In Phantom Images, Harun Farocki describes “operational images” as that which “do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation,”referring specifically to images recorded and processed by tactical warheads that allow them to detect their targets. Operational images not only serve a technical function, but also an ideological one: the operative war-time images recorded in the 1991 Gulf War served to conjure the impression of a victimless war, conducted and mediated purely through machines [1].

Today, the abovementioned smart missile systems appear simplistic in comparison to the proliferation of sophisticated deep-learning and algorithmic engines which utilise visual information culled from Closed-Circuit Television cameras (CCTVs) and satellite imaging, amalgamating a vast archive of data to perform complex operations. The ease by which today’s operational images are read and analyzed by machines makes it much easier for the state to monitor and track civilians, extending its regime of surveillance and transforming the urban city into what Koskela terms “enormous panopticons” – a modern-day labyrinth saturated with mechanical eyes [2].

Singapore exemplifies this condition with particular clarity. In their research paper "Watching You Watching Me: Lateral Surveillance in Singapore", Yan Song Lee describes how advanced technologies such as CCTV cameras and data-driven networks are deployed extensively around the island as part of the government’s “Smart Nation” movement, which allows for surveillance to be propagated almost infinitely [3]. This includes the Singapore Police Force’s Police Camera (PolCam) network, which boasts more than 90,000 cameras installed since 2012 that cover every public area, including housing estates, neighbourhood centers, hawker centres, multi-storey car parks and the linkways of transportation nodes such as MRT stations and bus interchanges [4]. Aimed at “deterrence”, the ubiquity of the camera lens enacts a panopticon-like effect that reminds citizens of the state’s ever-present gaze, operating regardless of whether the images themselves are viewed by humans or if the cameras themselves are functional at all.

Beyond internal surveillance, the camera is used as a means of monitoring civilian movement through the nation’s borders: at Changi Airport, automatic checkpoint lanes utilise “multi-modal biometrics” that record a traveller’s iris, facial and fingerprint details, allowing both locals and foreigners to pass through without presenting their passport [5]. Singaporeans are also subjected to lateral, “peer-to-peer” surveillance facilitated by the prevalence of handphone cameras, dash cams, personal security cameras, and the like [6]. Anything that deviates from the norm – ranging from car accidents to commuters unwilling to give up their seats on the train to the elderly – is quickly documented by civilians, with the images and videos being disseminated rapidly on social media and media outlets, creating an omnipresent, unceasing system of self-surveillance.

While surveillance studies have extensively examined urban environments, scholars have rarely addressed the ways in which such operational images have been employed beyond urban spaces, particularly in contexts such as Singapore, where forested areas constitute a significant percentage of its surface area.

In these forested zones, the regime of surveillance, whether state-sponsored or informally perpetuated, cannot be enforced in the same way as in urban environments. CCTVs are unable to permeate the forest’s interior (at least not to the extent that it saturates urban public space), and satellite imaging is similarly thwarted by the tropical forest’s canopy, unable to map the forest floor. Forests today are rarely inhabited by Singaporeans, which results in a scarcity of personal cameras. Unmanaged forests occupy roughly 20% of the island’s total surface area, constituting a significant space where the state’s machine gaze is unable to dominate [7]. This unknowability has led to the forest being seen as a site of mystery and even danger, harbouring threats such as wild dogs, boars, and the occasional “drain-walker” – anonymous men, presumably migrant workers, recently discovered to be camping illegally in forested areas near the Kranji Expressway [8].

Despite the forest’s resistance to the state’s technologically-driven panopticon, people have continued to aim a wide variety of high-tech sensors at the island’s forests, hoping to document what lies within. In 2019, researchers Gaw, Yee and Richards utilised satellite imagery and “ground-truthing” over eight years to produce a high-resolution map of Singapore’s terrestrial ecosystems with 79% accuracy, with several factors thwarting the attainment of perfect resolution: issues include persistent cloud cover, tall buildings obscuring low objects, and the misclassification of untamed vegetation as managed greenery [7]. Both independent and NParks-affiliated foresters also regularly venture into the forest at night, armed with infrared night-vision goggles, trail cameras and even acoustic sensors which allow them to catalogue and archive new species [9]. 

In Singapore, this quest to survey forest-dwelling wildlife using technology extends as far back as the colonial era, during which botanical diagrams, maps and other visual data were commissioned by the colonial administration, allowing European naturalists to impose universal, rationalist taxonomies upon their strange new Oriental colonies [10]. Colonial botany also imposed a deeply anthropocentric perspective upon indigenous wildlife, reinforcing their perceived value as resources to be exploited, for instance facilitating the cultivation of rubber trees on plantations worked by indentured labourers in Malaya and Singapore [10]. These colonial practices of identifying and classifying local wildlife continue to shape botanical knowledge today, providing visual and classificatory frameworks that are, paradoxically, crucial in allowing local conservators to monitor and document rarely seen, endangered species in the wild, so as to formulate targeted interventions to prevent extinction. 

Simultaneously, the growing technological surveillance of the forest facilitates a form of anthropocentric biopower, which “facilitates the production and processing of big data on wildlife populations and movements”, therefore “[engendering] opportunities for remotely controlling and managing wildlife through abstraction and calculability” [11]. CCTVs set up in the relatively densely forested Hillview estate were used to monitor, and ultimately cull, the local wild boar population, which had been perceived to be a threat to residents [12]. Increasingly driven into urban environments by the erosion of natural habitats, these wild populations have been subject to anthropocentric standards of acceptability, which are ultimately used to regulate their movements and population sizes.

In ideological terms, increased surveillance of the forest also constitutes the “conquering of a mythical exterior, if not its absorption into the hegemonic interior”, substantiating the state’s ability to control, shape and regulate the natural spaces within its borders [13]. Indeed, the state’s outward image as a precisely manicured ‘Garden City’ runs directly counter to the idea of the wild and mysterious forest, harbouring unknown and possibly dangerous wildlife.  valuable forests for housing projects, which is incredibly destructive to both local and migratory species. 

Motion-activated trail cameras and infrared night-vision cameras are the two of the most popular and effective instruments used by both citizen foresters and government agencies to produce operational images in the forests. It is no coincidence then that Robert Zhao chooses to use these instruments in his The Owl, the Travellers and the Cement Drain, a 46-minute two-channel video installation work first presented at the Singapore Pavilion within the exhibition Seeing Forest  at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, and later exhibited at Singapore Art Museum in 2025.

At Seeing Forest, the work was presented alongside three related pieces:: Trash Stratum (2024), an installation combining footage and found objects recovered from the secondary forest surrounding the Gillman Barracks in Singapore; Buffy (2024), a laminated digital print of a buffy fish owl; and A Guide to a Secondary Forest of Singapore (2024), an illustrated map of interconnected humans and animals, intertwined by a vast network of Albizia trees.

Exhibition curator Haeju Kim writes: “The term “seeing” here includes not only the act of visually perceiving or observing something, but also the observation of human interference with nature (resulting from the perspective of human society on nature), and how nature, in turn, reacts to such interference” [14].

Zhao’s film seeks to problematise the anthropomorphic drive to surveil the forest – which relegates the forest to a passive site to be observed – and instead repositions it as an active observer. Using an array of operative images such as trail camera recordings, thermal footage, and time-lapse videos, Zhao depicts various moments of interaction and collision between human and natural activity. Construction scenes are juxtaposed with animals moving through the same half-built sites; Sambar deer, previously thought extinct, roam through a slumbering city; a miniscule excavator labours to tear down a roiling ocean of trees. By documenting these surreal encounters, Zhao seeks to return the forest to a state of mystery, a state increasingly under threat by the proliferation of surveillance and deforestation.

In both The Owl, The Travellers and The Cement Drain and Trash Stratum, Zhao relies heavily on motion-activated trail cameras, favoured by filmmakers, conservationists and hunters as a way to observe nature uninterrupted by human presence. Contrary to this prevailing assumption,unfamiliar artefacts in natural environments, trail cameras impose an alien presence which may disrupt an animal’s behaviour. Aimed in a certain direction, the camera imposes the filmmaker’s selective gaze, which privileges certain animal behaviour – mating patterns, nesting behaviour, etc. – over others. There is also the unseen presence of the editor, who must select desirable images and obscure the unwanted presence of other animals in curating a certain narrative for the viewer.

As Kim writes, “the camera necessarily starts from the position of human technology… simply imagining or presenting the biological gaze of animals in the name of reproducing the gaze of “nature” is itself an anthropocentric proposition" [14]. She notes that Zhao, in attempting to disrupt anthropocentric technological surveillance of the forest, must necessarily utilise the same technology to create his film.

Zhao’s counter-anthropocentric approach, however, lies in his embracing of the imperfection of trail cameras, abandoning any pretense of erasing the human presence from his images. Instead, his trail cameras are turned toward documenting the intrusion of human activity into natural spaces, and animal behaviour that reacts to and ultimately adapts to such activity. His trail cameras surround a plastic water bin, presumably left over by Japanese or British soldiers previously inhabiting Gillman Barracks, and record animal interactions with the seemingly foreign object.

The visual data shows how animal behaviour has adapted to human intrusion: migrating birds use the bin as a rest stop in their journey, predatory hawks use it as a watering point in their hunts, and a massive monitor lizard uses it as a bathtub to cool its body during a hot day. The artificial plastic object is shown to have seamlessly integrated itself into the natural landscape, serving as a crucial element of animals’ daily life. Zhao thus inverts the perceived purpose of trail cameras – a means of divorcing human touch from natural behaviour – and instead uses it to deconstruct the very human-natural binary it is meant to uphold. 
 

In Zhao’s film, thermal images stand out from the rest of the black-and-white footage, saturating the double screen with blazing hues of purple, red and yellow. These images invert the image of the forest as perceived by the human eye or even conventional camera, from which animals and plants on the forest floor hide through chromatic camouflage, blending into overlapping green-brown tonalities. Under thermal vision, living animals, which emanate heat, are exposed in sharp contrast to the cooler tropical environment. The thermal camera is an invasive technology – its ability to reveal animals intent on hiding themselves violates what von Essen terms “contingent consent”, in which animals are given the option to engage with or disengage from the recorder [15]. However, thermal vision also centers animal vision in a way that conventional cameras do not, by mimicking the heat-based senses of night predators, who sense heat in order to hunt. Biological thermoreceptors can be found among several species of insects, reptiles and bats; this includes the mangrove pit viper, which dwells in mangrove forests throughout Southeast Asia, and possesses “pit organs” in its head which absorb infrared radiation and are also sensitive to conducted heat and other kinds of microwave energy [16].

The thermal image itself is not inherently counter-anthropocentric: after all, it still translates the infrared spectrum to the human vision, assigning colours to certain heat signatures which allows the human eye to decipher it. However, in Zhao’s film, the infrared camera centers a non-human perspective by recording human, not animal, interactions.

The film’s non-sequential narrative is interwoven with thermal footage of two unnamed human characters as they trek through the forest, tease each other, and tell stories. The camera always watches from a distance, sometimes spying on the duo from the forest canopy, and other times peering at them from behind leaves and branches. The thermal image obscures the actors’ faces, rendering their expressions inscrutable and reducing them to mere silhouettes, forcing the audience to rely on body language to decipher, if at all possible, their emotions.

In a lingering sequence, the camera slowly follows one of the characters as he scrambles across the forest, keeping its distance yet advancing steadily and relentlessly, while the human’s movements are clumsy and hasty, perhaps even fearful. Here, the audience inhabits, if temporarily, an animal stalker as it menacingly follows a human who cannot quite see it, but senses that she is in some danger. The thermal camera therefore allows the forest to ‘see’ the human, and also allows us as viewers to ‘see’ the forest’s capacity for surveillance – creating a cyborg animal-technological eye to counter the human-technological one.

The thermal camera’s value lies not merely in its ability to allow humans to inhabit animal eyes, but in exposing traces of the humans as interlopers and evidencing ways in which human interventions are impermanent, absorbed and integrated into the forest. In one sequence, it lingers upon a branch touched by one of the protagonists, its surface slowly fading from hot-red to cool-purple as the heat dissipates. In another scene, the camera observes voyeuristically as one of the characters urinates at the base of the tree, his urine creating a puddle that glows with fluorescent heat, and slowly fades into the landscape as the urine cools down and is absorbed into the soil.

The entropic process of heat dissipation, as revealed by the thermal lens, allows the audience to perceive the ephemerality of human presence in nature, undermining notions of the forest purely as a site of human exploitation and destruction. To that end, Zhao subverts the view of humans as the ultimate overmasters of the natural environment, revealing forests as a site that has and will continue to elude human control.

Ultimately, Robert Zhao’s The Owl, the Travellers and the Cement Drain attempts to appropriate, subvert and invert the purposes of operative images in anthropocentric technological surveillance of Singapore’s forests. Working reflexively with imperfect human surveillance technologies, Zhao centres the animal gaze and transforms the forest from the observed to the observer; his work reveals to us ways in which the forest is and will always be a site of mystery and power, through which we humans are not much more than temporary specks of light moving through a silent, observing sea.