Daniel Mann - Böcker

This book examines how vast, arid environments have become a coveted natural resource for American and European film and media producers. Seeking to sustain the colonial imaginary of the uninhabited frontier, the screen industries increasingly depend on states in the former colonies, transforming portions of their territories into quasi-extraterritorial zones stripped from Indigenous stewardship, deregulated as tax-exempt enclaves, and devoted to techno-military experimentation. Hot Locations traces the production of abstracted desert images and re-anchors them in their material relations to land and the humans and nonhumans who reside there. In so doing, Daniel Mann produces a highly original work that theorizes the desert as a distinctive extractive formation within cinema: an environment framed, captured, rendered, and circulated as both war zone and extraterrestrial world.

This book examines how vast, arid environments have become a coveted natural resource for American and European film and media producers. Seeking to sustain the colonial imaginary of the uninhabited frontier, the screen industries increasingly depend on states in the former colonies, transforming portions of their territories into quasi-extraterritorial zones stripped from Indigenous stewardship, deregulated as tax-exempt enclaves, and devoted to techno-military experimentation. Hot Locations traces the production of abstracted desert images and re-anchors them in their material relations to land and the humans and nonhumans who reside there. In so doing, Daniel Mann produces a highly original work that theorizes the desert as a distinctive extractive formation within cinema: an environment framed, captured, rendered, and circulated as both war zone and extraterrestrial world.

How did the Israeli military learn to cope with the ubiquity of media technologies that routinely document their power abuses? Why did they re-appropriate these to tighten their grip on Palestinian civilians? This book explains why a high-tech nation with advanced military technologies came to rely on the everyday media habits performed by soldiers and civilians.Daniel Mann argues that the intensification of the security regime in Palestine, and the increasingly personal use of media technologies by both soldiers and civilians, are deeply entangled. The book traces how, beginning in the 1990s, the integration of media into the lives of civilians and Israeli soldiers enabled Israel to transfer responsibilities to individual users, who in turn became legally and ethically liable for state abuses of power. Drawing on declassified documents, found footage, and social media, Mann shows how both media and warfare have been remodelled around the figure of the defensive, isolated, and insular ‘individual’. Mann suggests that the focus on representations and their close visual analysis paradoxically hinders our ability to understand media. Instead of zooming into fine details, we must step back to reveal the assemblage of images, users, and infrastructure that together serve to maintain the racial, legal and aesthetic divide between Israel and Palestine.

How did the Israeli military learn to cope with the ubiquity of media technologies that routinely document their power abuses? Why did they re-appropriate these to tighten their grip on Palestinian civilians? This book explains why a high-tech nation with advanced military technologies came to rely on the everyday media habits performed by soldiers and civilians.Daniel Mann argues that the intensification of the security regime in Palestine, and the increasingly personal use of media technologies by both soldiers and civilians, are deeply entangled. The book traces how, beginning in the 1990s, the integration of media into the lives of civilians and Israeli soldiers enabled Israel to transfer responsibilities to individual users, who in turn became legally and ethically liable for state abuses of power. Drawing on declassified documents, found footage, and social media, Mann shows how both media and warfare have been remodelled around the figure of the defensive, isolated, and insular ‘individual’. Mann suggests that the focus on representations and their close visual analysis paradoxically hinders our ability to understand media. Instead of zooming into fine details, we must step back to reveal the assemblage of images, users, and infrastructure that together serve to maintain the racial, legal and aesthetic divide between Israel and Palestine.