Flatness versus depth: A study of algorithmically generated camouflage. (February 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mollicchi, Silvia
• Editors: Amoore, Louise; Raley, Rita
• Is Part Of: Security dialogue. Volume 48:Number 1(2017)
• Page Start: 78
• Page End: 94
• Publication Date: 2017-02
• Subjects: Abstraction -- algorithms -- camouflage -- control -- depth -- flatness; Security, International -- Periodicals; International relations -- Periodicals; 327.05
• DOI: 10.1177/0967010616650227
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0967-0106

Abstract

For the past two decades, the camouflage patterns used on military uniforms have been computed by families of algorithms. The article argues that these computation methods fit within a genealogy of discourses on camouflage practices, which the text reconstructs along the axes of flatness and depth. Camouflage can be explained as an attempt at flattening information related to a target onto the underlying background, by producing general invariances within the environment and in accordance with the observer's perceptive faculties. Carrying out this task, static camouflage responds to the aporia of using one pattern to disguise presence within multiple contexts. After analysing two discourses on camouflage in relation to the notion of flatness, the article considers a case of algorithmically generated static camouflage. Its disguising method abstracts information from both the environment in which an army is expected to fight and the observer's perceptive capacities and then computes these threads of abstraction together in a pattern. The meshing function of computation thus flattens the principles embedded in the fabric, making them individually illegible. This changes the value that camouflage usually gives to target/background relations and to the observer's perceptive faculties.