FNA Presence Documents

In the afternoon hours of May 1, 2011, president Obama and his national security team were watching the livestream of operation Neptune Spear. The Situation Room, a photograph of the group of insiders who had direct, immediate access to this footage, shows the VIPs gathered around a table covered with laptops, paper cups and files staring at some kind of display unit, as football fans would be watching the super bowl. Instead they are watching the live broadcast of the execution of the top most wanted man in the world. At the time of this elite group’s gathering in one of the conference rooms of the Situation Room of the White House, the rest of the world is unaware of the hunt of the top most wanted man in the world in the city of Abbottabad in Pakistan. In other words, at the moment that this highly mediated event of near future was livestreamed and documented, outside of a certain security clearance, the present had not yet arrived. The people in this photograph were posing for the future, they were living in the near future.

The total fragmentation of presence, provided/facilitated by the mediatization of life and distributed according accessibility creates a new temporal topography. As such the presence can be managed and future designed. Bin Laden was executed in the future and dumped on the present and thus its not surprising that his body was never recovered. Its recovery requires an archeology of the future. Had the operation failed, the event had never taken place.