Strangeloves: From/De la région centrale, Air Defense Radar Station Moisie, and Media Cultures of the Cold War

In 1970 the filmmaker Michael Snow in association with others placed a motion picture camera in northern Canada with technology known as the Camera Activating Machine (CAM) that allowed it to create moving rather than static images. Snow's device had a relationship to the military monitoring devices that were stationed in the same area, and had been developed by Pierre Abbeloos. The film that resulted from the device, 'La région centrale' (1971; illus.) included images taken at high speed and was exhibited in New York in 1971, and can be seen, in light of Snow's interest in heightened mental states caused by drugs or sexual pleasure, as positing that both the CAM and the Cold War military surveillance operations had similar 'technical-libidinal' functions. The camera on the device was later replaced by a closed circuit video system, and the work that resulted 'De La' was one of the earliest uses made of closed-ciruit video by an artist.