10.54103/2036-461X/17818
The paper is divided into two main aims. In the first part, it wants to investigate the presence of thermal imaging in the context of contemporary visual culture, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when thermal imaging widely demonstrated how currently optics models of vision are increasingly accompanied by thermal models of visualisation. The result of the latter is thermography: at the same time, a process that transforms our epistemic relationship with reality, extending the possibilities of visualising information beyond the limits of the visible spectrum; and an image that maintains the indexical bound with its referent, but that is conceived as the outcome of an elaborated and displayed dataset. In the second part, the paper focuses on the artistic field in which thermal vision gained further relevance in the context of the pandemic. On the one hand, the artists have criticised and deconstructed it; on the other hand, they have relaunched its use in a biopolitical horizon, such as in the case of the photographic project Virus (2020), in which Antoine d’Agata roamed the deserted streets of Paris and visited some intensive care units with a thermal camera, during the first national lockdown in 2020.
application/pdf
2036-461X
17818
39
en
Simona Pezzano
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Covid-19 Pandemic
On the Trail of Some Human Heat. Thermal Imaging, Visual Culture and the Covid-19 Pandemic
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
22
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2023-01-24
2022-05-08
2023-01-24
2023-01-24
83-98
Cinéma & Cie
Simona Pezzano
2022
10.54103/2036-461X/17818
83
Università IULM, Milano
2036-461X
39
Covid-19 Pandemic
en
98
On the Trail of Some Human Heat. Thermal Imaging, Visual Culture and the Covid-19 Pandemic
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/17818/17542
22
                                                                                       On the Trail of
                                                                                       Some Human Heat.
                                                                                       Thermal Imaging, Visual Culture
                                                                                       and the Covid-19 Pandemic
                                                                                       Lorenzo Donghi, University of Pavia
                                                                                       Simona Pezzano, IULM University of Milan1



                                                                                       The paper is divided into two main aims. In the first part, it wants to investigate the pre-              Keywords
                                                                                       sence of thermal imaging in the context of contemporary visual culture, especially du-
                                                                                                                                                                                         Infra-Red Imaging
                                                                                       ring the Covid-19 pandemic, when thermal imaging widely demonstrated how currently
                                                                                       optics models of vision are increasingly accompanied by thermal models of visualisa-               Thermal Imaging
                                                                                       tion. The result of the latter is thermography: at the same time, a process that tran-                    Body Heat
                                                                                       sforms our epistemic relationship with reality, extending the possibilities of visualising            Visual Culture
                                                                                       information beyond the limits of the visible spectrum; and an image that maintains the           Covid-19 Pandemic
                                                                                       indexical bound with its referent, but that is conceived as the outcome of an elaborated                        DOI
                                                                                       and displayed dataset. In the second part, the paper focuses on the artistic field in which
                                                                                                                                                                                              https://doi.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       thermal vision gained further relevance in the context of the pandemic. On the one hand,
                                                                                       the artists have criticised and deconstructed it; on the other hand, they have relaunched      org/10.54103/2036-
                                                                                       its use in a biopolitical horizon, such as in the case of the photographic project Virus               461X/17818
                                                                                       (2020), in which Antoine d’Agata roamed the deserted streets of Paris and visited some
                                                                                       intensive care units with a thermal camera, during the first national lockdown in 2020.




                                                                                                 We are only a little stored, organized solar heat, a memory of Sun.
                                                                                                 A little phosphorus that burns in the meninges of the world
                                                                                                               (Paul Cézanne, quoted by Antoine d’Agata, La vie nue)




                                                                                       INTRODUCTION
                                                                                         37.5 is not merely a number. If combined with a unit of measurement (the
                                                                                       degree Celsius), it becomes a temperature indicating an increase in body heat,
                                                                                       generally called fever. During the peak phases of the Covid-19 pandemic, this
                                                                                       temperature has long been considered a threshold, a watershed line. 37.5
                                                                                       °C was, at least in Italy, the limit set by the Government to establish an alert
                                                                                       level: finding that temperature, or a higher one, meant being affected by the
                                                                                       most common symptom of infection. A significant consequence of this bodily
                                                                                       overheating was the obligation to stay at home, losing the right to frequent
                                                                                       public places. Consequently, to ensure compliance with this decree, access
                                                                                       to schools, hospitals, offices, supermarkets, and workplaces started to be


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                             83
     monitored by thermal cameras and thermal scanners. These devices, placed
     near the entrances of many buildings, acted as social guardians, allowing (or
     denying) entry to anyone based on the body temperature detected.
       Therefore, the health emergency has created a shared system of norms, rules
     and behaviour determined by and depending on thermal conditions. In a word, it
     has created a thermopower. A concept that describes ‘the ways that temperature
     management defines subjects, produces objects, and locates both in grids of
     social and political organisation. [... It] operates as a form of biopower, a means
     of administering and regulating life’.2 Thermopower is a concept that can be
     relaunched in an ecological perspective, considering thermal conditions as
     something that shapes our presence in the complexity of our reality. However, it
     is also a concept that primarily deals with bodies, especially within the pandemic
     framework. Bodies indeed are the main protagonists of this pandemic as any
     other. They are the first vector of contagion, the medium of the virus;3 they
     constitute an alarm heating up.4
       Let us return to thermal cameras and thermal scanners. These devices signal
     a social danger concerning the human body by quantifying excessive heating,
     a phenomenon undetectable by human vision. Another example that suggests
     how, in the pandemic/temperature relationship, thermal media and technologies
     have played an important role precisely concerning body monitoring: from
     traditional instruments, such as the thermometer for domestic self-detection,
     to advanced visual technologies, such as the thermal imaging used to visualise
     the spread of micro-droplets in the air.5 In the emergency context, thermal
     imaging has provided information about our bodies operating outside the
     visible spectrum. Allowing us to visualise the invisible effects of the virus — and
     reminding us, as Cézanne does, of what we are in our biological essence.



     ON THERMAL CAMERA
       It may be helpful to clarify the theoretical principle on which the thermal
     camera is based to understand how thermography works.
       In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton, experimenting with a dispersive
     prism, was the first to realise that sunlight is composed of coloured rays with
     different angles of refraction. Contrary to what was believed at the time, he
     demonstrated that white light could be divided into seven different colours.
     In the nineteenth century, James Clerk Maxwell added an important piece. He
     unified work on electricity and electromagnetism into four famous equations
     and established that visible light (VIS) corresponds to a small section of a
     large continuous spectrum of radiation: the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. All
     radiation in this spectrum behaves as if it were travelling in the form of waves,
     governed by two inversely proportional measures: length (cm) and frequency
     (hertz). Therefore, the smaller the wavelength, the greater the wave’s frequency.
       A limited part of the EM spectrum — the VIS, whose spectral range is between
     0.38 µm (violet) and 0.78 µm (red) — can be seen by the human eye; but going



84                                   Donghi, Pezzano, On the Trail of Some Human Heat
immediately above and below these limits, we encounter portions of the
spectrum that are no longer visible to humans. Beyond the upper end of the
visible spectrum begins ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which extends from 0.38 µm
to the X-ray portion of the spectrum (about 10 nm). On the other hand, below the
lower end of the VIS range is the infrared (IR) radiation, which extends from 0.78
µm to the Microwaves edge (about 1 mm). However, assuming that only a small
part of the IR range is used for imaging, IR radiation can be further divided into
different regions, depending on their distance from the VIS limit [Fig. 1].6
  Determining this distance is essential. For example, it clarifies how thermal




                                                                                     Fig. 1
                                                                                     A portion of the
                                                                                     electromagnetic spectrum




imaging, although belonging to ‘what could somewhat be defined as a real
“infrared visual culture”’,7 is not conceivable as a night vision equivalent. NVDs
(Night Vision Devices) operate on the borderline between the VIS and the Short-
Wave (SW) IR region (approximately 0,8-1,7 µm), absorbing small amounts
of natural or artificial light, amplifying it considerably, and displaying it on a
screen. Like the human eye, they are not suitable for too much light, nor when it
is entirely dark. In this sense, we can say that the human eye and NVDs operate
on the same basic principle: light hits an object, and then a sensor receives it
and converts it into an image. On the other hand, current thermal cameras can
measure IR wavelengths until the Long-Wave (LW) IR region (8-14 µm), far from
the VIS edge. It means that thermal cameras can operate both in the presence
of ambient light or in its total absence: in other words, they work watching
a blazing sunset or exploring a completely dark room. It happens because
thermal cameras do not detect light but heat, the thermal energy generated by
the IR radiation.8
  Everything we encounter in our daily lives deals with thermal energy. Some


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                        85
     things absorb heat, such as the asphalt of a road on a hot sunny day, or a chair after
     someone has sat on it. Other things emit it, either mechanically (a running engine)
     or biologically (the human body). Considering that ‘there are no thermal objects,
     there is only thermal action’,9 thermal cameras can measure this invisible action
     and display it in a visual form, revealing thermal variations between adjacent
     objects and between objects and environments. With some technical limitations
     (for example, a thermal camera cannot see through a window, because glass
     acts like a mirror for IR radiation); but also without restrictions due to weather
     conditions, even in the presence of smoke, fog and rain.10
       The website of FLIR,11 the global leader in thermal imaging, illustrates the
     extraordinary versatility of this instrument, which extends our possibilities to
     acquire information and visual knowledge about reality in various fields. First in
     military research, where experiments with analogue images and Mid-Way (MW)
     IR or LWIR have been conducted since the 1930s, up to the latest generation
     of thermal cameras, capable of collecting thermal data and visualising them
     digitally. Subsequently, thermal cameras also multiplied in the civil sector. And
     today, qualitative (displaying heat distribution) and quantitative (quantifying
     the heat signatures of the framed objects) thermal cameras are increasingly
     adopted in workplace safety, territorial surveillance, biological and ethological
     research, climate change studies, and medical diagnostics. Moreover, thermal
     cameras have become a popular accessory in the domestic market, following
     the development of more practical and less expensive models.12
       Once the principles of a thermal camera’s technical operation have been
     established, a fundamental question arises — what image status can we assign
     to thermography?



     ON THERMOGRAPHY’S REFERENTIALITY
       Since thermal cameras record thermal information, thermal imaging is a
     process no longer belongs to the domain of optics, the branch of electromagnetism
     that describes the behaviour and properties of light; according to Carolyn
     Kane, it belongs to a domain ruled by information systems and algorithms.13
     Moreover, it is not a process based on ocular vision, but on what Lev Manovich
     has described as a process of data visualisation.14 Therefore, as Ruggero Eugeni
     suggests, we can consider thermography as a particular IR image that is no
     longer part of the modern economy of light, although it fully belongs to the
     contemporary economy of visuality: a computational image that updates the
     acquisitions matured on the EM fluxes of the early nineteenth century with the
     current digital datafication processes.15
       A relevant consequence of this definition concerns the thermography’s
     referentiality. Given the recurrence we have experienced in this pandemic, let
     us take the human body as an exemplar case to understand how thermography
     visually presents its referent [Fig. 2].
       This thermal selfie16 demonstrates that in thermography the body is configured



86                                    Donghi, Pezzano, On the Trail of Some Human Heat
                                                                                       Fig. 2
                                                                                       A thermal selfie shot with
                                                                                       an iPhone SE and a FLIR
                                                                                       ONE PRO




as an aggregation of pixels that takes the form of a halo with an irregular profile,
chromatically returning the thermal radiation of its referent. The halo visually
presents this radiation behaving as an index of the body that was necessarily
in front of the camera at the moment of detection, maintaining thermography
a connection of physical continuity with it.17 It is precisely this continuity that
allows us to capture bodily heat. Invisible energy whose effects we can only
observe with the naked eye through some other natural indexical signs (like
sweat or skin reddening); but which can also be quantified and visualised
thanks to a technologically determined process. A process in which colours act
for arbitrary reasons (cultural, symbolic, ideological) as ‘a system of control
used to manage and discipline perception and thus reality’.18
  Although thermography’s indexicality persists, its referentiality seems
compromised regarding referent’s recognisability and identifiability. In general,



Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                            87
     NVDs make it possible to identify the framed object. Since what allows visibility
     is still natural or artificial light, an IR night image can show at least the main
     features of monitored bodies and faces, even if tinged with the spectral green
     typical of night vision. On the other hand, in thermography, the body is only
     recognisable as a silhouette that displays the outcome of converting thermal
     data into pixels, returning a shape vaguely compatible with the human one.
     Nevertheless, it is difficult, often impossible, to identify a body in its singularity
     — the case of the artistic project Virus, realised by the French photographer
     Antoine d’Agata in the spring of 2020 and analysed in the following parts of this
     essay, offers a decisive testimony to this referential anonymity.
        Of course, an optical camera is often embedded in a thermal imager. Therefore,
     the thermography can result in an imbrication between optical and algorithmic
     logic: as with the FLIR MSX, a system that adds visible light details in real-time
     for better clarity by incorporating edge and contour details into the thermal
     visualisation.19 In addition, there are ongoing experiments in the field of thermal
     facial recognition: not based on the similarity of exterior features, but on the
     recognition of the structure of blood vessels, vascular networks and facial
     tissue, which can be used as unique biometric features.20 However, the point is
     that the framed subject can lose its outward recognisability with thermography.
        This visual condition is perfectly recalled in Predator (John McTiernan, 1987),
     the first mainstream film to integrate thermography into the diegetic dimension.
     Especially when the alien creature scans the landscape from the trees,
     detecting human bodies only as heat sources, and recognising what, not who,
     is in front of it. Alternatively, it is highlighted in the more recent There Will Be
     No More Night (Il n’y aura plus de nuit, Éléonore Weber, 2020). A military found
     footage film in which the author’s voice-over, describing thermal imaging’s
     adoption during some recent war operations, remarks how ‘the thermal camera
     cannot distinguish between a farmer holding a rake or a soldier armed with a
     Kalashnikov’.
        The same visual condition is even more surprising in processes of thermal
     self-visualisation. As in Songbird (Adam Mason, 2020), a movie set in a dystopian
     future in which the Covid-19 (now Covid-23) pandemic has taken over, and the
     US government asks citizens to monitor themselves daily for precautionary
     purposes. The device dedicated to this task is a smartphone that detects body
     heat and issues an immediate alert to the authorities if the recorded data is
     too high. The thermal camera integrated into this device does not show the
     features of the face but only the colour shade that displays the correspondent
     heat radiation [Fig. 3]. A reminder of how self-visualisation in thermal imaging
     means missing out on self-recognition, but also making everyone immediately
     distinguishable from the dominant thermopower.
        Following this last example, we can conclude that the recent Covid-19
     pandemic, constantly exposing us to the action of thermal imaging cameras,
     has consolidated a twofold awareness of the relationship between the human
     body and thermography. On the one hand, precisely because of the difficulty of
     identifying the referent to which it is nevertheless linked, thermography finally



88                                    Donghi, Pezzano, On the Trail of Some Human Heat
                                                                                       Fig. 3
                                                                                       Songbird (Adam Mason,
                                                                                       2020)




seems able to provide a neutral, impartial, unbiased human image: an image
operating beyond appearance, gender, ethnicity and skin colour, displaying
the warmth of a body regardless of its physical appearance. On the other
hand, though the thermal image promises a more objective visualisation, ‘it
naturalizes a sense of certain bodies as mere heat and amplifies and sexualizes
forms of power’.21
  Consequently, also thermal imaging ends up renewing political and social
struggles with new power dynamics, dividing those who can access resources
and manage information from those who are subjugated, overwhelmed, or
relegated to the mere position of a detected object. In the well-known transition
from the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault (based on the
importance of vision and central monitoring) to the society of control profiled by
Gilles Deleuze (where computer machines are entrusted rather with the task of
tracking, capturing and scanning a target), it is decisive to grasp the ‘fundamental
alteration from the use of vision and optics to the use of information systems and
algorithms to control and manage bodies and behaviour’.22 Bodies that can be
detected, quantified, controlled, related to normativity criteria established on a
thermal basis, and then subjected to thermopower as a form of new biopolitical
management.



THE WARMTH OF BASIC FORM-OF-LIFE
  Although the field of applications of thermal images is wide and mainly pertains
to the military and surveillance sector, thermal imaging has seen a rising interest
in the contemporary artistic scene in the past few years. Increasingly, more
photographers and video artists employ this new technology. On the one hand
for criticizing and deconstructing it, on the other hand for relaunching its use in
a biopolitical horizon. One above all: the French photographer Antoine d’Agata.


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                      89
     In particular, we will bring Virus 23 (2020) into focus, a project developed during
     the confinement following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
        Human bodies no longer just reflect light, but produce heat. As mentioned
     before, they emit EM waves: invisible radiation collected by thermal imager
     and converted into visible images. It is not the first time that the photographer
     utilizes a thermal camera for his work. Already in 2017, he chose this device for
     Figures of Worship,24 a Magnum Live Lab project, in which people of different
     faith are portrayed practicing their respective religions. Catholic mass at Notre-
     Dame Cathedral; a group of Muslims who go to the mosque of Argenteuil; people
     praying in the Montparnasse cemetery. A documentation of rites and religious
     practices which coexist on French territory, three years after the terrorist
     attack on the Bataclan music venue in Paris by fanatics: images which display
     only bodies, stripped of any cultural and political specificity, solely captured
     as the essence of being living persons. Traces of IR thermal radiation — which
     would otherwise be impossible to identify without the help of captions — who
     gather in similar ways, regardless of their religious leanings. The photographer
     was fascinated by this process of visualising heat data, which reduces human
     subjects to essential figures, devoid of any other characteristics such as gender,
     skin colour or specific identities. As he remarked: ‘The thermal image freezes
     forms, postures, figures, poses, zones imperceptible to the naked eye’.25
        D’Agata deliberately chose again this sophisticated device for Virus to
     represent the resistance of human beings during the pandemic crisis: an
     emergency in which it was possible to introduce practices of surveillance and
     discipline over people’s bodies, to recall the very origin of this technology. ‘It is
     in this ambivalence between solidarity and contamination, this inevitability of
     social and physiological death, that I tried to apprehend, traversing a language
     of senses and of resistance that transfigures the body’,26 he declared.
        The first national lockdown ordered by the Government on March 17, 2020
     — and ended nearly two months later — has transformed the French capital
     into a ghostly city. A strong sense of responsibility guided him at that time,
     the same need to create a political and aware reaction to the situation, which
     convinced one of his friend Mathilde Girard, philosopher and writer, to keep a
     daily written record from the beginning of the confinement. She gets in touch
     with d’Agata early on — both findings themselves alone in Paris. The two started
     some correspondence: he of images, she of fragments from which a common
     vision emerged. Traces of the frenzy of speeches and health rules of those
     days: the physical separation, the forced isolation, the effects of limits in social
     interactions. Everything was documented in an exchange of texts and images.
        Throughout this period d’Agata roamed the deserted streets of the city at
     night, holding a thermal camera to record various invisible IR rays emitted by
     the few isolated human beings he met, wandering among the walls of ghostly
     buildings. Reds, yellows and flashes of dark blue: a variety of cold and warm
     hues which, according to their thermal zones, reveal the outlines of public
     spaces, benches, trees and buildings. Among these architectures rare human
     figures, nothing more than hot coloured silhouettes, stand alone in the streets



90                                    Donghi, Pezzano, On the Trail of Some Human Heat
of Paris, transformed by the confinement into a disturbing theatre of rambling
bodies. With a huge amount of thermal images collected during this period (he
believes he may have taken almost 13,000 in total), d’Agata wanted to capture
the hallucinatory desolation in which the city, and its suburbs — like most of
Europe — suddenly found itself during the lockdown.
  After the first days of confinement spent tracking the heat stored both in human




                                                                                     Fig. 4
                                                                                     Antoine d’Agata, extract
                                                                                     video from La vie nue,
                                                                                     Opéra National de Paris,
                                                                                     France, 2020



bodies and in buildings to make sense of the current crisis, d’Agata widened his
research to the situation in the intensive care units of medical centres in Paris,
Bordeaux, Marseille and Nancy [Fig. 4]. Nonetheless, the images of the hospital
and those on the street are the opposite: there an empty city, here overcrowded
hospitals; there the new rules of physical distancing, here the action of the
caregivers who touch the bodies of the patients: care, comfort and gestures full
of humanity. As many of us realized: ‘People are doing much more than they are
paid to do. In the hospital I saw people dying and nurses who were helping people
do that with dignity, holding them in their arms’.27 The thermal images here
capture the deep empathetic and carnal dimension of bodies that touch and are
touched: the human warmth linked to caring made up of gestures of closeness,
of attention — while we are asked to avoid any kind of everyday interaction.
In one of the few articles dedicated to his work,28 Alice Leroy underlines how
this traditional tracking system is used by d’Agata in a deliberately improper
way. Here, in fact, by detecting heat waves emitted by bodies, he did not try
to locate and identify people, but, on the contrary, he wanted to protect their
identity, without forgoing to document such a tragic moment. Continuing the
suggestion of Judith Butler to exhibit ‘images that convey the full horror and
reality of the suffering’ — remind Leroy — the French photographer took images
of vulnerable patients along with the ‘gentle sensuality of a gesture of attention
to others’29 performed by the healthcare staff.
  But exactly what does it mean to touch? Mark Paterson recalls that in De
Anima : Aristotle in his theory of sensation relegates it to the last place in the
hierarchy of sense faculties due to its different nature. For each sense there
is a distinct organ and a physical medium which performs a specific function.


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                       91
                            For tactility, instead, there is neither a single organ to which it corresponds,
                            nor a medium: it is our own flesh that acts as a medium, and not something
                            external — unlike air for hearing or diaphanous for vision. Touching therefore
                            always means being touched. In physical contact, while we perceive an object
                            which is external to us, we also touch our receptiveness at the same time. This
                            may help explain why Aristotle defined tactility ‘not only as indispensable, but
                            as prior to the other sensory modalities’.30 Being in contact with another body
                            means to have, at the same time, an experience of ourselves: the consciousness
                            of our physicality, of our being in the world. Through touch there is therefore an
                            exchange of feeling among human bodies. In short, capturing body heat, these
                            images catching the essence of another heat: that of affectivity, a fundamental
                            dimension for human life.
                              Both situations were connected by a common thread. The political and health
                            crisis linked to the pandemic gave d’Agata the opportunity ‘to craft this idea of
                            “bare life” both on the streets and in the hospitals into shape’.31 That dimension
                            of bare life debated by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer,32 continuing the
                            analysis which Michel Foucault interrupted, such as the practical modes with
                            which power operates on the bodies of human beings transforming them into




Fig. 5
Antoine d’Agata,
Bagatelle Hospital during
Covid-19 Outbreak,
Bordeaux, France, 2020



92                                                          Donghi, Pezzano, On the Trail of Some Human Heat
submissive bodies. Agamben asserts that on the threshold of the modern era
something changed dramatically. The space of bare life — that is biological life
with its needs — once situated on the margins, progressively becomes what is
at stake in the modern age: the new political subject. That bare life, which can
be killed and yet not sacrificed of the homo sacer, a paradox once distinctive
of this figure of archaic Roman law, with modernity it has become operative in
the status of every living being, so much so that the (biopolitical) power system
exerts control over the bare life of all individuals. A risk with which d’Agata is
very concerned, since he clearly stated: ‘The consequences of this are probably
worse than the virus itself: the way in which the war against the disease is being
used to strengthen control, both political and economic’.33 This reference to the
Italian philosopher is so evident that d’Agata called his last short film, based
on Virus project, La vie nue [Fig. 5]. In this three-screens projection of thermal
images flow at different paces, following a mechanic rhythmic dimension which
tries to echo ‘the mechanism in which the society has been caught’34 — as
d’Agata explains in a video interview granted to the Paris Opera.35



HEATMAPS OF MIGRANTS
   Deeply inspired by Giorgio Agamben, we can’t here skip to mention the photo
series of Heat Maps (2016) and the three-channel HD video, Incoming,36 both
part of a long-term project developed by the Irish photographer Richard Mosse.
From 2014 to 2017 he depicted the experience of migrants in camps, and the
urgent refugee crisis, recording only the contours of relative heat difference,
with a thermal sensitive, military grade surveillance camera. For these projects
he adopted a heavy, technologically advanced device, which mounts a lens
made by germanium, a chemical element transparent to infrared radiation.
This long-range thermal camera — designed to capture LWIR region and to
visualise it in shade of greys — is connected to a cadmium telluride sensor
refrigerated to minus 323 degrees centigrade and controlled by a computer.
This type of thermal imager is commonly used by the army and navy for border
surveillance and law enforcement since it can detect a human body at thirty
kilometres. It is not surprising that exporting thermal imaging systems, and IR
cameras, may be regulated by the United States Government’s thermal camera
export restrictions and may fall under International Traffic in Arms Regulations
(ITAR).37 Mosse explained the reason why he used a surveillance technology
striving to work it against itself, avoiding ‘[…] to rescue this apparatus from
its sinister purpose. Rather, we were trying to enter into its logic — the logic
of proprietary government authorities — to foreground this technology of
discipline and regulation, and to create a work of art that reveals it’.38
   Valeria Cammarata dealt with this work in an essay39 dedicated to the
comparison of this series of images with the work Recits d’Ellis Island, by
Georges Perec and Robert Bober united by the same indirect way of reflecting
on the Shoah, looking at the phenomenon of migration. When refugees



Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                    93
     move away from their Nation, in fact, they break ‘the intimate and necessary
     connection’40 between man and citizen and consequently they lose every human
     rights. As Giorgio Agamben explains: ‘In the system of the nation-state, the so-
     called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every
     protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form
     of rights belonging to citizens of a state’.41 They therefore find themselves in
     the same condition as those deported to concentration camps: a bare life, that
     is, the life of sacred man, stripped of all civil and human rights and exposed to
     sovereign violence. Thermal cameras visualised images which represent bare
     life,42 since they cancel any kind of difference between bodies, levelling all. Their
     phantasmatic and sinister presence, moreover, perfectly reflects Agamben’s
     concerns about a tendency towards totalitarianism regarding the contemporary
     political space.43



     VISUALISING IMMUNIZATION REACTIONS
        Linda Alterwitz, a multi-media artist with wide-ranging interests in the
     fields of medical research and the natural environment, is the last case we
     would like to briefly mention here. She soon started using thermal images —
     as she states on her website — exactly in 2013, ‘as a mean of envisioning the
     connections between science, technology, our environment and contemporary
     culture’. Employing a high-resolution thermal camera, she reconfigures its
     original meaning of this device by showing the otherwise not visible energy
     which vitalised animals and men alike: temperature is a universal feature that
     connects all matter, living and non-living beings. ‘From having a fever in one’s
     body to the effects of global warming, temperature pervades our lives’.44 As it
     is particularly clear in Signatures of Heat, a sextet of thermal images in grey
     scale which reveals the unseen rhythms of the human body and its relation to
     the surrounding natural habitat of which it is part.
        Injection Site: Making the Vaccine Visible,45 one of her latest works started
     in 2021 and still on, is particularly suited to emphasizing the relationship
     between thermographies and the medical front. It consists of a collection of
     images which shows people’s arm from fifteen minutes to four weeks after
     receiving the Covid-19 vaccine. What you see are several darker spots on the
     participants’ skin around the injection area, a sign of a concentration of heat,
     an inflammation provoked by the immunological individual response [Fig. 6].
     Each person’s reaction is different: some images present vast black marks,
     while others reveal minimal visual heat: ‘Through this series of work, I offer an
     opportunity to participate in conversation about an ongoing topic that continues
     to create human division’ – the artist declares to explain the inner reason of
     this new work.46 In fact, the vaccine can cause opposite reactions, not only
     physical, but also psychological: on the one hand fear or concern for possible
     side effects that are still little known, on the other a feeling of protection against
     any possible severe evolutions of the disease.



94                                    Donghi, Pezzano, On the Trail of Some Human Heat
CONCLUSIONS



                                                                                    Fig. 6
                                                                                    Linda Alterwitz, panel of
                                                                                    Injection Site: Making the
                                                                                    Vaccine Visible (2021),
                                                                                    at the artist’s studio,
                                                                                    Las Vegas, Nevada




   The recent Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the significant role of thermal
imaging in monitoring the body for diagnostic purposes. However, it also
established new individual conducts and unprecedented social behaviours
that bodies had to adhere to, in line with the thermopower in force during the
emergency. In addition, the pandemic emphasised how thermography makes
it possible to visualise information that the human eye could not perceive,
but beyond its presumed objectivity, it shows the body just as an anonymous
referent, hardly recognisable in its individuality. The anonymity that Antoine
d’Agata interrogated with the project Virus — in which he set out on the trail of
some human heat in the spring of 2020 — has been deliberately used against
this advanced technology, which is mainly employed for control purposes.
Here, in fact, by protecting people’s identity thanks to lack of details of the
thermographies, he was able to report the gravity of such a historical moment,
catching just the shapes of human bodies reduced to the most basic form-of-
life.




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Notes
 1
     Lorenzo Donghi is the author of the first three sections; Simona Pezzano is the author of the other three.
The short conclusions were written jointly.
   2
     Nicole Starosielski, Media Hot & Cold (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2021), 7.
   3
      Angela Maiello, ‘Viralità post-mediale. Quando il medium (del virus) siamo noi’, in Virale. Il presente al
tempo della pandemia, ed. by Roberto De Gaetano and Angela Maiello (Cosenza: Pellegrini, 2020), 149–153.
   4
     The Thermal Human Body, ed. by Kurt Ammer and Francis Ring (New York: Jenny Stanford Publishing,
2019). The authors point out that, in our globalised and interconnected world, body overheating was a
danger before the Covid-19 pandemic: ‘In recent years following pandemic fever outbreaks, e.g. severe
acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and avian flu, the need for fever screening in international travel led
to the employment of thermal imaging. The International Organization for Standardization was required to
address the issue of minimum standards needed to detect the presence of fever’, 5.
   5
     Ekaterina Koroteevaa and Anastasia Shagiyanova, ‘Infrared-based visualization of exhalation flows while
wearing protective face masks’, Physics of Fluids, 34 (2022) <https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0076230> [accessed
2 May 2022]
   6
      Image from Michael Vollmer and Klaus-Peter Möllmann, Infrared Thermal Imaging: Fundamentals,
Research and Applications (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH, 2018), 2nd ed., 10.
   7
      Federico Pierotti and Alessandra Ronetti, ‘Beyond human vision: Towards an archaeology of infrared
images’, NECSUS (Spring 2018) <https://necsus-ejms.org/beyond-human-vision-towards-an-archaeology-
of-infrared-images/> [accessed 2 May 2022].
   8
     ‘Heat [...] and light are both parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a camera that can detect visible
light won’t see thermal energy, and vice versa’, FLIR website, What’s The Difference between Thermal
Imaging and Night Vision? <https://www.flir.com/discover/ots/thermal-vs-night-vision/> [accessed
2 May 2022]. See also Vollmer and Möllmann, 1–10 and Richards A. Austin, Alien Vision: Exploring the
Electromagnetic Spectrum with Imaging Technology (Bellingham: SPIE Press, 2nd ed., 2011), 41–65.
   9
     Elena Beregow, ‘Thermal Objects: Theorizing Temperatures and the Social’, Culture Machine, 17 (2019),
2, <https://culturemachine.net/vol-17-thermal-objects/> [accessed 2 May 2022].
   10
       Can Thermal Imaging See Through Walls? And Other Common Questions, FLIR website, 4 October
2019,                   <https://www.flir.com/discover/cores-components/can-thermal-imaging-see-through-
walls/#:~:text=Can%20thermal%20imaging%20see%20through%20glass%3F,reflection%20of%20
yourself%20in%20thermal> [accessed 2 May 2022].
   11
      <https://www.flir.com/> [accessed 2 May 2022].
   12
      See footnote 16.
   13
       Carolyn Kane, ‘Digital Infrared as Algorithmic Lifeworld’, in Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color,
Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 211-240..
   14
      Lev Manovich, ‘What Is Visualisation?’, Visual Studies, 26 (2011), 36–49.
   15
       Ruggero Eugeni, Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (più uno) (Brescia: Morcelliana,
2021). See also Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light. A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels
(Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2014).
   16
      We realized this selfie with an iPhone SE and a FLIR ONE PRO: it is not a thermal camera but a smartphone
mobile accessory that can measure temperatures between -20 °C and +400 °C, with a spectral band of 8.000-
14.000 nm. The device has a relatively low thermal resolution (160 × 120); however, it is provided with an
optical camera with 1440 × 1080 resolution (parallax errors in the alignment of the two cameras are pretty
inevitable). This thermal image was taken excluding the optical camera and using a colour palette named
lava, which maintains the classic blue-cold and red-hot association.
   17
       Barbara Grespi, ‘L’evidenza dell’immagine. Postfotografia e idea documentaria’, in Dalla parte delle
immagini. Temi di cultura visuale, ed. by Barbara Grespi and Luca Malavasi (Milano: McGraw-Hill, 2022),
100.
   18
      Kane, 201.
   19
       Unlike image fusing, that is the merging of a visible light and thermal image, MSX (Multi-Spectral
Dynamic Imaging) does not dilute the thermal image or decrease thermal transparency,
   <https://www.flir.it/discover/professional-tools/what-is-msx/ > [accessed 2 May 2022].



96                                                           Donghi, Pezzano, On the Trail of Some Human Heat
 20
      Vincent A. Weidlich, ‘Thermal Infrared Face Recognition’, Cureus, 6.13 (2021), <https://www.cureus.
com/articles/51064-thermal-infrared-face-recognition> [accessed 2 May 2022].
  21
     Starosielski, 170
  22
     Kane, 213.
  23
     See the catalogue published after the project: Antoine d’Agata, Virus, photographies: Antoine dAgata;
Texts: Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Mathilde Girard, Philippe Azoury, Léa Bismuth, Juan Branco, Yannick Haenel,
Frédéric Neyrat, ([n.p.]: Studio Vortex, 2020).
  24
     Antoine d’Agata, Figures of Worship, see: <https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/antoine-d-
agata-worship/> [accessed 21 May 2022].
  25
     From a statement written by Antoine d’Agata for presenting his work Virus see:<https://studio-vortex.
com/product/virus/?lang=en> [accessed 1 May 2022].
  26
     <https://studio-vortex.com/product/virus/?lang=en > [accessed 1 May 2022].
  27
     I’m starting to Feel the Pain, a conversation between Sophie Wright — Former Global Cultural Director
of Magnum Photos, now photographer and art consultant — and Antoine d’Agata about his project Virus,
available on Magnum Photos website,<https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/im-starting-to-feel-
the-pain-antoine-agata-covid-19-coronavirus/> [accessed 30 April 2022].
  28
     It is quite surprising that d’Agata work — so dense and explicit in political, philosophical and theoretical
themes — has hardly been taken into consideration by scholars who deal with visual studies.
  29
     Alice Leroy, ‘The Fever of Images: Thermography, Sensuality and Care in Pandemic Times’ in Pandemic
Media, ed. by Philipp Dominik Keidl and others (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2020), 91–98 (96).
  30
     Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 17.
  31
     The Paris Opera, shut down by the governmental decision taken after the pandemic, decided to highlight
the work of those artists who documented the ongoing crisis and how the pandemic impacted on the society.
See the interview La vie nue, Entretien avec Antoine d’Agata, online video recording, YouTube, 18 January
2021, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tWg7CN8Mmw> [accessed 27 April 2022].
  32
     Agamben, Homo Sacer.
  33
     I’m starting to Feel the Pain.
  34
      Exhibition at Tiblisi Photography & Multimedia Museum on 11 March 2020, <https://tpmm.ge/en/
exhibitions/bare-life-by-antoine-dagata-magnum-photos-> [accessed 28 April 2022]. It is also the title of
a short movie by Antoine d’Agata The bare life (La vie nue, 2020) available on YouTube, <https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=aexsJAeHlGM&t=19s> [accessed 30 April 2022].
  35
     Le vie nue, Entretien avec Antoine d’Agata.
  36
     Richard Mosse, Incoming, three screen HD video installation (52’10”), with 7.1 surround sound (2014–
2017).
  37
     FLIR System, known for being one of the leading companies in producing this technology, was accused
of violations for selling overseas UFPA uncooled focal plane array ‘while seeking and obtaining an official
classification’, as you can read in the first paragraph of Order Relating to FLIR System, Inc., <https://efoia.
bis.doc.gov/index.php/documents/export-violations/export-violations-2021/1303-e2656/file> [accessed
23 April 2022].
  38
      Niall Martin, ‘As “index and metaphor”: Migration and the Thermal Imaginary in Richard Mosse’s
Incoming’, Culture Machine, 17 (2019).
  39
      Valeria Cammarata, ‘Fantasmi e trasmigrazioni. Le memorie degli altri in Georges Perec e Richard
Mosse’, in Tempo e Shoah. Politiche dell’oblio e forme testimoniali, ed. by Matteo Di Figlia and Daniela
Tononi, (Palermo: Palermo University Press, 2020), 113–130.
  40
     Agamben, Homo Sacer, 75.
  41
     Ibidem.
  42
     See the book of stills from Incoming project (which contains an Agamben’s essay), Richard Mosse and
Giorgio Agamben, Incoming (London: Mack, 2017).
  43
     ‘The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the
planet’. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 99.
  44
     This quote and the previous one are taken from the project page Signature of Heat (2012- ) in Linda
Alterwitz personal website, <https://lindaalterwitz.com/project/signatures-of-heat/> [accessed 24 April
2022].
  45
     For this other project see: https://lindaalterwitz.com/project/injection-site-humanizing-the-vaccination-



Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                          97
process-2021/ [accessed 30 April 2022].
  46
     Linda Alterwitz personal website, <https://lindaalterwitz.com/project/injection-site-humanizing-the-
vaccination-process-2021/> [accessed 30 April 2022].




98                                                       Donghi, Pezzano, On the Trail of Some Human Heat
