Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
A DIGITAL MEMORIAL
The record of a double erasure, the evidence of a massacre and of a grave upturned,
is digitized and remembered here, apparently by military surveillance satellites.
The black is presented to us as the black of freshly upturned soil in the village of
Izbica. Absorbing more heat than the adjacent grasslands, it is distinguished and
recorded by the implacable sensors of the satellites. It would take only the next
rain to wipe away the evidence, and then the grass would start growing again. But
not on this image.
How can this image be located? In time and space, in history, in memory, or in
a database? These—the remainders of the burial ground for scores of villagers in
Izbica, killed by the military in March, buried by their neighbors soon after, and then
removed from the scene in June—are just a few of the millions of pixels that make
up this image, and there are certainly many more worth memorializing. But how can
we return this picture to its rightful place in memory, realign it with the data stripped
away from it as it became public? For now, we are left to our own devices.
It's not that hard to do. Izbica is a small village, locatable on a map with coordi -
nates. In May, as imaged by a German military drone, the grave was just off to the
side of a curved road. The road is blurred on the 10-meter SPOT data, but recogniz -
able. And when rotated, the image of the tampered grave released by the Pentagon
retrieves one element of the data, a north orientation. Compared with the Depart-
ment of Defense image, the coarseness of the pixels on the SPOT data is deceiving—
but the shape is the same, and nameable with longitude and latitude points on a
map. It can be marked in digital space and time—as a memorial to an event which
should not be erased.
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