Seeing like a surveillance agency? Sensor realism as aesthetic critique of visual data governance

Abstract

Despite the centrality of visual data creation and analysis in security-related governance not only of heavily surveilled battlefields, but of fields as diverse as petty crime, urban mobility and migration, the sensors and systems producing visual data used for security purposes are rarely themselves the focus of close scrutiny. This is surprising as photography, IR, and science and technology studies literature all point towards equipment as being agential and transformative. We argue that in the photo-series Heat Maps, the Irish photographer Richard Mosse opens up for a much-needed discussion of visual data production by appropriating equipment normally used for surveillance. We develop the idea of sensor realism by considering Mosse’s Heat Maps in dialogue with other aesthetic and photographic traditions and concepts. By sensor realism, we mean an aesthetic realism based on the visual replication of technologies used in visualising and governing an issue, rather than on a photorealistic depiction of an issue. Sensor realism, thus, is the critical artistic appropriation of visual data production equipment, aesthetics and practices, and allows viewers to scrutinise how visual data production reassembles and formats that which it observes. We discuss the politics of sensor realism and argue that used as a critical aesthetic it can reveal how visual data production practices are productive and enact ways of seeing that prefigure visual governance by structuring how reality is made available for governance in visual data. But due to its appropriation of sensing technologies, it always risks confirming the practices it seeks to critique.