The Art of Questioning Lethal Vision: Mosse’s  Infra  and Militarized Machine Vision

Military techno-vision is decidedly opaque. We – the public in whose name they are developed and deployed – are never quite allowed to scrutinize how exactly it operates, or what kind of work it performs. For a long time, military techno-vision was related to the optical qualities of the human eye. It was either about enhancing the natural human eye, seeing further, seeing in less light, seeing from different locations, or about mimicking the human eye, creating spatial awareness and navigation capabilities from the singular point of the eye/camera. Today, increasingly, militarized techno-vision is not merely about the production but also the interpretation of images, about the mind rather than the eye, to use the anthropomorphic language that dominates high-tech discourse. This shift from optics to procession, vision or understanding is related to the development of precision optics and the resulting flood of images that threatens to overwhelm the security bureaucracies seeking to optimize lethal vision. The contemporary problem, thus, is not overcoming invisibility but rather how to efficiently manage a flood of opaque images. The solution, proposed by militaries as simultaneously benign and efficient, is to delegate image interpretation to machines. In this paper, I ask how we can scrutinize and interrogate the agency of such machine vision systems when we as a public are rarely granted access to the operations they perform. First, I briefly explore current machine vision technologies, and the technological projects that have identified their blind spots. Second, I look to artistic image production as a means to help think about militarized vision and pictorial agency.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Rune Saugmann

Conference

Publication date: May 2018

Publication date (Print): May 2018

Pages: 1-7

Affiliations

[1 ] International Politics

University of Tampere

Tampere, Finland

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVAC18.29

SO-VID: cbfc7c3d-eaef-4477-8865-9e2cb60345cd

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Politics of the Machines - Art and After

Conference acronym: EVA Copenhagen

Conference number: 7

Conference location: Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark

Conference date: 15 - 17 May 2018

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Digital arts and culture

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVAC18.29

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

References

G.C Allen 2017 Bringing AI to the fight against ISIS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists https://thebulletin.org/project-maven-brings-ai-fight- against-isis11374 4 5 18
L Amoore 2007 Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror Security Dialogue 38 215 232
RS Andersen 2015 Remediating Security. A semiotic framework for analyzing how video speaks security University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Science Copenhagen
J BolterR.A Grusin 2000 Remediation: understanding new media MIT Press Cambridge, Mass
J DengW DongR SocherL.-J LiKai LiLi Fei-Fei 2009 ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database 2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition IEEE Miami, FL, USA 248 255
Deputy Secretary of Defense 2017 Establishment of an Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (Project Maven)
D Gregory 2011 The everywhere war The Geographical Journal 177 238 250
DJ Haraway 1991 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature Free Association Books London
T JohnsonC.F Wald 2017 To Handle Its Influx of Drone Footage, Military Should Teach AI to Watch TV. WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/the-military-should-teach-ai-to-watch-drone-footage/ 11 6 18
Kodak 2005 KODAK AEROCHROME III Infrared Film 1443 https ://www.kodak.com/uploadedFiles/Corporate/Industrial_Materials.../ti2562.pdf 11 6 18
T-Y LinM MaireS BelongieL BourdevR GirshickHaysJP PeronaD RamananC.L ZitnickP Dollár 2015 Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context arXiv:1405.0312v3
D Lyon 1994 The electronic eye: the rise of surveillance society University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis
A NguyenJ YosinskiJ Clune 2015 Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, IEEE https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897
Norwegian Police Security Service 2014 PST and Societal Security Presentation at Peace Research Institute Oslo 12 12 14
C Pellerin 2017 Project Maven to Deploy Computer Algorithms to War Zone by Year’s End
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE https ://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1254719/project-maven-to-deploy-computer-algorithms- to-war-zone-by-years-end/ 4 5 18
N PeruginiN Gordon 2017 Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces: Distinction and the Ethics of Violence Antipode 49 1385 1405 R Rebibo 2014 I STILL SHOOT FILM istillshootfilm.org http://istillshootfilm.org/post/48700294601/richard-mosse-interview-kodak-aerochrome-in-the 6 27 18
O RussakovskyJ DengH SuJ KrauseS SatheeshS MaZ HuangA KarpathyA KhoslaM BernsteinA.C BergL Fei-Fei 2014 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge arXiv:1409.0575 [cs]
R Saugmann Andersen 2017 Video, algorithms, and security Security Dialogue 48 354–372
MJ Shapiro 2009 Cinematic geopolitics Routledge London; New York
J Stearns 2011 Shocking pink. The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/ma y/28/richard-mosse-infrared-photos-congo 27 6 18
M TazzioliW Walters 2016 The Sight of Migration: Governmentality, Visibility and Europe’s Contested Borders Global Society30445 464 The Economist 2016 From not working to neural networking. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/06/25/from-not-working-to-neural- networking 4 5 18
O VinyalsA ToshevS BengioD Erhan 2015 Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator arXiv:1411.4555v2
O VinyalsA ToshevS BengioD Erhan 2014 A picture is worth a thousand (coherent) words: building a natural description of images Google AI Blog. https://ai.googleblog.com/2014/11/a-picture-is- worth-thousand-coherent.html 4 5 18 W Walters 2014 Drone strikes, dingpolitik and beyond: Furthering the debate on materiality and security Security Dialogue45101 118

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] G.C Allen 2017 Bringing AI to the fight against ISIS Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists https://thebulletin.org/project-maven-brings-ai-fight- against-isis11374 4 5 18

[2] L Amoore 2007 Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror Security Dialogue 38 215 232

[3] RS Andersen 2015 Remediating Security. A semiotic framework for analyzing how video speaks security University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Science Copenhagen

[4] J BolterR.A Grusin 2000 Remediation: understanding new media MIT Press Cambridge, Mass

[5] J DengW DongR SocherL.-J LiKai LiLi Fei-Fei 2009 ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database 2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition IEEE Miami, FL, USA 248 255

[6] Deputy Secretary of Defense 2017 Establishment of an Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (Project Maven)

[7] D Gregory 2011 The everywhere war The Geographical Journal 177 238 250

[8] DJ Haraway 1991 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature Free Association Books London

[9] T JohnsonC.F Wald 2017 To Handle Its Influx of Drone Footage, Military Should Teach AI to Watch TV. WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/the-military-should-teach-ai-to-watch-drone-footage/ 11 6 18

[10] Kodak 2005 KODAK AEROCHROME III Infrared Film 1443 https ://www.kodak.com/uploadedFiles/Corporate/Industrial_Materials.../ti2562.pdf 11 6 18

[11] T-Y LinM MaireS BelongieL BourdevR GirshickHaysJP PeronaD RamananC.L ZitnickP Dollár 2015 Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context arXiv:1405.0312v3

[12] D Lyon 1994 The electronic eye: the rise of surveillance society University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis

[13] A NguyenJ YosinskiJ Clune 2015 Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, IEEE https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897

[14] Norwegian Police Security Service 2014 PST and Societal Security Presentation at Peace Research Institute Oslo 12 12 14

[15] C Pellerin 2017 Project Maven to Deploy Computer Algorithms to War Zone by Year’s End

[16] U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE https ://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1254719/project-maven-to-deploy-computer-algorithms- to-war-zone-by-years-end/ 4 5 18

[17] N PeruginiN Gordon 2017 Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces: Distinction and the Ethics of Violence Antipode 49 1385 1405 R Rebibo 2014 I STILL SHOOT FILM istillshootfilm.org http://istillshootfilm.org/post/48700294601/richard-mosse-interview-kodak-aerochrome-in-the 6 27 18

[18] O RussakovskyJ DengH SuJ KrauseS SatheeshS MaZ HuangA KarpathyA KhoslaM BernsteinA.C BergL Fei-Fei 2014 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge arXiv:1409.0575 [cs]

[19] R Saugmann Andersen 2017 Video, algorithms, and security Security Dialogue 48 354–372

[20] MJ Shapiro 2009 Cinematic geopolitics Routledge London; New York

[21] J Stearns 2011 Shocking pink. The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/ma y/28/richard-mosse-infrared-photos-congo 27 6 18

[22] M TazzioliW Walters 2016 The Sight of Migration: Governmentality, Visibility and Europe’s Contested Borders Global Society30445 464 The Economist 2016 From not working to neural networking. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/06/25/from-not-working-to-neural- networking 4 5 18

[23] O VinyalsA ToshevS BengioD Erhan 2015 Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator arXiv:1411.4555v2

[24] O VinyalsA ToshevS BengioD Erhan 2014 A picture is worth a thousand (coherent) words: building a natural description of images Google AI Blog. https://ai.googleblog.com/2014/11/a-picture-is- worth-thousand-coherent.html 4 5 18 W Walters 2014 Drone strikes, dingpolitik and beyond: Furthering the debate on materiality and security Security Dialogue45101 118

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The Art of Questioning Lethal Vision: Mosse’s Infra and Militarized Machine Vision