Technical Control. Harun Farocki and the Labor of Images. Francesco Marchini MA Documentary Photography University of South Wales - A.Y. 2018/2019 francesco.marchini@icloud.com
Abstract In this essay I explore the relationship between images, labor and control within the practice of the German filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944 – 2014). While integrating politics and aesthetics and conceiving of the image as a means of technical control, in his works Farocki sets out to a critique of representation as our dominant image paradigm. Drawing upon the cinematographic medium and the histories of cinema to reflect on the historical trajectories of aesthetic practices in the twentieth Century, Farocki analyses the world of labor and representations and how our visual culture is built upon technical images – that is, images that work. In the world of industrialized images, moreover, images and control proceed along the same way towards a restructuring of our vision and sight. This dimension becomes most evident in Farocki’s last piece of work, the series Parallel I-IV (2012-2014), which addresses the aforementioned relationships in the virtual world of computer images.
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1. Images, Labor and Control Throughout his career, the German filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944 - 2014) developed a critical cinema that focused, among other topics, on the image “as a means of technical control” (Foster, 2004, p. 157). While this is a recurring theme in many European thinkers and artists of the last century – like Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School as well as Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol – what distinguishes the practice of Farocki is his commitment to “film production as a political act, as critical work on images, and his theoretically-oriented interest in social and aesthetic processes” (Pantenburg, 2001, p. 14). In order to contextualize his practice, it is useful to cite Walead Beshty, who speaks of the “industrialization of the image as a primary force behind the transformations of aesthetics through the period that can be called the long twentieth century” (Beshty, 2018). With his works, Farocki has been witnessing the historical trajectory of aesthetics practices and analysing the progressive affirmation of ‘industrialized’, technical images at the expense of other paradigms of the visible. While documenting as well as deconstructing changes in our perception, seeing and imaging, in his films Farocki considered ‘representation’ to be an historical variable, and conceived of it in the same way Walter Benjamin did: as a form of reproduction, always historically situated and capable of inaugurating new ways of seeing. In all of his works, a critique of representation that set out to break the equation “seeing is knowing” is always present and politically informed. As Thomas Elsaesser recalls about him
In many ways a classic Marxist materialist, he realized that, at some point in the 20thcentury, images began to take a life of their own, rather than being the representation of some reality outside them, or distinct from them. But he also knew that images were circulating as commodities that absorb both social reality and human labour, in the Marxist sense of being ‘phantasmagorias’ and ‘commodity-fetishes’ [which] led him to a fairly sustained critique of ‘representation’ as our dominant image paradigm (Elsaesser, 2017, p. 218)
The image in the age of its technical reproducibility is a ‘commodity’, a token of exchange within the economic conditions of production – as Allan Sekula already argued in the 1970s referring to the case of photography. While subscribing to this idea, Farocki also addresses the lack of the representational status which affects the world of technically mediated images. The materialist perspective undertaken by the German filmmaker revolves around 2
the idea that there is nothing in the world like a natural or neutral image: what we see and the way we see are always the result of a more or less explicit form of manipulation. This renders the concept of visibility traditionally associated to representations a questionable assumption, and Farocki often expresses “his skepticism toward the probability of visualizing complex procedures” (Pantenburg, 2001, p. 20). He therefore considered the filmic medium, and the montage in particular, as specific sites of intervention where to develop a new visual language – both in images and texts – ethically capable of reflecting this state of affairs, proving that aesthetics can also be harnessed to intervene in economies of power.
Harun Farocki, Ein Bild (1983), 16mm, colour, 1:137, 25’
Throughout his career Farocki explored the relation between images, image machines and image production, on the one hand, and the corresponding social and political reality on the other. As the Foreword to his 2001 collection of essays recalls, “Through a critical and uncompromising analysis of photographic and filmic footage, which Farocki researches and collects from the archives of various image production sites and reassembles in his films, he 3
succeeds in revealing the technical, social, cultural, and political contexts of image production and distribution” (Gaensheimer and Schafhausen, 2001, p. 8). In particular images, labour, and control are three themes closely related to his practice, for to analyse the political and social contexts of image production and distribution means showing the labor involved in the construction of representations, as well as conceiving of the image as a means of technical control. In the film An Image (1983) the German artist shows how much work is required to construct representations, and how a whole industry literally revolves around a single body to elaborate the image for the front cover of a PlayBoy issue. In this work Farocki studies the labor of images in the magazine industry and operates like a social scientist, bringing to visibility the production stage of commercial pictures: the cumulative effect is that of a ‘critical distantiation’, which forces the viewer to question the traditional assumptions associated with these kinds of images. In many of his works, then, Farocki sets out to explore these complex relationships creating new visual metaphors and discourses that show how technologies of vision and the world of industrialized images are closely related to what we see and the way we see – and how they both relate to materialist and historical condition of labor. In other words, his critical cinema explores how the materialist conditions for economic production are inextricably linked to the different statuses of representation in our culture and, more critically, how both relate to the issue of control. The critic Hal Foster summarizes this complex relationship in these terms: From Images of the World to Eye/Machine, Farocki has juxtaposed emblematic images from various moments in capitalist production – a simple punch-press, say, with a sophisticated robot or missile – in order to retrieve some evidence of the technical relation, some sense of the lived connection, between different modes of labor, war and representation that each new mode tend to banish from memory […] Like Marx, he implies that each new phase in this history of production and reproduction sets up a new relay of power and knowledge; and, like Michel Foucault and Jonathan Crary, he suggests that each new relay involves a new regime of the subject as well (Foster, 2004, p. 158)
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Harun Farocki, Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (1995) video-BetaSp, colour and b/w, 1:1,37, 36’ Arbeiter verlassen Die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1995) is a piece of work where Farocki “gathered, compared, and studied these and many other images that use the motif of the first film in the history of cinema, ‘workers leaving the factory’” (Farocki, 2004, p. 242). The exemplarity of this film relies on its confrontation with the histories of cinema through a cinematographic analysis on the medium itself, as Farocki acknowledges:
The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is seldom drawn to the factory or even repelled by it. Films about work or workers have not emerged as one of the main film genres, and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines […] Over the last century virtually none of the communication that took place in factories, whether through words, glances, or gestures, was recorded on film (Farocki, 2004, p. 238).
Combining the representation of the class of labourers with the mechanized aspects of the industrial production, Farocki's film shows that the Lumière brothers’ sequence already carries within itself the germs of the eventual disappearance of this form of industrial labor. Workers Leaving the Factory corresponds then to an early stage of capitalism: its industrial phase, traditionally based on the factory as a ‘confinement site’ and corresponding to the
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Foucauldian stage of ‘disciplinary societies’. Industrial production, confinement techniques and cinematographic representation mirror here the historical convergence between mechanization and the cinematic capture of techniques, gestures and expressions. But there is more to say about this stage of industrialization because, as Farocki underlines,
In 1895, the Lumières’ camera was pointed at the factory gates; it is a precursor of today’s many surveillance cameras which automatically and blindly produce an infinite number of pictures in order to safeguard private property […] A new archive system is thus under way, a future library for moving images, in which one can search for and retrieve elements of pictures in order to safeguard private property” (Farocki, 2004, p. 238).
Workers Leaving the Factory, then, also anticipates the main concern of Farocki’s successive researches: the industrial use of programmed machines, in particular those that perform the automation of the mind, of mental labor and the automation of mental functions such as vision, hearing and reasoning. As Lev Manovich synthesizes: “With mechanization, work is performed by a human but his or her physical labor is augmented by a machine. Automation takes mechanization one step further: the machine is programmed to replace the functions of human organs of observation, effort, decision” (Manovich, 1996, p.).
2. Operational Images Since the beginning of the new millennium the practice of Farocki started focusing on the notion of the instrumental or operational image, also elaborating on the philosophy of Vilém Flusser, which in his famous essay Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1985) develops the concept of technical images (technisches Bild). Technical images, according to Flusser, are opposed to traditional images in their being results of ‘invisible operations’ set out by a ‘black box’ – in itself an apparatus whose integrity is completely operational (and so is operated by the user) and whose output is the computation of concepts (what today we call data). Technical images inaugurate a new regime of visibility, where images operate as instruction for actions and could no longer sustain the idea of representing a window on the world. Walead Beshty describes Flusser’s concept of technical image in this way:
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While chiefly descriptive of the industrialization of images, [technical images] is a term whose roots reach back into the Renaissance, to the lenticular experiments of Brunelleschi, the writings of Alberti, and the camera obscura, while giving a strong conceptual ground for the discussion of various digital platform implying a nascent form of post-industrial society through its sensitivity to the networks of production and reception of images. It incorporates images arising from science, journalism, and art alike. It accepts the optical and the diagrammatic as viable forms […] immediately brings forward the political as central to the understanding of images and their implications. Primarily, it addresses a shared quality of certain images, their automaticism, their internalization of a set of rules to which they must dutifully adhere as they merge seamlessly into our experience (Beshty, 2018, p.)
As Volker Pantenburg remarks, “subsequent to the increasing replacement of hands by robot and machines in the industrial production, the operational image is a key player in todays’ replacement of the eye. In it, questions of labour and questions of the image cannot be dissociated” (Pantenburg, 2017, p. 55). Operational images are images that operate, make comparisons, calculate and evaluate data: ‘automatization’ and ‘internalization of sets of rules’ are their two main features and point at a universal restructuring of the vision, whereby work processes “can no longer be analysed by close observation, since their most important aspects have drifted into a sphere of non-visibility” (Pantenburg, 2017, p. 55). On his side, Farocki gives a ‘negative’ definition of operational images at the beginning of the first of his three-installations piece Eye/Machine (2000-2003), referring to them as “Images without a social goal, not for edification, not for reflection”. In this work, Farocki considers the operative war pictures from the Gulf War of 1991 and provide a paradigmatic investigation of the operational images located in the context of warfare and military operations. It shows missile simulators, tracking software and shots from camera-bombs: all material that was broadcasted on television and that the German filmmaker uses in order to accentuate the ambiguity of the operational – that is, “the utopian potential that lies in its affinity to labour as well as the risk of being cut off from human experience” (Pantenburg, 2017, p. 52).
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Harun Farocki, Auge/Maschine (2000) video-BetaSp, colour, 1:1,3, 23 min. (Loop) In this work Farocki assumes a necessary correspondence between the technology of production and the technology of destruction, of manufacturing and war, signalling how human vision has become completely automated in front of the incipient ‘blind’ recognition patterns operated by visual machines. Operational images, as visualisations of data that can take different guises, are literally speaking ‘working images’: they exist only as “a process of permanent comparison in which a present image is evaluated against an immense amount of image-data stored in the computer […] ” (Pantenburg, 2017, p. 54). In Eye/Machine Farocki acknowledges this shift in visibility as a change of the concept of vision itself – which now regards “the information-processing task of understanding a scene from its projected images” – and as a change of the concept of understanding, or cognition, which now finds itself “equated with action. The computer can be said to ‘understand’ a scene if it can act on it – move objects, assemble details, destroy targets” (Manovich, 1996). As Manovich remarks, computer vision seemed to put an end to the history of perspective, which has served until then as a model of visual automation, as “the first step towards ‘the rationalization of sight’” (Manovich, 1996), now giving way to other techniques of space mapping and visualization. The point is that, as Farocki saw, operational images have always been part of our visual culture:
However, operational images are by no means restricted to the military sector, but determine various practices […] Farocki was interested in more than just their specific use at the service of
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violence and destruction. At stake for him was a typology, a history or archaeology, or even – in his own modest way – a theory of the operational image. It goes without saying that this is a quite comprehensive project; a project, furthermore, whose relevance increases with today’s omnipresence of practices like data mining, image retrieval, face-recognition software and related practices. The field is vast. Wherever algorithms of pattern recognition are employed, images become part of and merge with technical operation (Pantenburg, 2017, p. 49)
3. Deterritorialisation In famous, more recent works such as Deep Play (2007), Serious Games I-IV (2009-2010) and Parallel I-IV (2012-2014) Farocki further analyses the relationship between operational images and how “invisibility is something actively produced, rather than simply an absence”, focusing on the simulation as a process of construction, “one of the crucial strategies of this new invisibility” (Elsaesser, 2017, p. 222). As Volker Pantenburg recalls, “on the threshold of the twenty-first century, a second transition, accompanied by a change of media, becomes visible […] Instead of direct surveillance of a site, technical signals – image and sound – make possible a kind of situation where neither the controller nor the person being controlled are bound to a particular place” (Pantenburg, 2001, p. 20).
Harun Farocki, Deep Play (2001) Multichannel-Installation, 12 tracks à 2 hours 15 min. (Loop)
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Electronic control technology, based on the automation of vision and sight made possible by artificial intelligence, seems to summarize exemplarily the new era of ‘control societies’ described by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his Postscript on Control Societies. Deleuze redefines the concept of a control mechanism describing it as a system “giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant” and relating it to the new fields of pharmaceutical and genetical engineering. In control societies individuals become ‘dividuals’, masses become ‘samples’, ‘data’, ‘markets’ or ‘banks’, control itself relates to ‘floating rates of exchange’ and the factory has given away to ‘corporations’ (Deleuze, 1997, p. 180). Drawing on the geo-philosophy and the critique of capitalism developed by Deleuze, Farocki became interested in the ‘deterritorialising’ effects of our culture that render our experience of time and space less perceptible and detached from reality, somehow at the border between visibility and invisibility. In the series Deep Play (2007) Farocki graphically demonstrates how sports and the sports industry have become workplaces – every bit closely monitored – by showing the 'clean feed', the television networks’ raw material over the final of the 2006 World Cup. We see individual players on both teams, but also abstract computergenerated representations of the flow of play. As presented on his website, Deep Play shows that “the laboratory of football is able to exhibit the most advanced technology in the production and presentation of moving images”. And in the essay called Controlling Observation Farocki states that “more than anything else, electronic control technology has a deterritorialising effect. Locations become less specific. An airport contains a shopping centre, a shopping centre contains a school, a school offers leisure and recreation facilities […] With the increase in electronic control devices, everyday life will become just as difficult to portray and to dramatize as everyday work already is” (Farocki, 2001, pp. 316-320). Electronic control devices displace the grounds of human experience, as data become part of our bodies and control becomes internalized: the result is that we are left with "coexisting metastable states of a single modulation", the one effected by the computer (Deleuze, 1997, p. 179). This has meaningful consequences on the relation between what is visible and what is invisible, as Thomas Elsaesser comments:
I take Farocki’s point here to be not only that he wants to map out the limits of the visible in the very age of the vision machines, but that, as a result of these vision machines, invisibility itself
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has become a kind of commodity, especially within the commercially high profit […] still politically low-profile ‘synergies’ that were establishing themselves between computer software firms, security specialists and consumer service industries (Elsaesser, 2017, p. 222)
4. Empathy and Materiality. The industrialization of the Imagination Some two years before he died, Harun Farocki released the first instalment of Parallel I-IV (2012-2014), the four-part video installation cycle that was to become his last major work. In this series, Farocki deepens his quest into the realms of the Bild, confronting the nature of 21st Century images ‘against’ themselves and pushing his critique further from the domain of the logistics of perception and of militarization of experience that he had already analysed in works such as Images of the World and Eye/Machine. In this respect, a recent exhibition of Farocki’s works in Barcelona states that “towards the end of his life, Farocki questioned why the term empathy had been handed over to the enemy (i.e. mainstream cinema and entertainment industry)”, calling for its reconsideration and appropriation, or “Another Kind of Empathy” (Farocki, 2016a). In the age of virtual simulations, invisibility as a ‘new kind of commodity’ refers to the idea that large parts of human experience that were previously free become industrialized by marketing and technology corporations. As James Bridle recalls in his article on the essence of the virtual,
If the cyberpunk imagination emancipated the digital virtual from its military-industrial origins […] it can equally be said that a grand failure of the imagination has allowed that possible utopia to slip away once again. The virtual is currently unthought by capitalism, as digital networks become sites of consumerism, devices for the alienation of labour and for violent and unequal supply chains, and the vector for fundamentalist, chauvinist and nativist ideologies […] What was once an open, relatively public forum, is increasingly owned and operated by a few telecommunications, marketing and technology corporations […] As a result, it has become necessary to look more critically at the construction of this virtual space – at its industrial as well as its imaginative underpinnings. (Bridle, 2017)
What empathy and visibility share in common in the image-making world of the 21st Century, is that they signal a failure of the imagination and of its ‘protentional’ (or anticipatory) capacities. The programming of sight and the lack of protentional, imaginative experiences
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proceed along the same ways in our culture, because the domain of virtual images corresponds to a form of invisibility that has now taken over reality itself by means of anticipating and predetermining it. Calling for another kind of empathy towards the new world of vision machines, Farocki knew that in the era of post-photographic realism and of hyper-simulations “what we see is not only created by programmed codes, but the way we see is also programmed [...] The computer image, thus creates “parallel” worlds that affect trajectories: the image itself is the world/reality we live in” (Arantes & Nesteriuk, 2016, p. 46). In other words, we live immersed in a world of images that have decisive influence over the way we see and approach reality. To the late Farocki, exploring these trajectories must have appeared an urgent imperative, one requiring detailed attention to the industrial as well as to the imaginative underpinnings of these commercialized, democratized forms of operational images.
Harun Farocki, Parallel I (2012) Video, colour, sound, 16 min. (Loop)
The new kinds of invisibility and the labor invested in their production, in other words, require a rethinking of the strategies for making visible. In Parallel I-IV Farocki sets out to explore the image genre of computer animation and the construction, the visual landscapes and inherent
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rules (and limits) of computer-animated worlds in order to reflect on the current state of mimesis at the borders of the picture-making industry:
Today, mimesis has become a matter of generative algorithms, and the resulting technologies are increasingly capable of calculating, predicting, and controlling complex processes – from manufacturing, to war, to emotional experiences in the animated worlds of mass entertainment. Underlying Farocki’s investigation into the frontiers of innovation in current image-technologies is the assumption that increasingly, we live in technologically produced image-worlds […] (Elsaesser, 2017, p. 216)
In Parallel I, the first of his four-parts video installation, Farocki retraces the history of graphic development in videogames over the last thirty years through the elements of trees and vegetation, referring once again to the very first cinematographic motifs and to the histories of cinema. In the first video of the series we are shown the leap in the development of computer graphics from command-lines to photorealistic renderings of natural elements, features that are normally peripheral to our perceptual awareness. As Adam Jasper recalls, “Understanding game space requires something closer to Jean Epstein’s concept of photogénie, understood as all that is ineffable in film – in particular, the motion of leaves, reflections on glossy surfaces, or the movement of waves over water” (Jasper, 2017). This accelerated evolution directly refers to the history of photography and film, but unlike these two mediums, Farocki tells us, computer images cannot be analysed in terms of improvements in representational techniques because there is no external reality they ought to represent. Farocki refers here to Max Weber and his concept of ‘ideal-types’, understood as ‘models’ that share characteristics with actual objects but to not derive from, or correspond to, any specific example. In other words, the German filmmaker points our attention towards the idea that the world of computer graphic is self-contained: what drives its improvement in terms of ‘realism’ is not fidelity to reality but another drive, “the desire for a seductive kind of verisimilitude” (Jasper, 2017). In their departure from any possible indexical bond, computergenerated images must be considered from the perspective of post-production, not in terms of production (or, as it were, in terms of representations). Accordingly, Farocki seems to suggest, it is also necessary to be suspicious of images, since they are code and, as such, programmable. As the series progress it becomes clear that the interest of Farocki is in the
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boundary conditions that are implicit in the construction of game worlds: most notably, the edge of playable universe and the limits of interaction with computer-generated characters. In a passage from Parallel I, the narrating voice suddenly asks: “Does the world exists if I am not watching it?” What Farocki called a “new constructivism” – that is, a new form of industrialized labor affecting the ‘imaginary condition’ of images – is here at play and cannot be dissociated by the new strategies of invisibility put in place by the entertainment industry. Each bit of these foreign worlds is constructed piece by piece, and reality amounts here to simulacra that are both meticulously rendered and insubstantial: “Does it even make sense to apply the theoretical language of film to these games?” asks Adam Jasper (Jasper, 2017). By appropriating, mediatizing, and subverting the logic of games, Farocki placed them in a kind of non-space, where other texts could be revealed showing the invisible behind the latest version of the operational images. From the point of view of labor, Farocki seems to tell, this state of affairs means that post-production has become the default value in the modes of production, replacing representation as a paradigm. Whereas analogue filmmaking centered on production, on capturing the reality in order to represent it, digital filmmaking is based upon a different mode of production and extracts reality in order to transform it into data-sets. This has profound consequences on the fate of cinema, as Farocki expresses in an interview for the Tate Modern: “I am just researching these strange new images which are somehow on the verge of competing with and defeating finally the cinematographic-photographic image, so that the era of reproduction seems to be over” (Farocki, 2016b). In this respect, the afterlife of images – or the image after the era of its reproduction – bears in itself the germs of still undisclosed possibilities.
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Bibliography Arantes, P., Nesteriuk, S. (2016) ‘Programming the Visible: Dialogues between Vilém Flusser and Harun Farocki’, Flusser Studies 21, pp. 45-54. Available at http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/21print-edition.pdf (Last accessed: 19th March 2021) Beshty, W. (2018) ‘The Commons in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, in Beshty, W. (ed.) Picture Industry. A Provisional History of the Technical Image 1844-2018. Zurich: JRP Editions, pp. 20-33 Bridle, J. (2017) ‘On the Virtual’, NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria. Available at: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition_post/on-the-virtual/ (Last Accessed: 19th March 2021) Deleuze, G. (1997) ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, in Deleuze, G. Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 177-182 Elsaesser, T. (2004) ‘Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist’, in Elsaesser, T. (eds.) Harun Farocki. Working on the Sightlines, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 11-40 Elsaesser, T. (2017) ‘Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals’, in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2017, Vol. 12 (3), pp. 214–229 Farocki, H. (2001), ‘Controlling Observation’, in Farocki, H. (ed.) Imprints: Writings, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, pp. 306-322 Farocki, H. (2004) ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’, in Elsaesser, T. (eds.) Harun Farocki. Working on the Sightlines, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 237- 44 Farocki, H. (2016a) ‘Harun Farocki. Empathy’. Exhibition held at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2nd June – 16th October 2016. Description available at https://fundaciotapies.org/en/exposicio/harun-farocki-empathy/ (Last Accessed: 19th March 2021) Farocki, H. (2016b) ‘Harun Farocki – Cinema, Video Games and Finding the Detail | Tate Shots’, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tERIscWmpSo (Last accessed: 19th March 2021) Flusser, V. (2000) ‘Towards a Philosophy of Photography’, London: Reaktion Books
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