Abstract

Automated target recognition originated because of the reorganization of human perception necessitated by the U.S. proclivity to accelerate (the possibility of) military action. This story begins with James J. Gibson, a prominent psychologist and mentor of Rosenblatt whose studies of perception in World War II (WWII) both developed a militarily useful concept of a target and, contradictorily, would serve as a precedent for his subsequent ecological theory of vision. In both contexts, Gibson embraced the notion that recognition of an object was contingent on one’s sense of relation to it in physical space and affective register. A target, then, was an entity whose meaning—its adversarial resonance—had been institutionally determined in advance and imposed on embodied acts of recognition so they could be coupled with action in an automatic, unconscious way. In the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA would take up these perceptual techniques in its MARK I Perceptron tests and its parallel activities of human photo interpretation (specifically, object detection) in the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Despite the staggering U.S. investment in global surveillance technology, this era was characterized by “photo gap” periods, which fed a paranoia that the country was becoming physically reachable by an adversary’s weapons it could not perceive. Defense institutions’ sense of geopolitical uncertainty prompted a preemptive posture. What may have appeared as an “age of the world picture” was in fact an age of the pictorial target list as world, which enabled a collapse of the temporal gap between recognition and response.