Video: The dialectics of scanning. Contemporary documentaries and digital mapping technologies
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Abstract
Over the last few years a growing number of documentaries have integrated images drawn from digital mapping technologies, technologies which can be traced back to the nineteenth century photogrammetry. Using photography 3D modeling or a technology such as the Lidar scanner, they show images of still objects or landscapes a virtual camera can navigate through. Whether it is cave, a coastline, a church, statues, monuments and houses, still existing or disappeared since long, a virtual gaze wanders in and around. I can name just a few examples which I might study further in my presentation: Sunstone (Filipa César and Louis Henderson, 2018), Quantum creole (Filipa César, 2020), Constant (Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, 2022), Cielo Abierto (Felipe Esparza Pérez, 2023), VO (Nicolas Gourault, 2020), Golden Jubilee (Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021), Truth or consequences (Hannah Jayanti, 2020). These films tend to mix digital images made of dots and abstract lines with the live action ones, inviting us to reflect on a wide array of matters such as excavation and extraction, surveillance, memory and narratives. Overall they explicitly engage with a kind of space that is said to be absract or theoretical, hence the films I’d like to adress reflect and somehow divert digital scanning technologies rather than merely using them. They do it in such a manner it directs the viewer’s attention to the media involved and how they inevitably shape the world and our understanding of it. Drawing thoughts from different films and considering them more broadly within a media archaeological approach of mapping technologies, I’d like to consider how documentary films seek for diverting means when it comes to the so called new media. They seem to confront to the strategic point of view intrisic to mapping technologies its tactical and critical counterparts. Instead of enrolling themselves in the illusion of a new digital enlightenment of the world they explore the very same media’s potentials for obscuring and opacification. Rather than the real that the dots and lines of digital images stand for, what matters then are the remaining gaps and cracks in between them.
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