Re: <nettime> Perceptual Deception

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

On this question of deception of robotic vision systems, it is worth 
re-reading Paul Virilio who may have been the first to engage with the 
epistemological, strategic, and aesthetic aspects of such technical 
vision systems that Manaugh speculates on in reaction to the Tesla 
accident. Importantly, Virilio reminds us that the deception techniques 
needn't be any more "visual" than are the decision-making systems that 
are the aim of such counter-practices.

Here's a section of a (forthcoming) text on operational images 
(Farocki's term) that I have been working on:

In a text first published in 1988, The Vision Machine, Virilio discusses 
the mental impact of current and potential future developments in the 
sightless vision of “visionics.” Virilio himsefl is particularly 
concerned with the epistemological status of mental images in comparison 
with virtual images, those “synthetic images created by the machine for 
the machine,” which are enigmatic and exclude the human observer. 
Virilio points to the transgression of synthetically produced images 
into the field of the factual, and to the way in which the virtual 
begins to have real effects: “To my mind, this is one of the most 
crucial aspects of the development of the new technologies of digital 
imagery and of the synthetic vision offered by electron optics: the 
relative fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational, if you prefer) 
and the virtual; the ascendancy of the ‘reality effect’ over a reality 
principle already largely contested elsewhere, particularly in physics.”

Forecasting future events becomes a crucial task of the new vision 
systems, as well as increasing attempts at deception and the overriding 
of reality by virtuality, not least in the military and propaganda 
scenarios of the Cold War, where nuclear deterrence was based on the 
visibility and invisibility of one’s own nuclear military potential. 
This also concerns decoy technologies, which Virilio describes in detail 
because they exemplify the operative replacement of real phenomena by 
deceptive images which, for instance, divert a missile from its real 
target onto a virtual decoy target. An important reason such deceptions 
are possible is the mediality of perception which hinges on the specific 
perceptive parameters of a particular system, and the necessity of what 
Farocki called the disavowal, i.e., the reduction of what enters the 
field of vision to aspects that can be recognized and processed for 
operative decision making.

Virilio emphasized the fact that technical visuality is fundamentally 
different from the way humans see: "Don’t forget, though, that “image” 
is just an empty word here since the machine’s interpretation has 
nothing to do with normal vision (to put it mildly!). For the computer, 
the optically active electron image is merely a series of coded impulses 
whose configuration we cannot begin to imagine since, in this 
'automation of perception,' image feedback is no longer assured. That 
being, of course, the whole idea."

From a human perspective, this is a blind gaze, a gaze that does not 
take in the complexity of a visual field and its aesthetic 
multidimensionality but only looks for precoded cues. “Blindness is thus 
very much at the heart of the coming ‘vision machine’. The production of 
sightless vision is itself merely the reproduction of an intense 
blindness that will become the latest and last form of 
industrialization: the industrialization of the non-gaze.” However, this 
blind, technical gaze and its statistical way of analyzing and 
interpreting images is not simply different from a human way of seeing; 
Virilio saw the danger of it increasingly becoming the basis for human 
visual perception and understanding: “The usual criticism of statistical 
thought, as generating rational illusions, thus necessarily comes down 
to what we might here call the visual thought of the computer, digital 
optics now being scarcely more than a statistical optics capable of 
generating a series of visual illusions, ‘rational illusions’, which 
affect our understanding as well as reasoning.”


All quotations from Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: 
Indiana University Press, 1994), 62; first published as La machine de 
vision (Paris: Galilée, 1988).


Am 07.07.16 um 08:31 schrieb nettime's avid reader:

> Robot War and the Future of Perceptual Deception
> .
> Geoff Manaugh, July 5, 2016
>
> http://www.bldgblog.com/2016/07/robot-war-and-the-future-of-perceptual-deception/

<snip>

> In any case, I suppose the question is: if, today, a truck can blend-in
> with the Florida sky, and thus fatally disable a self-driving machine,
> what might we learn from this event in terms of how to deliberately
> confuse robotic military systems of the future?
>
> We had so-called “dazzle ships”[2] in World War I, for example, and the
> design of perceptually baffling military camouflage continues to undergo
> innovation today; but what is anti-robot architectural design, or
> anti-robot urban planning, and how could it be strategically deployed as
> a defensive tactic in war?

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