Abstract
The news media spotlights events and concerns of the world, affording a privileged
and yet passive vantage point from which to remotely observe the suffering of others.
This raises manifold questions—social, ethical and political—broached by the field of
'media witnessing' in media studies discourse. The aim of this practice-led research is to
engage media witnessing in live television news and photojournalism, in terms of the
sense-affective dimension of media, so as to elaborate the relationship between the
news and the affective politics of crisis and catastrophe. In, Latent Images and
Monochromes, the affective capacity of resolution is explored, temporally and spatially,
in the latencies of satellite television transmission, and the JPEG compression algorithm,
respectively.
Jill Bennett's 'practical aesthetics' and Hito Steyerl's 'documentary uncertainty'
provide the foundation for a conceptual framework that engages the documentary
mode in terms of affect and visibility. Bennett provides a contemporary aesthetics
inflected by media and affect theory, which focuses on real-world events. Similarly,
Steyerl argues that affect has displaced representation in contemporary aesthetics and
politics. She states that affective and aesthetic processes are now the primary means
through which the public are addressed, as typified by the U.S Department of Homeland
Security's terror threat level chart.
In theory and practice, Steyerl's 'abstract documentarism' provides an approach to
the documentary that enlists the techniques and language of abstraction, such as the
monochrome, to critique conditions of visibility and affective politics. The studio
practice is further contextualised by the post-production video work of Alfredo Jaar,
Omer Fast, and other documentarist art practices.