What happens to the human gaze when the rules of the visible world no longer apply? Between 2024 and 2025, while serving in an assault battalion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, artist Vitaliy Gerasymenko used his camera not simply to document a war zone, but to register a shift in perception itself. The frontline emerges here not as a fixed geography, but as a cognitive and sensory condition—one increasingly structured by machine vision, where drones, sensors, and targeting systems redefine what can be seen, and by whom.

Heat Signatures unfolds within this altered regime of visibility. It is an intimate record of a nervous system under permanent stress, suspended in a temporal “limbo” where experience oscillates between extremes: the accelerated time of combat and the suspended duration of waiting. Drawing on the spectral aesthetics of thermal imaging, Gerasymenko’s images echo the logic of machinic perception, where bodies appear as heat traces and environments dissolve into gradients of intensity. Vision here is no longer anchored in human optics, but mediated through technologies that abstract, classify, and operationalize the visible.

In the context of war, the work operates within a broader crisis of the documentary image. Long associated with evidentiary indexicality, the documentary is unsettled by the rise of automated seeing—systems that do not merely record reality but actively construct it. Gerasymenko’s images inhabit this tension: they oscillate between testimony and translation, between lived experience and its algorithmic rendering. The result is not a stable document, but a field of perceptual negotiation.

Moving through apparent ghost villages, the artist’s gaze lingers on the silhouettes of his companions, suspended between their emergence and disappearance. Weapons and machines appear not only as tools of violence, but as extensions of an optical regime in which survival depends on visibility, detection, and evasion. Within this landscape, to see is to be seen; to remain invisible is to persist.

Rather than reaffirming the authority of the image, Heat Signatures dwells within its instability. It asks what forms of witnessing remain possible when perception itself is delegated to machines, and what kinds of life exceed or resist capture. The frontline, in this sense, becomes both a physical and epistemic threshold—where the human gaze confronts its own limits, and where the documentary once again fractures into new, uncertain forms.

Author: Tobias Zielony

Vitaliy Gerasymenko (b. 1993, Ukraine) is a cinematographer and photographer currently documenting the frontline as a member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. With a background in film and linguistics, his work investigates the fracture of human perception under extreme pressure. His practice has evolved from traditional reportage toward a conceptual mapping of the “zero line” as both a cognitive and technological space. Utilizing the aesthetics of the modern battlefield, Gerasymenko captures a perspective born of direct immersion—one where the landscape is stripped of its familiar surface. His work seeks to render the invisible atmosphere of the frontline, creating a haunting, visceral record of the human and machine presence amid the ongoing Russian invasion.