COVID-19 transformed urban culture, introducing unprecedented elements into everyday city life. The image of the crowd, always associated with the emergence and life of metropolises, was replaced by empty streets. The gradual repopulation of public space comes with the reappearance of its inhabitants wearing masks. This picture of the “new normal” is accompanied by multiplying thermal cameras and infrared thermometers proliferating at the entrance to every place.
Paranoia is the pandemic’s aesthetic horizon, and nothing fits it better than a gun-shaped thermometer. Inevitably, we wonder what the philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio (1932–2018) would say about this, having so often warned us of the political dimensions of the automation of perception and the industrialization of vision. This automation concerns the emergence of artificial vision, the delegation to machines of a gaze we do not possess. Industrialization, meanwhile, refers to the market for synthetic perception, extensively deployed by contemporary forms of surveillance.
One pillar of these surveillance systems is remote sensing, a way of monitoring and extracting data without physical contact with the object. Technically, the first military balloon flights, conducted since the late eighteenth century before photography was invented, can be considered the origin of this procedure in an archaeology of its practices. Although aerial photography was a landmark of the First World War, what we understand as remote sensing only became established during the space race and Cold War between the United States and the USSR.
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All this is done through images of an individual’s physiology, viewed by entirely machinic eyes that scan the body and reconstruct it by translating electromagnetic inputs into pixels that, within seconds, form a “pink-purple and deep blue” portrait of the subject. A portrait can only be validated in a database, housed in a computing cloud and subjected to some artificial intelligence that will look for patterns to potentially contribute to a cure for COVID-19. But these may also be used for other purposes. We do not know.
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The normalization of guns disguised as thermometers and cameras that collect our bodies’ spectral signatures therefore contains much more than a temperature reading. These tools bring to light, albeit encoded by a militarized science, the agendas of an algorithmic optics we need to learn to see. Because it already sees us.
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