Endless War was created by YoHa with Matthew Fuller in 2012, it is not a video installation but a month-long real-time processing of data from the the Afghanistan War Archive seen from a series of different analytical points of view. N-gram fingerprints categorise the summaries of the records finding pathways through the 76,000 files. The reduction of words to sequences of bytes or letters allows patterns to emerge creating terms used in phrase matching between entries; and searches for the frequency of words. As the war is fought it produces entries in databases that are in turn analysed by software looking for repeated patterns of events, spatial information, kinds of actors, timings and other factors. Endless War shows how the way war is thought relates to the way it is fought. Both are seen as, potentially endless, computational processes. The algorithmic imaginary of contemporary power meshes with the drawn out failure of imperial adventure.

During this talk I want to close read the residue of the machines that created the war archives released by WikiLeaks in 2010,  It seems to hint at the existence of a sensoria, an entire sensory and intellectual apparatus of the military body readied for battle.   How do we participate in these formations and how do they participate in us? This form of digital archive requires us to join collectively with a complex ensemble of technical objects. We act with them to create an architecture of lists where formal relations have priority over semantics, creating the fields of potential from which new knowledge emerge and with it new forms of power on and off the  battlefield