May 2018, arsenal cinema

Technologies of Violence

LESSONS OF WAR, 2014

The short film series curated by Maria Morata and Piedad Solans explores the relationship between arts, digital technologies, and the contemporary production of violence over five programs. Technology as a system of organization, services, and control holds the tools for global domination in machines, the Internet and electronic systems – for a new era of political security whose field of representation is cyberspace. In semio-capitalism, digital images are produced, manipulated, and disseminated by the military complex, the leisure industry and the media and are a powerful instrument of ideological propaganda. The role of the technological image in the digital context opens up critical reflection on the paradoxes of the technosphere which frames them: between transparency and invisibility, control and optimization, utopia and dystopia.

Bild ex machina (16.5.) challenges the breakthrough in using images for military purposes in the civil sector. Surveillance from the air and the observation of protected areas and weapons factories are set again the subversive use of drone technologies and Google Earth perspectives.

War machines (23.5.) shows mythologies of violence with their icons, landscapes, war games, and emblematic figures. The films of the program subvert and change digital programs, video games and virtual scenarios and reveal the effects of violence as well as the strategies of destruction and  forced population movement in armed conflict.

Hyperoptics: Visibiltiy or invisibility (31.5.) reflects on digital materiality, data farming, market-oriented analyses of online information and resisting surveillance systems. The series continues in June (mm/ps)

A project by Art Santa Mónica, with the support of the Institut Ramon Llull and the Embassy of Spain.