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digital information processing methods has meant for police practices: «[T]he so-called dragnet search essentially differs from previous search methods in that it is used in cases in which a known culprit cannot be searched for, but in those cases in which an unknown culprit first has to be identified by sifting through personal data organized according to feature groups.» [62] The «dispositive of the grid» [63] again appears to play a central role—yet apparently in an altered way: «[T]he censorship that accompanies digital data processing [appears] … to consist in the entire future population of a country being left to the discretion of a single dispositive of access.» [64] Herold regards this access as given in the possibility of being able to represent and analyze data through «random linking … in every desired context and combination.» [65] The connections to the shifts of the archive described above are clearly visible here. Not only do connections between very different materials become—intermedially—possible, these links also allow discovering patterns where for humans there are none to find—similar to computerized image recognition processes. However, this means that the individual
image is defined less by its production with the goal of its localization in an archival matrix (such as is the case with Bertillon's mugshots), rather it is a locked-in-place section out of an intermedial data flow, which today is primarily produced through video surveillance.
The installation of such video surveillance systems on all public squares, in shopping centers, in government quarters, etc., began in Great Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s and has in the meantime become more and more common in Europe—a development which in particular the artist Heith Bunting has made reference to. (see also Neighborhood Watch by Doug Hall) Video cameras first record as much as possible. It is not until something happens that the images are gone through, images retrieved, and then assigned meaning in retrospect: This occurred with the images showing Lady Di leaving her hotel shortly before her fatal accident in the fall of 1997. For this reason Winfried Pauleit speaks of images in the futur antérieur case, which if need be later become police images. [66] Moreover, there appears to be a trend towards the paradigm of video surveillance replacing the photo archive—quite in the spirit of the increasing dominance of transmission over