When the Warmth Leaves, Where Do We Go?: Sharing the Corpse in Thermography's Necropolitical Aesthetics

Finnish visual artist Terike Haapoja's Entropy (2004) and In and Out of Time (2005) utilize a thermal imaging camera to display the ins-and-outs of recently deceased livestock losing their bodily temperatures. For audiences, thermal imaging exposes some hidden material dimensions of human and other-than-human bodies, effectively welcoming a reconsideration of what it means to be (a)live and dead. Rather than arguing solely that Haapoja's work explores a boundary blur in performance's ontology between mediation/performance, self/Other, human/other-than-human, and liveness/death contingent on metaphysical ideals like "presence" and "absence," this essay roots her performances in livestock farming and war. Thermal imaging monitors and kills necropolitical populations on borders, under occupations, and in conflict zones. The technology Haapoja uses imbricates in a broader material history, one that now exploits thermal imaging to establish necropolitical aesthetics that materialize the other-than-human and inhuman as killable life.