Rogue Pixels: Indexicality and Algorithmic Camouflage

Abstract

The resolution of publicly available satellite photography is limited to 50 cm a pixel. Every pixel in a satellite image is a single, solid color. The reasons for the resolution limit are tactical as well as protective: according to forensic architect Eyal Weizman, it maintains the privacy of individuals on the ground as well as makes the consequences of state violence harder to investigate. A uniformly colored pixel can be evidence of a drone attack or proof that it never happened. The indexical evidence ambivalently sustains both interpretations. If camouflage has been traditionally thought of as a blending into the contiguous environment, often geared toward a camera’s gaze, in this essay I look to the reorientation of camouflage away from the adjacent surroundings and toward the mediating structures of the interface and database. The objective of camouflage is now to merge into arrays of information and to slip below the threshold of detectability. This essay examines the work of artists and activists, such as Hito Steyerl, Zach Blas, and Adam Harvey, who strategize ways of becoming “rogue pixels” hiding in “the cracks of our standards of resolution,” resisting the means by which our bodies are indexed on virtual interfaces and algorithmically parsed as data.