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AP E RTU RE 5 8
Tarik Samarah, Aluminum
wire taken from a
secondary mass grave,
2002. The wire was used to
fasten the hands of a victim
from Srebrenica, Kamenica
near Zvornik, Republika
Srpska, July 22, 2002
© Tarik Samarah

What Is a Document?
An exchange between Thomas Keenan
and Hito Steyerl

Theorist Thomas Keenan and artist Hito Steyerl maintain

an ongoing dialogue about the fraught relationships
between politics, evidence, and images, central concerns
of their respective practices. In the following email
exchange, they continue that conversation and trace
the etymology of the commonly used but contested
word document back to its original meaning, “to teach.”
This early association provides a useful key for unlocking
the shifting role of documents and evidence in our
rapidly evolving media environment.
WO RDS 5 9
 Hello Hito,
In Arles and Frankfurt over the last couple of years, you and
I have been circling around a thicket of questions about
the documentary, politics, evidence, forensics, and most
especially, modes of representing things that happen in
the world. Reflecting on this, I found myself asking, what is
a document, anyway? So I turned to the dictionary.
The word document in English comes from the Latin
docere, to teach, and the earliest uses cited by the OED
associate it less with evidence than with instruction, and
even warning, as in this usage from 1660: “Punishment goes
to the prisoner, but examples to the document of all others.”
The event that is document(ed) does not fully coincide with
itself, or is doubled as an exemplum; it constitutes a trace,
which is pedagogically oriented toward the future. One
needs to learn from it. It’s not difficult to see how the meaning
traveled from this notion of “exemplary lesson” to the
contemporary sense of evidentiary proof, but they are
not exactly the same. Rather than teaching us something,
documentary today often seems to be designed to shut down
deliberation, to impose the force of fact, and to generate
a decision or a judgment. When we say that something is
evidence or proof, we generally aim to put an end to further
questioning.
But, in fact, we can’t. Evidence in a legal context does not
close the case. Evidence—whether it’s a written document,
a testimony, or an object—opens the case. Something is
presented for consideration, debate, dispute, interpretation—
and other interpretations. That is what happens to documents,
in trials and in political life. They are contested, their
meanings explored and contrasted. Interpreters gather
around them in disagreement because they have something
to teach, but not always as unequivocally as the punishment
administered to the prisoner.
I think that we, too, often forget this sense of the
instructive instance when we talk about documentary and
documentation today. The document still has something to
teach us. What’s interesting about this is the way it sidesteps

Video still of 3-D model of

a drone strike in Miranshah,
Pakistan, April 1, 2012
Courtesy Forensic
Architecture in collaboration
with Situ Research

AP E RTU RE 6 0
Right:
Protests during the
Confederation Cup
semifinals, Belo Horizonte,
Brazil, June 26, 2013.
Photograph by Midia Ninja
Courtesy Midia Ninja
One may even have to start
a major push to erase most
documents that are being
created, via algorithms and
metadata, of people’s behaviors
and habits, and claim the right
for people to go undocumented.
WO RDS 6 1
the question of authenticity and truth. The document
retains a tie to “what happened” by virtue of its specimen or
exemplary status; it is ripped or doubled from what happens,
but in order to teach, which means it’s the lesson that
somehow has primacy, rather than the event.
Tom
Hello Tom,
I guess the notion of document has traveled even further in
the past two decades. Within contemporary technologies of
dispersion and dissemination, a document is defined less by
its content or its relation to reality than by its affective punch
and velocity. When a picture of an atrocity spreads on Facebook,
there are no fact-checks, no evidentiary procedures whatsoever.
But once launched, any kind of document, whether it actually
even documents anything, can go on to create a new reality
by means of the constituency that shared, spread, sustained,
and built it.
So within the last twenty-five years we have experienced
a massive shift from the document as evidence, replete with
eternal anxiety over whether it is true or accurate or not, to the
document as trigger and catalyst of events. Vilém Flusser and
Peter Weibel already remarked on this when they saw how
Romanian protesters stormed television stations and started
making history in ’89. Nowadays, it’s less about people
surrounding documents, but rather documents flying and
swirling around people by way of social media. People decide
whether to share and enforce their claims or not. Nevertheless
it changes the subject from a never-ending fixation on the
document’s truthfulness and all the convoluted and paranoid
vocabulary surrounding it.
Photograph edited with
Obscuracam, a photo
and video app for Android
phones that allows users
to obscure people’s faces
and protect their identities
by pixelating, redacting,
or covering them with a
funny nose and glasses.
The app, developed by
Guardian Project, also
removes all identifying
data stored in digital
photographs including
GPS location and phone
make and model.
Courtesy Guardian
Project
When we admit that the
document can’t speak for
itself, we can start to map
out new routes it can take,
new networks it can catalyze,
new claims it can provoke,
and new politics to help bring
those claims into being.
AP E RTU RE 6 2
But on the other hand a document on its own—even if it
provides perfect and irrefutable proof—doesn’t mean anything.
If there is no one willing to back the claim, prosecute the deed, or
simply pay attention, there is no point to its existence. If evidence
of human rights violations is only followed up when the U.S.
takes an interest, why bother? People realized this in the 1990s—
transparency or public-ness didn’t change a thing. Social media
is concerned with building constituencies around documents,
very often in the most wacky ways, but then again, this integrates
politics into the foundations of documents themselves, instead
of using them within pre-established legal, political, or journalistic
scenarios, each with their own protocols for establishing the
truth. Also, documents are fundamentally shape-shifting, taking
on the form of metadata, or algorithmic predictions, which
again modifies their relation to reality in a dramatic way.
Hito
Hi again,
I share your weariness with the “is it fake, was it
photoshopped, is it staged?” neurosis and the police forces
of documentary security who want to protect us from the
manifold deceits of the image.
But it’s no wonder that the anxiety persists: documents
may not have any verifiable relation to reality, may not
show anything actual or even, as you say, anything at all, but
they still have to claim that they do. The document is a truth-
claim-making machine, an operational form, structured
so that even if it’s hollow it can and will go on functioning.
And since no document conveys its meaning unequivocally
or speaks for itself—that is why a crowd (different crowds in
different settings, actually) gathers around it, arguing about
what it means and trying to have it teach different lessons—
there is something hollow about every one of them. That is
why we can disagree about them, make claims for and with
them, inscribe them in struggles, work with them to make
things happen—because an interpreter, a vector, is always
required, from (before) the start. But they also work on us.
They are not simply inert, even if sometimes they do not put
up a lot of resistance to their use and abuse. It would be wrong Military police throw
gas bombs at protesters
to think about them as instruments or tools, though they do at Sé Church, São Paulo,
things to us, whether at the level of individual affect or in the Brazil, June 11, 2013.
networks they create by linking us to other realities, other Photograph by Midia Ninja
Courtesy Midia Ninja
images, other interpreters.
You are right that they don’t always work, and that
the ’90s taught us this—three-and-a-half years of the war in
Sarajevo live on TV. But we can’t blame the images for what
happened. What we can blame, besides all the obvious
political and military decisions, is the notion that the images
do our work for us, that because they were evidence, they
were also triggers for actions that would put an end to the
slaughter they showed. There the notion of documentary
proof really is culpable, the idea that in the document itself
there is not only truth or fact but also a force that compels a
response. Waiting around for the document to be attended
to properly doesn’t seem like much of a strategy anymore.
I think your notion of a new form that “integrates politics
into the foundations of documents themselves” is exactly
right, and it’s happening all around us. Think of the Facebook In some contemporary riots
campaign by the civil resistance in Kafrnabel in Syria,
the reverse-engineering of surveillance and tracking data there are five masked people
by the Forensic Oceanography and Watch the Med projects, with a tablet device for
the drone strike visualizations done for the UN by the
Forensic Architecture team at Goldsmiths, or the advocacy each protester without one.
strategy that accompanied Amy Ziering and Tracy Dick’s
2012 film The Invisible War about rape within the U.S. military.
The street starts to look like
When we admit that the document can’t speak for itself, a mix between an electronics
we can start to map out new routes it can take, new networks
it can catalyze, new claims it can provoke, and new politics fair and an Old Masters
to help bring those claims into being. painting.
Tom

WO RDS 6 3
 Hi Tom,
In many cases, actually most, we do not even reach the point at
which anyone could argue about the truth claims of a document
because most documents are not entering any arena where such
assessments could be made. Most documents never become
evidence of anything in an institutional sense. The ones that
do are already a privileged minority.
Most documents share the fate of most images and remain
unseen, because there is a massive oversaturation of visual
material. They are the dark matter of the visual world, the stuff
that actually causes it to expand and disintegrate at a speed
that hasn’t yet been properly understood. In this situation,
paradoxically, and even shockingly, it could be more productive
to facilitate a place of public debate, on- or offline, where
people can share and debate about the images and data they are
producing rather than insist on a document’s truth in certain
forums. Images are not a matter for specialists anymore—anyone
can produce them in great numbers—so in a way, concerns have
shifted from interpreting documents according to predetermined
protocols to making and disseminating them.
At this moment one may even have to start a major push to
erase most documents that are being created, via algorithms and
metadata, of people’s behaviors and habits and claim the right
for people to go undocumented, off the grid, and to regain some
control over when to be documented or not.
But this is just a temporary situation created by a huge
imbalance between an overwhelming lack of justice and equality
and an almost unprecedented ability for people to create
documentary (photographic, video, etc.) records. The map,
so to speak, is far exceeding the territory. It is about rethinking
what, and how much, needs to be documented.
Hito
Hi Hito,
I’m not sure I understand your distinction between
“facilitating a place of public debate” and “insisting on
some document’s truth in certain forums.” Do you mean
that we shouldn’t be content with or limit ourselves to
existing forums (especially international legal and media
ones) but try to bring new ones into existence? In order
for the “irrelevant” documents to have a chance? If so,
I’m with you, because it’s certainly the case that the existing
forums are extremely restricted in terms of what sorts of
documents cross their threshold and why, and in terms of
the interpretive protocols they allow. The important battle
is at these thresholds, I think, maybe even more than the
interpretive battles within them. But isn’t that what we’ve
been talking about: how new sorts of documents—from
jihadi martyrdom videos to viral human rights campaigns—
produced by otherwise unheard-of persons and forces and
circulated in unprecedented ways, can themselves start
to force new forums into existence, can spark new debates,
and not only put new questions on the agenda but also change
the way that agenda is constructed?
As for oversaturation, I’m not so sure. Or, rather, haven’t
we always been oversaturated and moving too slowly to catch
up with everything? There are always too many words and too
many images and too many sounds to be able to clearly figure
out what’s going on. Which is to say, things are always getting
lost, overlooked, forgotten. If there weren’t this combination
of too much and not enough, if somehow there was just
enough, just the right amount, and we could make sense of
it all, we’d have no need for politics, conflict, interpretation,
dispute…documents.
Tom
AP E RTU RE 6 4
Hi Tom,
It’s interesting how much mobile technology has changed the
stakes. Before, one could either watch events or participate
in them, as Flusser argued. The revolution would not be televised
because if people watched it in their living rooms there would
be no revolution. Now documenting has become more of a
live activity and less about retroactive interpretation of objects.
It is the making—live streaming, editing, encoding, encrypting,
dissemination, and mediation—not only of the documents
themselves but equally and maybe more importantly of the
events being documented. The event is being made across
different platforms and networks, as a stack of actions, images,
and feedback loops, traveling from cloud to cobblestone.
Sometimes this looks rather funny: in some contemporary
riots there are five masked people with a tablet device for each
protester without one. The street starts to look like a mix between
an electronics fair and an Old Masters painting gallery with
hundreds of glowing tablets held up high above heads. Tablets
have replaced flags or protest signs. Actually, it is a very clear
expression of what people are doing: they reframe and re-edit
reality, in real time, out in the streets. Of course there is also a
lot of silliness and danger with that, including the obvious fact
that each person thus becomes perfectly trackable.
Hito
Hi Hito,
People want to make a record of what’s happening, but they
also want to do something with it: tell a story, make a claim,
send it and show it to others, let it loose. In the lab school
of the streets, you’re right, they are our researchers and our
instructors; they are making documents in that old sense
of “instruction” with which we began this conversation.
They are also making evidence, not in the sense of proof
but rather in the more forensic sense of making something
evident, presenting it to a public, calling for a judgment.
Sometimes in that fleeting, snap-chatty DIY way you describe,
other times in proper labs with high-res imagery, GIS, and
3-D animations. But in both cases, the question is less the old
one about the correspondence between image and event, and
more about something different: how to face the fact that the
events are made with and out of and into images—and other
documents as well—and that it’s up to us to respond to them.
Tom
Thomas Keenan teaches literary and
political theory at Bard College where
he directs the Human Rights Project.
He is the author of Fables of Responsibility
(Stanford, 1997) and, with Eyal Weizman, Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer
Mengele’s Skull (Sternberg Press, 2012). based in Berlin whose work has addressed
He coedited, with Tirdad Zolghadr, a range of concerns, notably politics
The Human Snapshot (Ram Publications, and the digital circulation of images.
2013), and in 2010, cocurated (with A collection of her writings, The Wretched
Carles Guerra) the traveling exhibition of the Screen, including her celebrated
Antiphotojournalism, which opened at 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,”
La Virreina Centre de l’Image, Barcelona. was published last year by Sternberg Press.