refractal

Wired today featured a profile of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) efforts to bring satellite reconnaissance photography to bear upon human rights violations within closed societies like North Korea and disputed territories like the Gaza Strip. They work with NGO’s and regional groups to help provide and disseminate documentary evidence of acts of violence to the world community.

Visualizing human atrocities from the perspective that these images afford is a quite a complicated thing to do. One can look at an aerial view of Auschwitz, for instance, of prisoners lined up, tracing a curved line, to be processed through the gate. But the whole scene still resolves at such a clinical level. One can illustrate and argue from miles in the air, but can one provide the visceral force of documentation needed to rouse the world’s intervention? After the fact, when the picture has meaning and history behind it, certainly, it can be quite compelling and have an almost a voyeuristic magnetism to it. This was where they would shoot them. This is the creek that the ashes were dumped in. But how do we understand it, how do we relate to the reality in these images?