Bodies of Evidence is a visual essay that explores the visual-sensory intimacy that occurs when viewing images of atrocity from the war in Gaza in an era where the concept of “bare life” is governed by computational protocols. Through the image series Crisis in the Palm of My Hand, which emphasizes the physical dimension of viewing horror, the essay focuses on the bodily-technological moment in which the living body views the dismembered body through computational tools of processing and dissemination. The interplay between two words – proximity and approximate examines the correlative network violence in which viewing content is based on the estimated proximity between statistical data, subjects, and objects. The essay suggests a reading of the term Ashla, meaning dispersed body parts, which Nadira Shalhoub-Kevorkian uses to understand the catastrophe of the dismemberment of the Palestinian body. In the networked environment, dismemberment is not just a result but an ideology, the main purpose of which is to construct subjects as placeless objects. Unlike the Israeli project that seeks elimination, the network does not have an elimination goal but an expansion goal: the dead are not the opposite of the living as long as they can generate movement in the network. Correlative violence disintegrates the possibility of politicizing the image, as identification with pain is replaced by the thrill of self-aggrandizement, and the movement of resistance is reduced to the gesture of a finger scrolling down a screen. The essay examines several works through the differences between touch and hapticity, a concept explored by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and proposes collective bodily witnessing as an alternative to the dismembering network economy.
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