Remote Vision: a Film Screening from Stephen Cornford and Harun Farocki

The National Art School and Western Sydney University invite you to a special free film screening event, curated by NAS Lecturer in Drawing Ben Denham and featuring Stephen Cornford’s Spectral Index (2023) and War at a Distance (2003) by Harun Farocki.

Monday 6 November 2023

6:30 – 8:30pm

Cell-Block Theatre

National Art School

Photographic imaging technologies have long been associated with important historical shifts in art practice. One famous example is the influence of photographic works by Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge on Marcel Duchamp’s paintings, including his iconic work Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912). Harun Farocki and Stephen Cornford continue this legacy of artists reflecting on the role of new and developing imaging technologies in the contemporary world.

The screening of Stephen Cornford’s Spectral Index will be followed by a discussion with the artist regarding his film and its relationship to Harun Farocki’s work. Farocki has been an important influence on Stephen Cornford. The screening and discussion with Cornford is a unique opportunity to reflect on the connections between the works of these two artists and to experience the full power of their films through the National Art School’s state of the art cinema projection and sound system.

Stephen Cornford, Spectral Index, 2023, 18:25 minutes

Digitisation has shifted the materials on which our media technologies rely. The minerals and metals required for digital imaging are the same as those required for energy transition away from fossil fuels. There is currently a new resource race underway, with nation states and political blocks scrambling to ensure secure supplies of these critical raw materials. This race is both driven by and reliant upon visual cultures, a recursive circularity in which images are used to produce minerals which are used to produce images.

This single-screen video work considers the role of the ​‘spectral index’ in framing our relationship with landscapes that are perpetually surveilled by orbital satellites and aerial drones. A spectral index is a mathematical image function in which different wavelengths of the visible and infrared spectrum are combined to produce false colour images that analyse different terrestrial conditions. To gaze at the earth through these instrumental lenses presumes both ownership and functionality of the planetary surface below.

Stephen Cornford

Harun Farocki, War at a Distance, 2003, 54:44 minutes

In 1991, when images of the Gulf War flooded the international media, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on computer. This loss of bearings was to change forever our way of deciphering what we see.

The image is no longer used only as testimony, but also as an indispensable link in a process of production and destruction. This is the central premise of War at a Distance, which continues the deconstruction of claims to visual objectivity Harun Farocki developed in his earlier work.

With the help of archival and original material, Farocki sets out in effect to define the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and sheds light on how the technology of war finds applications in everyday life.

Antje Ehmann