Excerpt from: 'Image Bockade', 2015, video 38:20 min

In September 2014, veterans of Israel’s elite army intelligence unit called ‘8200’, many of whom were still on active reserve duty, signed a letter publicly addressing the State’s political and military leaders and declaring their refusal to continue taking exploitative action against Palestinians in order to maintain military control of the occupied territories. Though they were refusing to continue their military service in order to instigate a policy change, the signatories were still committed to upholding national security and therefore adhered to censorship laws and did not reveal their identity. As a consequence, all media interviews with them were performed with their faces obscured. 'Image Blockade' documents an experiment initiated in collaboration with neuroscientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The subjects of the experiment consisted of two groups: other veterans of the 8200 intelligence unit and a random control group. The participants had their brain activity scanned using MRI technology while watching clips from media interviews with the dissidents. These reports had been approved for broadcast by military censors, but we inserted additional information that most likely would not have passed the military censor. The subjects of the experiment were asked to identify which clips had been altered and what would or would not have been censored. Each participant’s brain activity was measured while viewing the interviews. The work explores issues of censorship, the various conventions of image restraints through which it is mediated while examining how involvement in a system of secrecy and in blocking information influences the visual and auditory cortices. More than a scientific inquiry, we use the situation to reflect on issues of insubordination, forms of interrogation and of mediation of testimony, legal and illegal violence and its connections to trying to restrict the power of the image. Also conceptually, as the censorship forbids revealing 8200 faces, we were interested in the different meanings that arise from the choice to instead show the 8200 brains’ activity, this in a way using their brain as a mask.