Seminário Empire Front, de Atif Akin

Atif Akin’s Empire Front: 
Networks and the Hermeneutical Dimensions of Disruption

Political culture relies on a systematized set of conventions that readily actualizes dialectics in their most brutal form: right and wrong; war and peace; past and future; secrecy and openness. Situated along this dialectical boundary is a disruptive potential, tasked with questioning power structures borne of this political culture. Most visibly articulated through art, media, and culture, the transformative potential of such disruptions is catastrophic and progressive at once: it can threaten to destroy an existing narrative, and it can, simultaneously, become normative. The internet in the age of corporate capitalism has provided the perfect breeding ground for such disruptions to play themselves out, several times over. This phenomenon is most evidently observed in the dyad of social media and mass surveillance, intricately interwoven into one another, and in turn, into our daily existence. War, power, rights (privacy), narrative, identity, and language have all been shaped and morphed by the utopian vision of voluntary, online, social participation and its antithesis, with momentum and speed that only capitalism can provide. Where are the counter forces, the resistance and subversion to this teleology? 

Empire Front, an installation of photographs taken from the social media accounts of American soldiers stationed in US bases abroad, offers a glimpse of one such disruption. The work, created by the artist, Atif Akin, in 2015, comprises over 600 polaroid-format images displayed in a large-scale grid format, stripped of their color filter, and dimmed into green-gray-brown tones reminiscent of military fatigues and maps. From afar, the grid of photographs looks like a topographical map of a war-zone. Stepping closer, this is classic war documentation—a collection of photos of American soldiers on the front lines—joining a long history of photographic representation of America at war: tintypes documenting soldiers and battle scenes during the civil war; glass plate negatives of World War I; and the 16mm film format used extensively to document World War II. Alongside the grid is an animation work panning aerial views, gleaned from online satellite imaging services, of those bases where the soldiers are located, and from where they share banal tidbits of their daily lives: Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Turkey, Kosovo, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

More information: http://postscreen.fba.ul.pt/seminar-empire-front/