology, video, Thierry Kuntzel

Tools, in this way, capture more than just people's bodies. They also capture the imagination, offering technological fixes for a wide range of social problems.

– Ruha Benjamin

Let us try not to miss the target here: choosing which technological evolution we wish to emerge in our life world cannot be done without first having chosen which governmental rationality one wishes to have ruling our society.

– Antoinette Rouvroy

Where Darkness Matters

It is July 1991 in New York. You enter a dark, wide, shallow space at the Museum of Modern Art and see three mural-sized video projections along one wall. Confronted with the large scale of the installation (each image is ten feet high by seven feet wide), you stand against the opposite side of the room, attempting to grasp what is being presented at once. The three videos begin simultaneously with a saturated white light that gradually fills the space of the room. Slowly, the central panel, which functions independently from the two others, reveals shades of grey that give shape to a figure. The camera goes back and forth above the central figure in a regular and continuous fashion, following a path that gradually expands the field of vision, creating a scanning and electronically programmed quality to the image.