INSIGHT

The map imagery is not only a projection of what we think is happening in the context of colonialism and apartheid, but also a central tool for taking control of the narrative, an instrument of conquest (Edward Said, 1996, 27). In both Israel and Palestine, the disputed land requires a narrative justification of possession, otherwise the promise land would become an illegitimate occupation and the homeland would be in danger of being destroyed. The fact is that for more than 20 years the Israeli government has used KBA regulations to restrict commercial satellite maps of Israel, Palestine, Syria and parts of Jordan to extensively conceal its own illegal expansion, construction and demolition by lobbying its ally, the US. In this process the violation of the imagery is magnified and brought to public attention as never before, with the awareness that maps are not neutral, objective documents but sites as well as practices of methodologically divorce political struggle and practice from epistemological theory and inquiry. Geography is therefore the art of war but can also be the art of resistance if there is a counter-map and a counter-strategy. I will therefore situate my research on the violence produced by satellite/aerial imagery based on Laura Kurgan's research on the subject, where I define pixelation as the process of selectively and purposefully converting real world data, content into images, and the selective and purposeful re-blurring of the satellite imagery produced by governments, organisations and institutions as secondary pixelation. I will use Google Earth and Geomolg as tools to study satellite maps of West Bank and the Gaza Strip in Palestine as objects of study to explain the connection between pixelation and apartheid system. This project will highlight the role of pixelation in the subtraction of the body and the city, in order to raise public awareness and resistance to the situation. As Laura Kurgan concludes:

Maps construct space—physical, propositional, discursive, political, archival, and memorial spaces. For many of us, maps now are as omnipresent as the more obvious utilities (such as electricity, water, gas, telephone, television, the Internet), functioning somehow like “extensions” of ourselves, to co-opt Marshall McLuhan’s famous definition of media. They have become infrastructures and systems, and we are located, however insecurely, within them. Drawn with satellites, assembled with pixels radioed from outer space, and constructed out of statistics joined to specific geographies, the maps presented here record situations of intense conflict and struggle, on the one hand, and fundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space, on the other. (Fig.5)

In fact, it is only when we begin to question the representativeness of satellite images in detail that we realise that these images are not shaped by the perceptions of the users, but rather it is the content of the images that shapes people's visual knowledge of streets, cities, environments and the planet in general. The most direct reason for this is that the vast majority of people are unable to actually experience 'seeing from above', so it is more difficult to question the objectivity of satellite images and more likely to believe that what they are seeing is real. However, as Hito Steyerl argued, it is a misunderstanding that cameras are tools of representation; they are at present tools of disappearance. The more people are represented the less is left of them in reality ( Hito Steyerl, 2012).

The resolution of satellite imagery is significantly lower than other imagery we come across due to limitations such as distance, technology and privacy policies, and the high resolution satellite mapping platforms available to the public on the web such as Google Earth, Bing map, Apple map, MapBox etc. build up their maps based on a patchwork of satellite imagery from different sources with varying resolution levels, by which presents 40-50cm/pixel in the most detail. This means that the process of pixelation of satellite maps is itself 'Body-Elimination'. In satellite maps things smaller or closer to body scale can only take up 1-2 pixels at most, but ironically satellite evidence is often used for making assertion and argument, by all means, for people. This pre-interpreted and Body-Elimination nature makes satellite maps reinscribed with the data that created it, the image which was the pixelation of reality as well, generates subtraction of violence.(Laura Kurgan)

In order to further analyse the impact of the Body-Elimination brought about by pixelation on the narrative of the image, I have produced a series of images as a reference. These old photographs were taken from the Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection at the site of an archaeological excavation near the Palestinian village Sebastiya, between c. 1900-1920. Its lable such as Title, Creator, Date, etc. proving that this was an archaeological event directed by the Harvard University and the image is in The Library of Congress, D.C, USA. This data attached with it was intended to surve as kind of defination which shape people's understanding of the photographs following the perspective of photographor as well as collector.

• Title: Northern views. The excavations at Samaria. Unearthing Ahab's Palace

• Creator(s): American Colony (Jerusalem). Photo Department, photographer

• Date Created/Published: [approximately 1900 to 1920]

• Medium: 1 negative : nitrate ; 5 x 7 in.

• Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-matpc-22580 (digital file from original)

• Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.

• For information see: "G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection,"(https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/res.258.mats)

• Call Number: LC-M34- A-183 [P&P]

• Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

• Notes:

• Title from: Catalogue of photographs & lantern slides ... [1936?]

• General information about the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection is available at: https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.matpc Gift; Episcopal Home; 1978.

• Format: Nitrate negatives

• Collections: Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection

When all the bodies in the picture are separated out, a completely different narrative turns up. The images that lose the bodies also lose their social and cultural connections, becoming some unknown, unlocated nowhere. Tools are scattered on the ground with mounds of earth, stones and plants are spread across the scene, with only the crumbling stone walls and staircases still proving to be a site of archaeological remains. Although this image is closer to a landscape photograph than the previous archaeological excavation, it still perfectly matches its labeled data. It can be seen that the purpose of this series of images was to document the archaeological achievements of the colonialists in the Western world, regardless of the people, culture or life of the locals, and that the data recorded by the bodies in these images was ignored by the photographers, collectors and users they hope to share with, by who they treated locals as object but not subject with no different from the environment. From which in another word, people of local palestinian were conceptually censored. I would therefore argue that Body-Elimination is the subtractuion of the data within the image, which precisely erases the cultural features, activities, behaviours, land ownership, etc. that the body represents, and it also removes the ability of people to read the colonialviolence.