Viewfinder: Harun Farocki's recently completed Eye/Machine trilogy made its debut last month at the 54th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Artforum editor Tim Griffin caught up with the filmmaker on opening day in the Carnegie Museum's garden, where he mused on smart weapons, cinema, and CNN.

TIM GRIFFIN: How would you say the second Gulf War has changed the imaging of war?

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HARUN FAROCKI: In the first Gulf War, we all believed in "smart" weapons--meaning a weapon that can detect its own target and steer itself there. In this war, nobody dared to talk about smart weapons. They were a joke. Even the government no longer tried to tell us that such weapons really work. Nevertheless, one must consider how we first turned to such automatic weaponry--and that has to do with the logic of production in general.

A Texas Instruments promotional film that I quote in Eye/Machine says, "One bomb, one target." If you can only sell one bomb per target, how do you keep your market from shrinking? You sell software for your weapon. And with this development, the logic of war turns toward humanitarian ends: We need wars with humanitarian goals, where you can't just blast everything, but you really have to make decisions about who is good, who is bad, who's an ally, and so on. This is the future. Our visionary idea that there are terrible regimes, and that the ideals of say, the French Revolution should be spread around the world, works very well with one interest of the military-industrial complex--introducing these so-called smart weapons. Somehow there's a strange alliance between this vision and the selling of software that hasn't even been produced yet. And in this sense the Gulf Wars have changed the status of images, because images are no longer just a means for entertainment or education. They are tools.

TG: Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?

HF: In the early days of photography and film, natural science found them very useful. Soon, however, science got into microspheres and no longer needed things that merely enhanced the human eye a little bit. Now, when a weapon or other machine begins to process an image--in order to know its position and to decide if it's working within the range of the duties for which it was programmed--that realigns images. They're no longer so separated from reality as they were before.

TG: And how does this sort of viewpoint manifest itself in your work?

HF: This is, I think, the thesis of the third part of Eye/Machine. But I shouldn't sound so cynical about humanitarianism. I just try to catch hold of this influence over images. Let's compare it to bureaucratic language or the language used in court--the language that writers like Kafka and Robert Walser use to talk about their characters. Language has to do with power, and its use by institutions is something we've lately become strongly aware of.

TG: I'd like to ask you about the language of images. How would you describe the impact of cable news on the framing of the current war?

HF: With cable we've seen the arrival of several images onscreen at once. They have the stock information here and the weather information there, one correspondent in real time here and a tiny image with archival footage there; you always have one image here and another one in Washington and a correspondent at network headquarters talking or something. The structure is more like a computer than a film, and in a primitive sense it's like having an editing table in front of us. We're looking at several images, creating interrelations among images and texts. That's quite complex compared to the classical news, where you had a storylike sequence of images.

That's why I use multiple screens in my work--because today there's always the image, and then the image being read in terms of what's next to it. Also, in the three parts of Eye/Machine, I use and reuse many images: Some images from the first part reappear in number two, and some from number two in number three. I try not to have a linear, deductive argument but rather these quite short, poemlike concepts--what Walter Benjamin called the Gedankenbild, or the "idea-image."

TG: Your description has a hypertextual quality.

HF: One must be careful when saying such things. Look back through history and see what people said about the coming of video or photography, and you laugh! I would say that the computer is very much language-based, not image-based--it's not the end of the Gutenburg Galaxy--yet after the past twenty years, images are now presented in a different way, used and reused. And the ability of many people to work with images, even with moving images has dramatically changed. Young people now intuitively see how images have been edited; they understand the camera movement behind it, the hierarchies of meaning, and so on. Thirty years ago even film students couldn't do this.

TG: What is cinema in the Internet Age? Or, speaking more generally, given recent developments in technology?

HF: We've seen the development of two strategies. Because we receive so many images so quickly, the construction of a film--even a primitive one--has become very elaborate. It's not enough to have nice establishing shots, because you've seen all these shots already. They're exhausted. Also, the very concept of phantom shots--a shot from an impossible position--is no longer surprising. A camera can be in your tooth, your nose, wherever, Cinematography is competing with these developments and becoming baroque. On the other hand, we have these powerful filmmakers who do the opposite, becoming very simple and essentialist, like the Dardenne brothers, or almost Buddhist, like Abbas Kiarostami--just a car and two people talking.

TG: This doesn't change the circulation of images, or their control. How would you describe the change in access to imagery that we have in this Gulf War versus the previous one?

HF: In the first Gulf War, they really tried to avoid showing Iraq. At the beginning of the current war, you had these live feeds from so-called embedded journalists, which sometimes looked like traffic TV--just highways and driving. Once, in Canada, I turned on traffic TV and I thought, "Is that Baghdad?" But it was only Ontario. I was very relieved. [Laughs.]

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TG: And the changed relationship of image to reality that you mentioned earlier?

HF: You know, when it comes to news, knowledge about a country like Iraq or Afghanistan is close to zero. If people know where to locate it on a map, that's already a lot. A Hegelian could say in an ironic sense that the war made Afghanistan appear. Only when you destroy it do you come to recognize it, at least formally. This other level of phenomena--whether there's a resistance or no resistance, for example--these are not very meaningful facts of what the country is. It's a very ephemeral aspect of so-called reality.

I mostly watched the current war from Europe, where people had learned much from the first Gulf War. There was a huge disbelief in the images one saw. You don't know where they are taken or what their meaning is. I think people have become very smart at deciphering images and knowing how relative the meaning of an image is and how much it has to do with context and interpretation ... and with preknowledge. As Dziga Vertov said, "Unlike dogs, images don't have name tags."