Before and After

The contemporary prevalence of before-and-after images shapes our perception of the world. It certainly opens up a new dimension in shifting our attention from the representation of the human agent to representations of territories and architecture, which also turns spatial analysis into an essential political tool.

Andrew Herscher, ‘Envisioning Exception

Andrew Herscher, ‘Envisioning Exception, Satellite Imagery, Human Rights Advocacy, and Techno-Moral Witnessing’, lecture at the Centre for Research Architecture, 4 March 2013. Herscher’s lecture, although delivered too late to be referred to in this piece in more detail, has been instrumental in the edit. It was included in a series of seminars on satellite imagery titled ‘Sensing Injustice’ that Susan Schuppli has organised in the context of the Forensic Architecture project. Other contributions to this series have been helpful in shaping this essay, including Lars Bromley’s contribution, on 27 November 2012; John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog’s, on 29 January 2013; and of course, Laura Kurgan’s Close up at a Distance, 19 April 2013. More information on the series is available at http://www.forensic-architecture.org/seminars/sensing-injustice/.

4. Conversation with Lars Bromley, 28 January 2013. See also the Land Remote Sensing Policy, 1992, available at http://geo.arc.nasa.gov/sge/landsat/15USCch82.html.
5. William Fenton, Why Google Earth pixelates Israel, available at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2386907,00.asp.

the fantasy of forensics is the reversibility of tim

But even if the human rights analysts must look at the same images as the targetier, they can be tuned to other issues, establishing more extended and intricate political causalities and connections. They must see in these images not only the surface of the Earth but the surface of the image – that is the politics that is embodied in the technologies of viewing and representation.

Human rights analysis seems paradoxically to have entered a post-human phase. Sensors and algorithms, rather than humans, are analysing the transformation of the environment as the condition that sustains human life.

The exclusion of people from representation is thus complemented by their gradual exclusion from the increasingly automated process of viewing and also, as we have seen, from the algorithmic process of data interpretation.

bomb-made landscape

Conflicts in the Anthropocene might best be understood, not as battles taking place in the landscape, or even as wars fought for land, but rather as the process of making of new lands.