Operational Aesthetic: Take 1

It might sound too simple to suggest a specific aesthetic of the operational image. It is not, after all, a specific genre or style, despite the connotations to the aesthetics of surveillance, administrative screen space, situations like the control room,8 or “think tank aesthetics” as a fusion of operations research and twentieth-century modernism, as Pamela Lee shows in her work.9 Instead, while aware of these historical, aesthetic, and architectural contexts, I see “operational aesthetic” as a heuristic term that helps to connect specialist image practices and technical imaging into a broader discussion of the notion of operationality that emerges from the earlier history of photography and calculative images to the digital images and automation that is at the back of military applications, AI and platform culture, and the gradual shift to the centrality of invisuality as per the argument in chapter 2.

Operational images can then be seen as a particular conceptual switch in what we consider an image and what we consider as users and operators in such aesthetic practices. Action/acting takes precedence, which is evident when, for example, Elsaesser argues that a redefinition of the aesthetic takes place in such combinations of looking, operating, and clicking (or interface actions more generally):

One can go even further and claim that operational images

function as instructions for action—[and] are the new default value of all image making, against which more traditional images, i.e. images meant merely to be contemplated, to be watched disinterestedly or for their aesthetic qualities are being redefined as specialized instances of operational images—and I’m not even primarily talking about advertising, propaganda or pornography. After all, there has grown up a generation of users who, instead of wanting to look at images, are more and more expecting to be able to click on images on their Facebook feed or on Instagram.10

Aesthetics of operations become about processing the bodies involved and formatting their actions, as well as the various other proxies related to the spectrum of the what and where of operations.

While much of the above seems to relate to a discussion concerning digital culture and the image as interface, Tom Gunning’s, Ilka Brasch’s, and others’ take on the operational aesthetic, shifts the focus to an earlier context of cinematic culture as well as popular depictions of technology in print media.11 Brasch focuses on late nineteenth-century fiction and early twentieth-century cultural expressions in outlining a particular narrative and visual style. Drawing on existing historical research on a variety of media formats, from P. T. Barnum’s “public hoaxes” to Edgar Allan Poe’s literary writing to early cinema, Brasch develops an argument that concerns the relation between technological systems and the public display of technology. The domestication of new technologies is mediated through an aesthetics of how things work, where the observation of detail led to an appreciation of industrial society in action. Brasch quotes Neil Harris on the operational aesthetic in U.S. culture of the nineteenth century:

Machinery was beginning to accustom the public not merely to a belief in the continual appearance of new marvels but to a jargon that concentrated on methods of operation, on aspects of mechanical organization and construction, on horsepower, gears, pulleys, and safety valves. The language of technical explanation and scientific description itself had become a form of recreational literature by the 1840s and 1850s. Newspapers, magazines, even novels and short stories catered to this passion for detail.12

Such displays can be seen as a version of the cabinet of curiosity in the emerging age of technical systems but with much room reserved for deceit and trickery.13 A passion for detail went together with a variety of affects concerning new technologies, from anxiety to enthusiasm. Brasch expands on Harris’s work to show the various ways that the operational aesthetic shifts across genres and institutional contexts. It becomes effectively seen as both a narrative fascination with the workings of systems—questions of observation, detail, and process—and training how to read and appreciate systems, a recursive operation upon the reader/viewer as such. Reading Poe is thus contextualized in this broader technological culture. It becomes itself indexical of what the genre of print serials teased out: detective fiction unfolding through the newspaper and magazine serials, thus becoming a processual genre.

Operational aesthetic homes in on the processual side of technological systems. For example, one could cite philosophical toys and visual technologies that demanded a relation between touch and process,14 such as the phenakistoscope and zoetropes. Still, there is also a broader continuity across different technologies and what they imply by way of operational process and the position of the user. The operational aesthetic becomes understood in Brasch’s analysis as the narrative format of “this is how that works”: while at first seeming distant to our topic at hand—video installations by Farocki, contemporary media arts, technological images, and the operations after operations research and cybernetics—it helps to focus on the narratives and images that make sense of technological systems. In an early cinematic context, as Gunning points out, the operational aesthetic comes to concern a “fascination with the way things come together, visualizing cause and effect through the image of the machine, bridges the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, shaping many aspects of popular culture”15 while reserving a specific spot for the inoperative too: the failing of a systemic, even programmed procedure exemplified by various hiccups in Chaplin’s and Keaton’s films. A hint of the inoperative image, again.

Two sides to the operational aesthetic, then: “This is how” as showing, picturing, and demonstrating that make sense of operational procedures; “how that works” as referring to the advanced systems where images are featured in operation, the military and scientific systems that exhibit nonhuman automation (as much as the training of operators for particular tasks). This show and tell is even more interesting for complex bundles and layers of interface systems. Marianne van den Boomen has referred to this as the built-in, designed depresentation that comes as a feature of hiding “procedural complexity” that features in computational environments. As a term, it is useful to read against the backdrop of aesthetics of demonstrating a process: “The icons on our desktops do their work by representing an ontologized entity, while depresenting the processual and material complexity involved. This is the way icons manage computer complexity, this is the task we as users (in tacit conjunction with designers) have delegated to them.”16 The managerial task of interface design is somewhat related to the above-mentioned design of looking, operating, and clicking. Thus this also concerns the design of complex systems that can be packed into simpler shells for user interaction—or operator interaction—and then feature as the other pole (of what scholars of operational aesthetics in cinema and literature outline). These are not contradictory but, in peculiar ways, complementary traits. To show and tell in order not to see all that there is.17

Such detailed historical reading of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century public cultures of operations represented in a variety of formats comes to imply that the representations are a form of training. In ways that echo Walter Benjamin and other media scholars’ arguments about the drilling and training of modern subjects to understand technology, the idea of the operational aesthetic as both domestication and as training the operator becomes clear.18 While the operator is a central figure of modern large technological systems, it also takes place on other scales of the interface with technology (and not merely traditional media technologies).

The operator is created both for the home and the workplace. As Brasch notes, mid-nineteenth-century advertisements by I. M. Singer & Company “addressed them not as purchasers of a commodity but as operators of a sewing machine.”19 The shift in gender focus of “operating” becomes an important part in appreciating the different histories of the operational aesthetic that includes questions of public and private labor too:

The reassurance of sewing as a woman’s task then impacts the notions of the machine and of the operator, both of which move from the public and work spheres into the private sphere of the Victorian home. Whereas technological mechanisms were established in farm work or in industrial facilities, both times performing functions that in one form or another translate into monetary value for its operator, sewing machines provide their home-based operators with surplus time instead of money.20

While the sewing machine had an important impact on various forms of the display of technology and the empowerment of female work with machines, at another scale, the telegraph, and then subsequently the telephone, presented an interesting dilemma for the operational aesthetic of machinery. As Brasch points out, such systems were not restricted to any one site where they reside as machines: they relied on a distributed network to function. As such, the operator—with the fine-tuned specialist skill, haptic touch, and sensibility—became understood through her/his/their work that interfaced with large-scale systems and distributed infrastructures of communication. As Brasch sums it up, “Human agents are trained to become operatives, just like they were when using a sewing machine.”21 As operatives, they are both at the site of the machine and somewhere else, as the system spans vast geographical territories and becomes a structuring of a different sense of space. This, indeed, was a key realization of early media and technological theory too: space and time, not residing only at one place at a time, distributing a set of communicative affects, capacities, and sense of subjectivity.22

Is the operational aesthetic, in this sense, an aesthetic of training? Not an aesthetic only in the sense of what training looks like but aesthetic as guidance of sensorimotor activities toward particular forms of action and operation. Images that function as manuals that show labor and knowledge, whether packed into a human (habits, gestures, memory) or a machine (system). Elsaesser seems to imply this in his discussion of Farocki’s work on labor and the new invisibilities of control systems, or labor in “control societies,” in the manner Gilles Deleuze outlined. Training thus is both cognitive and affective, goal-oriented even if potentially unconscious. In many ways, this then applies to an endless chain of recursive operations of images that train: images that show images that train humans to operate images and images that increasingly operate without human intervention or even beyond human perception. The operational aesthetic though, when dealing with large-scale systems that emerged in the late nineteenth century and populated the twentieth-century technological landscape and problems of operational research, are then faced with the same task: how to understand, cognitively, the out of sight and out of place that is integrated into a formatting of the world in its own image, an image that programs potentials of action. How should we understand the nonlinear yet connected operations of telecommunications, remote sensing, and remote targeting, or the work of infrastructures that enable displaced communication to take place and reformat physical territories?

Geocinema: Digital Earth Images

One section of Geocinema’s Making of Earths narrates the collection of minerals and other ground samples in Tengchong, Yunnan province, China, in the 1970s. The airborne experiment was central to the emergence of new remote sensing applications in China, and it started from the ground up, mapping and organizing ground truths into a taxonomy:

15,000 rock, soil, vegetation and water samples had been taken from its mountainous landscapes as part of the inaugural 1970s Landsat remote-sensing experiment. Their spectral signatures folded into databases which were crucial in training satellites to see not only pollution from urban and oceanic topographies, but also the mineral, petroleum and coal deposits underneath the nation-state’s territories.23

From airborne photogrammetry to spectral imaging and many other techniques, remote sensing operates as productive cross-reading of ground truths and invisual technologies that prepare images in order to prepare data in order to prepare policy from extraction to sustainability. Grounds are formatted (organized, divided, classified) for epistemic purposes to be used as training data and establish an operational chain: ground to satellite to ground again to data for further imaging. This operational chain is extremely useful for depicting large-scale areas, whether those that are hard to reach (such as remote sensing and AI systems used to identify ocean-floor ecologies from cable infrastructure to biota) or just widely distributed where the clustering of particular objects or resource types facilitates management of those areas.24 Such operational images are thus not located only on the screen but in the circulation of information and data from sensors to machine learning processing. The opening note about turtles all the way down also applies to this operational infrastructure of remote sensing and its role in contemporary geopolitics that formats surfaces and reinscribes earths (and oceans).25

Geocinema’s cinematic installation and the broader research project Framing Territories look at what they call planetary cinema and the “making of earths” through their research on the Digital Belt and Road initiative (DBAR). Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess focus on the Chinese data infrastructure for sustainable development through artistic methods. These methods become a way to tie in contemporary audiovisual work with insights into large-scale media infrastructures that address the technoscientific basis of framing climate and bring another layer of imaging into view through their experimental take on remote sensing (that itself produces another layer of visibility of planetary-scale changes). From “Planetary Cinema” to “Calibration” to “Future Forecast,” Geocinema’s themes highlight both spaces where spatial data is constructed for use and spaces where infrastructure operations enable circulation of all forms of entities (roads, railroads, data, and people, including data about ethnic minorities). The themes also highlight epistemic processes that emerge from their work with DBAR as well as with historical archives such as the Jesuit histories at the Zikawei observatory in Shanghai that formed a part in a network of observatories. Other historical reference points include the early nineteenth-century case study of the weather and astronomical observations of Mongkut the Great, monarch of Siam (currently Thailand) read side by side with questions of calibration that refers to remote sensing techniques of ground-truthing but also the other levels of work of standardization as it features in DBAR and other policy work as a transnational glue. This creative recursive structure of themes in many ways reproduces the recursive logics of power at play in DBAR and its role in broader Chinese politics of sensing.26

As such, their work presents us with a useful case for a contemporary version of operational aesthetics: it deals with the multiscalar reality of scientific imaging and large-scale infrastructures while moving across different sites and contexts of production of weather and ecological data: from satellite ground station and ground station security guard to interviews with policymakers and scientists to operator control rooms and screens of graphs and diagrams. In this sense, the work is set in a similar context as, for example, Armin Linke’s installation, moving image, and photography works that focus on seabed mining and the planetary management of oceans, such as the Prospecting Ocean project.27 Likewise, Susan Schuppli’s Ice Cores (2019) video features similar themes of the transformation of material samples into data and climate science relevant knowledge, even if the institutional spaces in question are an archive (Canadian Ice Core Archive) and a lab (OSU Ice Core and Quaternary Geochemistry Lab in the United States). Another contemporary example of a mix of artistic and architectural aesthetics is the Anthropocene Observatory.28 Here the notion of an observatory as “a composition of documentary practices and discourses”29 allowed for a way to understand the links among knowledge institutions, standardization of information, and engagement with planetary-scale issues in ways that tapped into infrastructures of information about environmental and territorial changes: from bureaucratic administration to measuring instruments to the management of ecological data. To underline the centrality of curatorial practices as sites of crystallization of different disciplinary practices, ZKM’s Critical Zones (curated in 2020 by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel) can also be quoted in this context.30 It is also relevant both for its metaphoric use of the notion of “observatory” and for the specific topic at hand, as Geocinema’s The Making of Earths was part of that exhibition alongside many other contemporary practitioners.

In what follows, I primarily refer to the version of the Framing Territories project installed as The Making of Earths for ZKM’s Critical Zones exhibition; this version consists of sections that underline the narrative choices of aesthetics of sites, logistics, labor, and historical layers in particular ways. The different themes for The Making of Earths (“Footnotes to the Making of Earths”) speak of remote sensing and remote actions that correspond to technological protocols, policy, and bureaucracy. In addition, they produce a series of images of operations that tie together images, data, satellites, people, ground stations, and scientific conference dinners.

The specific sections of The Making of Earths produce a series of multiscalar surfaces of images with nonlinear structure. This cinema is composite on many levels, including the exhibition outputs. While their work can be contextualized in a variety of contemporary contexts, from experimental (moving image) media arts to speculative design, I want to bring this into a discussion of infrastructural and logistical images. As such, their work (indirectly) elaborates Brasch’s idea about operational aesthetics in the context of large-scale data infrastructures that consist of physical, informational, and human elements, namely working bodies on- and off-screen. In Geocinema’s case, two elements stand out, and they are intertwined in ways that elaborate a particular planetary angle to our topic at hand. First, the DBAR plans are a diagram of a planetary image, the Digital Earth, as it has been symbolically coined since the 1990s. Second, the cinematic method elaborates systems that are too large to be grasped at one point of reference, image, or frame; in one situation; or by way of interface-operator experience.

Geocinema’s Framing Territories was underpinned by the Digital Earth program31 fellowship that allowed them to conduct research, interviews, shooting, and data collection “on the ground” in both Beijing and other locations where the DBAR program hits the ground. Their focus on the earth observation network and its remote sensing and environmental data operations was entangled with their interest in cinematic expression and planetary infrastructures. Their work as part of the Strelka Institute’s program had already triggered the methodological line of considering “planetary-scale sensory networks—cell phones, surveillance cameras, satellites, geosensors—as distributed cinematic apparatus,”32 which resulted in an extended and speculative sense of what a camera is. As a postlenticular device (see chapter 5), the camera here is perhaps more of a metaphorical residue when it comes to the actual employment of scientific sensors that operate in various locations on the ground and in orbit, but their interest in moving images persisted as central to the methodology. Indeed, this large-scale sensory operation is described as nonlinear and fragmented with multiple elements of data, paper, and people: “Sensing fragments of the earth their operations generate terabytes of raw data, infrastructural architectures, obscured labour, dissonant weather, governmental policies, scientific management, environments and situations.”33

The DBAR program—as an infrastructure and policy project and even a platform—is a fitting focus for the research into planetary infrastructure. It could easily be seen as an interesting and expanded case study for an STS project on science infrastructures such as geopolitics. However, in this case, it is approached through cinematic practice and methodological considerations as to what role images play in this constellation of scientific concerns about remote sensing, ground infrastructure, and projects that span across national boundaries. As a science program, DBAR has an interesting history related to the birth of remote sensing projects in China since the 1970s and systematic investment in realizing the symbolically celebrated Digital Earth projects discussed by Al Gore in 1992 as part of a run-up to the vice presidency in the Clinton government, where the broader agenda of “information superhighway” became a popular trope of policy discourse.

Interestingly, the Digital Earth was picked up in the Chinese context, and it started to resonate with a variety of foreign policy (and other) goals over the past twenty years. By the end of the 1990s, the Chinese Academy of Sciences had already hosted “the first International Symposium on Digital Earth” (1999) with the first Beijing Declaration on Digital Earth followed up in ten years with the next Beijing Declaration on Digital Earth in 2009.34 There, Digital Earth becomes manifested as the term that includes work toward infrastructures and information resources of sustainability, questions of “global commons,” and a general range of security Operations Other Than War: “Digital Earth should play a strategic and sustainable role in addressing such challenges to human society as natural resource depletion, food and water insecurity, energy shortages, environmental degradation, natural disasters response, population explosion, and, in particular, global climate change.”35

Digital Earth can be seen as a conflation of the lineages of cartography and meteorology.36 It picks up on the “digital” as a period of big data from 1972 Landsat Earth Observation data to the twenty-first-century information infrastructures. It establishes the ability to integrate and visualize data as a central engine of influence and impact. The integration of Gore’s vision of a “three-dimensional visual representation of Earth that would help humankind take advantage of geo-referenced information on physical and social environments, linked to an interconnected web of digital libraries”37 structures Digital Earth as an international project from satellites to ground surfaces with an air of (political and scientific) neutrality. Yet, at the back of the several institutional connections and methods, it connects to geopolitical planning and presents us a case of techniques of images and imaging as they work on (transnational) territorial management.38

Even if outside the scope of this chapter, it is useful to read the Digital Earth and the subsequent DBAR in relation to the Belt and Road initiative focused on physical infrastructure projects and legal frameworks that reformat territories across vast regions in Asia and beyond. Architectural, infrastructural, legal, and economic tools—such as debt regimes—are part of Belt and Road’s different investments from ports for maritime routes to railroads to dozens of new Special Economic Zones “modeled after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.”39 A good example of such projects is the “estimated $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a collection of projects connecting China to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea.”40 Belt and Road, and also Digital Belt and Road, are thus apt examples of politics of infrastructure understood in the broad sense while also supported by other measures of geoengineering in and out of Chinese territory: these include hydrogeographic maneuvers that are not restricted to terra firma, but include atmospheric factors too, such as weather modification.41

Bazdyrieva and Suess’s summary helps to understand the scale of operations across the world:

Similar to the Belt and Road Initiative, the geographies of its digital counterpart remain not clearly defined yet ever expanding. Having twenty-seven satellite missions, super computers in Jinan and Wuxi, and four satellite ground stations within China’s borders, the initiative had already launched eight representative centers outside and across four continents before the end of 2018; first in Bangkok, then Helsinki, Potenza, El Jadida, Peshawar, Moscow, New York, and Lusaka, with many more to come. Made of an ensemble of coordinates, the project relies on creating networks between nation-states with more than sixty regional partnerships and transnational agencies such as the United Nations. Less explicit is how these locations coincide with particular infrastructural partnerships, where along with “capacity building” for scientific exchange, heavy projects laying down fiber-optic cables have been enabled across regions in Eurasia, Africa, and the Arctic. This includes the Lusaka economic zone, a China Smart Tech City in Morocco, with similar contracts in Thailand, Pakistan, and a 10,500 km fiber-optic link across the polar seabed through Russia into Finland.42

While the Belt and Road initiative has become a key feature of China’s foreign policy branded by infrastructure development and financing, the Digital Belt and Road is defined as a science program that is closely aligned with the sustainable development goals of the UN—with an effective link to territorial plans across vast areas of the earth. The sustainability plans (including achieving carbon neutrality by 2060), material epistemologies, and infrastructures have significant geopolitical stakes built into them: climate modeling and their infrastructures are forms of political closures and transformation through which contemporary planetary governance is taking place. Infrastructure for data and data-based services can intensify geopolitically significant asymmetries while still working within generally agreed upon global sustainability goals.

As Bazdyrieva and Suess narrate from one of their field investigations into DBAR networks: “Many of the projects proposed over the duration of the conference included ways to accrue sets of data from ‘developing countries’—nation-states which did not have the capacity for their own satellite ground stations or supercomputers. For example, Bangladesh and Myanmar were promised on-demand satellite images of their own territories through an online gateway. Funding provided by the Chinese state was to allow the UN Environment Program to implement air and water monitoring systems in Nairobi, Cape Town, in Addis Ababa.”43 DBAR interest in ecological environments, natural disasters, land resources, and other geoscientific data and modeling44 is part of its grand science infrastructural plan: global, quasi–real time, based on mass-scale data acquisition, integrating space–air–ground observation, with “high spatial, temporal, and spectral resolutions.” Data about the earth is constantly constructed anew according to different plans, some with good intentions and some more cynical, some a mix of both. The territorial exchange becomes transposed onto DBAR services and other relevant, structured dependencies. Computers, satellites, and data become part of implicit geopolitical soft power. To note, not all of this power is particularly soft either as it works as an example of internal colonisation: it is important to consider how many of the Chinese “data-intensive and predictive technologies . . . were first tested and developed in Xinjiang,”45 as Shaoling Ma notes, drawing connections between persecution of minorities such as Uyghurs and the broader state-led programs for sensing and sustainability.

In the context of this book, the question of images comes to the fore. While the idea of a Digital Earth conjures an image (or imaginary) of a virtual globe—a theme sometimes used in the rhetoric too—it consists of a variety of sources of Earth observation and other data that is Ready to Use (RTU), managed through various software platforms. While the visual media history of Digital Earth would be itself interesting—from early modern woodcuts (see Figure 18) to techniques in cartography to Landsat satellites to Chinese satellite remote sensing and big data to early 2000s Microsoft 3D geographic teaching software46 and onto Google Earth—the focus here is on the operationalization of particular images (see Plate 4). This means also focusing on what role images play in the context of territorial transformation and management as enfolded in data. Indeed, one could track the trajectory from the “computer and 3D graphic technologies supported by the film and video game industries”47 to the ways virtual globes are an element in how platforms of scientific data produce operational images—namely, as models and simulations.

Multiple genres of images are at play: photographic, cartographic, and data-driven visualizations are integrated on the platform. Satellite data to various forms of RTU products such as “digital orthophoto maps, regional image maps, top of atmosphere reflectance, land surface reflectance, top of atmosphere brightness temperature, land surface temperature, normalized difference vegetation index, ratio vegetation index, global environment monitoring index, normalized burnt ratio, normalized difference water index, and pixel quality attribute”48 function alongside “other big Earth data” that provide a wealth of standardized and thus combinable and comparable material. Measurement stands at the beginning of production of environment as data. The Digital Earth at the back of DBAR is thus driven by a question of “massive, multiresolution, multitemporal, multitype Earth observation data”49 that is then mobilized along with the platform for various physical models (climate change, Earth system) and AI models (related to chapter 2 but here on a scale of multiscalar Earth models as images).

Geocinema’s The Making of Earths visually dissects the theme of the globe as it features as an architectural ornament in DBAR plans and science buildings. The globes featured in posters and a very large 3D model at the Remote Sensing and Digital Earth Institute entrance in Beijing (see Figure 21) are reminiscent of revolving globes found in school classrooms, except these are expanded to loom above the height of an average human. The model pairs up with the globe-shaped cinema theater inside the building as a walk-in world in its own right. One can discuss these as cultural techniques of inside and outside, space and projection, and cartography and cinema. Other subtle shifts across the binary divisions of inside/outside are shown: a passage to inside the fabrication of cinematic continuities across a heterogeneous set of input data; a physical model, transformed into a digital screen; a paper-based cartographic representation of territory juxtaposed with a data map. As a cinematic version of engaging with operative ontologies, it shows various elements that make up the scaffolding of the DBAR: the stitches that hold the symbolic and the material infrastructures together, something that could also be seen as a “cosmographic project” in the sense that historian of science John Tresch has described the term. In Tresch’s use, it refers to the concrete spaces, images, and practices where cosmologies are materialized, “ideas of the order of nature that are enacted, embodied, elaborated, and contested in concrete settings, institutions, representations, instruments, and practices.”50 Inconspicuous details from the series of globes on posters, cinema theater shape, and other recurring symbolic objects are thus also part of how the cosmology is being inscribed beyond written manifestos and other grey literature51 of remote sensing and Digital Earth. Or, to phrase it even more tightly: DBAR is a project that feeds off grey literature and its material repetitions across architectural space that resonates with infrastructural space.

Cosmographical insight to abstract sets of ideas (planetary technologies, infrastructures—cosmologies even) is thus on par with operative ontologies, and here they are placed in relation to material scientific systems. The planetary as it is being built as architecture, as symbolic system, as infrastructure—even as “sculpture”52—is opened up by Geocinema’s camera movement across the space as it links up with a pan across the image surface of a composed, meteorological earth-image. In other words, the camera views the cosmographic details of architectures of institutions, images, instruments, and practices, and the Making of Earths is framed through these scenes. The project frames the production of invisual images through its own cinematic images that show the process unfolding. No tricks, no underlying secrets are assumed or revealed, just the surface process that emerges at sites, symbols, and technical explanations. As a “making of” film, it fits into the description of operational, procedural aesthetics as “how is it done”—but one that does not give out a simple explanation of a deus ex machina. Instead, a multitude of processes unfolds where the operational is not merely one type of an image—not necessarily even one concrete picture—but rather about the institutional links and articulations and sometimes casual observations, as in many cases of the interviews peppered across the episodic film. The operational refers thus to a vast, distributed capacity to sense, register, and digest the world as images and spit it back as models.

The shift between data and image, so central to much discussion about operational images, comes through in an interview Geocinema filmed with Professor Li of the Academy of Sciences. A didactic explanation of the pipeline of data follows, underlining a cosmographic world-building exercise with knowledge: from signals to pictures to data to information to knowledge, the material flow of remote sensing input becomes one form of “immutable mobiles” that travel from one infrastructural site to another thanks to the work of standards. One could with justification refer to the various sites filmed by Geocinema as “centers of calculation,” to echo the term proposed by Bruno Latour: those nodes of scientific power that can accumulate data, processing it by working through “maps, account books, drawings, legal texts, and files, that cartographers, merchants, engineers, jurists and civil servants get the edge on all the others.”53 The ability to combine, superimpose, reshuffle, and summarize are essential operations that feed forward back into the world. Signals transform into pictures, then into data, then into information, then into knowledge, sent out to the world. Now, though, such centers of calculation might be located somewhere between spatial and scientific institutions and their platform effects; or, that the platform itself becomes one form of an operative center of calculation that accumulates data and processes it and reformats worlds in and through logistical operations.

Professor Li’s explanation in the section on “Algorithm” in Making of Earths is one specific point where images and pictures are specifically talked about: “The satellite is just a signal for us, it is not a picture,” he explains and continues, “it’s a signal, and we process it to be a picture.” A technical detail turns more than technical. It turns into particular moments of transformations in the logistical operations of DBAR. As such, the tricky relation between representation and the invisuality of data is somewhat implied in how material is gathered in Geocinema’s work; the signal is the base reference point for much of DBAR’s scientific work, but images that it mobilizes are not visible in the traditional sense. Hence, the operational aesthetic of large-scale signal and data systems is focused on proxies that are cosmographic details and operative ontologies; they are inscriptions in and around centers of calculation that DBAR establishes that are the geographic locations for the audiovisual piece and the larger Framing Territories project: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Sri Racha ground stations, the climate research center of Bangkok, conference halls in the Tengchong volcanic district, and the risk-management rooms of the oil conglomerate Gazprom in Omsk, Russia.54 In each case, the operational aesthetic at play is about choosing, selecting, and framing which image is adequate for the job and which scene and architecture at play speak to how territories are being formed in this mass-scale circulation of signals and materials.

Both the installation Making of Earths and the Framing Territories project venture into different sites and situations to map the geocinematic apparitions of contemporary entanglement of data and territory. One could justifiably argue that it stretches the term “cinema” way beyond many scholars’ comfort zone but also returns to what Thomas Elsaesser called the s/m version of a media archaeology of cinema: science and medicine, surveillance and military, and so on.55 And it also speaks to what Ute Holl demonstrates as the laboratory origins of cinema: scientific sites of research of living beings such as in experimental psychology, measurement and information management, feedback and reaction tests, and other places where moving images played a role.56 Now, though, the operational aesthetic is focused on different sorts of scientific sites such as climate and environmental sciences and Earth observation but that same lineage is still articulated in relation to its own conditions of existence. In this case, it is about data and logistics.

Logistical Images

Geocinema’s depiction of indoor places like the Sri Racha ground station is full of stillness. Monitors next to monitors occupied by no one in particular, computer fans humming, lulling the already passive room to sleep; “Idle staff keep watch over labouring machines as they download petabytes of raw data from satellites and atmospheric sensors.”57 The scene is preceded by a more official note on the interoperability of data, then cut into scenes populated primarily by screens and monitors; in an alternative take that was not part of this installation version for the ZKM exhibition, the camera lingers even longer in the sleepy room of monitors humming, emphasizing a disconnect between labor that is visible, and labor that is distributed across automated systems and their maintenance. Operational aesthetics that engages with distributed systems of such invisual scales becomes a different thing when faced with proxy-hopping that tells a story of infrastructure. Here, proxy-hopping is meant to indicate this set of sites, infrastructures, interviews, people, papers, screens, images, and others that define the logistical operation that is DBAR—not that the film is meant to show what DBAR is. In my view, it is meant to show what operations it consists of, fragments of moments where calibration and synchronization, technicalities, and assumptions occur.

The mundane, even boring scenes of control rooms feature military operations rooms with experts plotting logistical movements of troops (enemy and friendly) or remote control interfaces from space flight to drone strikes, smart cities to vehicles on Mars. Some of this coalesces with the “ecology of operations”58 of radar as coined by Bernard Geoghegan, but it also stretches further than the specific screen and logistical technology of radar. This is one aspect of the twentieth century lingering on to twenty-first-century digital smart cities and their architectures of governance, even if the implication of one command center observing across a space—like panopticon—is as such quite mistaken.59 But the spatial scenes of operators and operating interfaces take us to Farockiesque themes of labor, knowledge, and control.

Observation is tightly regulated and full of standardized ways of behaving to avoid missing a thing and knowing what to report.60 Not much that is visible necessarily emerges at all. In a project conversation I had with Geocinema, they pointed to a historical document, written in the late nineteenth century and archived in the Zikawei Observatory in Shanghai, on instructions given to a weather observer: how the body must comport in order to observe and annotate the weather reliably. The historical document comes out as an anecdotal archival find, but it started to gain gravity in its own right as it was set against the other themes of observation in the advanced networks of data and labor. It formed part of a discussion about the operative chains of standardization and regulations and of calibration and interoperability as part of the logistical nature of observation, which is never solitary even when done alone—the paradox of operating as part of large-scale systems, centralized or not.

Sometimes operators of operational images turn out to be monitors themselves, on standby mode, performing labor that itself is invisible only due to its seemingly passive nature. Action-packed images—documentary photographs or fictional descriptions—are often different from the nature of labor in the operational aesthetic (think of the earlier-mentioned Ehmann and Farocki project “Labour in a Single Shot” too). While the images might have a similar quality as fiction—to synchronize multiple data points to feed forward such synthesis toward potential actions—the action itself is out of sight and distributed across a multitude of geographical regions.

Earlier I mentioned in passing the notion of the logistical image, but I want to return to it briefly as it reveals in more detail these points outlined above. Toscano and Kinkle’s use of the term that stems from work by Allan Sekula, Fredric Jameson, and others connects questions of political cartography to visual artistic practices that are less about contemplation and more about understanding the relations and abstractions of class, social reality, and technology: “The logistical image—whether the particular domain of logistics is military or commercial is of minor importance here—is to be considered primarily in its informational functionality, as an element in a concatenation of actions, or in a flow.”61 The notion hovers between such images, still or moving, that help to understand the vast sphere of logistical operations and are themselves conditioned, dependent on logistics. The notion can be best described in relation to cognitive mapping as per Fredric Jameson: What are the possibilities of mapping the scales and abstractions of capital in relation to lived worlds of experience? The two are of fundamentally different scales of reference and somehow implied in each other. What forms of aesthetics—and cartography—allow us to visualize this in ways that stay true to the reality of abstractions while understanding the political necessity of maneuvering in such a peculiar space, in such a peculiar definition and control and framing of bodies and territories?

As Toscano and Kinkle point out, cognitive mapping emerges from urbanist Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (from 1960) that addressed questions of urban “legibility” to its inhabitants. These points then develop into Jameson’s political question of what navigation means, and further to a discussion where the logistical image is both defined by logistics and tries to make sense of its own conditions of existence. To quote Toscano and Kinkle:

A consideration of the logistical image can thus open onto an aesthetic and political inquiry into the conjunctions between circulation and abstraction, the traffic in photographs and their abstraction from use, the role of images in logistical flows (military, productive, financial) and their modes of exchange and commensurability. Attention to the traffic in and of photographs, to their integration into logistical apparatuses of production and destruction provides a critical counterpoint to the lures and impasses of images and representations of “traffic,” of the circulation of goods and people.62

This perspective, resonating with the point about invisual operations as a particular kind of logistics (in and through platforms) also underlines the need for nonrepresentational accounts of images. Instead of merely reading the applicability of concepts to audiovisual practices, the inverse relation can be considered: How does Geocinema’s Framing Territories project and its installed versions—as one example among many that could be cited—help to understand the contemporary operational logistical image processes? It becomes useful to consider it as one take on the logistical image where the primacy of operations becomes a way to frame the image as nonrepresentational. Their images of invisual processes help to understand the platformatting of territories across a vast distributed space and a longer historical period of the emergence of remote sensing; especially when their moving images of DBAR infrastructure of tech and people, process and administration, are read in relation to their research narrative, the point about logistics and geopolitics becomes clear.

The earlier note about remote sensing and inventory of mineral signatures follows through into contemporary projects where the “visualizing of land and air” becomes a formative element in DBAR’s Digital Earth as a cascading set of logistical operations based on past data and future predictions. As Geocinema’s Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess elegantly outline, the commercial underpinnings of DBAR’s sensors and future-modeling data are a central part of the project:

Clients here range from insurance companies to real estate developers, and those constructing projects such as ports, railways, or economic corridors. With the underlying claim that further ecological certainty will be possible from the harvest and interpretation of datasets from atmospheric particles, “big data” becomes a mode of sociopolitical and economic ordering. These migrating modes of governance are trained along “mining of implicit and non-obvious patterns, rules, and knowledge behind big data” made possible with financial promises and more practically through to standardization of scientific protocols. . . . Translating these datasets into possibility curves, statistical future projections, and graduated maps, environmental risks are spoken into the vocabulary of GDP, political negotiations, and urban management.63

Such a logistical image—one where nothing visible necessarily happens but a massive concatenation of actions is implied—is at the back of the conjunction of governance, value, and invisuality. Hence the operational aesthetic—the logistical image and the aesthetics of cognitive mapping, the processual and its interplay of visibility, invisibility, invisuality—at play here refers not merely to a geographically distributed “this is how it works” sort of show and reveal but to the difficulty of revealing anything. Indeed, the notion of invisual is again central as such infrastructures are also platforms that can integrate multiple logistical operations and scales of activity and spew them forward. Furthermore, in this case, it is glued in a particular style of Digital Earth’s holistic rhetoric and relation to environmentalism such as natural hazard prediction and management alongside agricultural management, observation of environmental conditions, and so on. The discussion could also be expanded from DBAR to other platforms of environmental data management.

Geocinema responds to the assemblage of signal, data, and their architecture in two ways: both in relation to the space where those operations take place (indoors, outdoors, construction sites to board rooms) and in relation to which spaces are being framed and managed, both now and in and through predictions of a multitude of possible futures.64 Operational images are bureaucratic procedures, but they cascade on multiple material levels. Indeed, as operational aesthetics of invisual platforms and data, this form of a logistical image of infrastructures responds to Sean Cubitt’s neat summary: “The purpose of data is neither to know nor to picture but to manage and predict,”65 which itself leads to the temporal underpinning of the framing of territories as data. They are contemporary in the fundamental sense of the term,66 occupying multiple different temporalities where past patterns are aggregated into datasets for modeling futures and for prescribing what futures are perceived, captured, and reinforced. This is one way to understand contemporaneity (as per AI and machine learning); another one is the accompanying aesthetic sense of diagrams that visualize, and sometimes propose or even impose, futures. It can be a nightmare to be caught up in someone else’s future, even in their image of one.

Territorial Prediction

Forecasting plays a key role in the operational aesthetic presented in moving images by Geocinema. It occupies one part in outlining the multiple temporal levels of the aesthetic of images—both operational and framing them in Geocinema’s work. In the lineage of the visual and cinematic arts of logistics such as Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s film The Forgotten Space (2010) about planetary ocean transport logistics and capitalism,67 Geocinema’s work attempts to synchronize its own images to deal with infrastructure, logistics, and data in ways that are beyond representational. The sequences feature the process of images being born, resonating as cosmographical inscriptions like the multiple earths and globes, maintained by labor, actuated in a variety of paperwork and administration.

As explained above, forecasting features both as a conceptual figure in their research narrative pertaining to DBAR and as one platform of management and prediction. In Bazdyrieva and Suess’s words: “With Earth Observation data annexed to capital, techniques of measurement are inseparable from infrastructures of governance, where interpretations of how the earth is changing are feeding back into political modeling across the Belt and Road.”68 This feedback loop, a version of what I have in other contexts coined as “medianatures” to imply the recursive, cascading, complex, logistical continuum of media and nature,69 characterizes how particular material epistemologies of knowledge and management pick up on a prescriptive material force when they hit the ground.

In parallel to Geocinema’s project, artist-researcher Abelardo Gil-Fournier’s work on territorial prediction as image prediction speaks to a similar set of concerns with other means and artistic methods. In his approach, framing territories is approached through geographical datasets and a next-frame prediction technique that become both a tool of creating imaginary landscapes based on historical data and working with time-lapse imagery to investigate the invisual process of territorial forecasting and prediction. Here, the work is methodologically interesting in how it pairs up with Geocinema’s project and other recent works that engage with AI imaginaries of “fake” geographies.70 Even if coined “fake,” these fabricated image worlds are central to understanding real and speculative questions of territorial management: a particularly apt example of a recent art project in this vein is Asunder (2019/2020) by Tega Brain, Julian Oliver, and Bengt Sjölén. Asunder pulls satellite images and runs them through the Community Earth System Model (CESM)—a climate model—to simulate possible futures for selected regions from Silicon Valley to Dubai to arctic regions. Without being able to go into further detail about Asunder, it connects to our discussion here by focusing on creating images that have a particular relation to material transformation—even terraforming, of sorts. Responding to the discussion on platforms and invisuality in chapter 2, it also creates simulated scenarios through images that reformat territories. “The result is a fictional ‘environmental manager’ that proposes and simulates future alterations to the planet to keep it safely within planetary boundaries, with what are often completely unacceptable or absurd results.”71

Gil-Fournier’s “Surface Value” workshop72 at the transmediale festival in 2018 engaged with a closely resonating register of “absurd results” of automated systems. Surface Value engaged with the geographical, the geological, and the planetary surface from the perspective of aerial vision since the early twentieth century.73 He applied these approaches to contemporary art and design practice contexts with geographical datasets and technological images. Such images that extend from a representational status to operational functions and invisual applications as platforms become essential in the mediation of territories.

Gil-Fournier linked some theoretical discussions about operational images and surface forensics with a crash course on machine learning. He offered a tutorial on the basics of machine learning, from installing the necessary software and plugins to a discussion of the Google Earth Engine platform. While the workshop was focused on data and geographical formations, the method was to think through images: to investigate the time-lapse as one technique of creating sequences out of historical changes in a particular selected region and then feeding it forward to possible sequences that might follow. The task was to perceive how images can take up a life of their own in an AI version of Paul Klee’s note: a line (is a dot) that went for a walk. In practice, it meant treating large-scale territories and regions as sequences of images and image-like features where “change” is prescribed (in a rather blunt way) as a description of aggregated patterns across historical datasets, projecting future changes accordingly.

Some examples of the large-scale use of datasets mostly deal with different monitoring and research uses, focusing on forest- and water-coverage changes, agriculture and urbanization, and animal habitats. With available satellite data and relevant Application Program Interfaces (APIs), projects such as Global Forest Cover Change and Disease Surveillance and Risk Mapping are good examples of how data is used for prediction and where satellite imagery participates in the operational definition of territories.74 Gil-Fournier’s focus was to investigate these techniques as test cases concerning the media operations that can be mobilized to speculate with imaginary landscapes and reflect on those (image/data) tools and techniques of territorial prediction. In many ways, it was also an experiment with invisual image practices. They look like geographic territories, and yet they act like digital data operations.

In Gil-Fournier’s brief, the participants were tasked to address the planetary images as video images, as moving sequences of description and tracking of change across a geographical surface. As the workshop text explains:

Next Frame Prediction names the experimental set of Machine Learning techniques aimed to algorithmically produce the frame that follows a video stream of images. This approach to video-prediction makes use of convolutional neural networks that, relying on large databases of videos, are able to identify temporal patterns and behaviours within a sequence of frames. This analysis provides them with the capacity of generating future movement and, in consequence, of extending videos with plausible futures.

This project is conceived as a platform to research on the application of techniques of video prediction to sequences of historical satellite data. Starting from the available timelapses of archived aerial images, this platform aims to generate future visions of the surfaces of the Earth where, flattened as video sequences, terraforming activities such as deforestation or urbanisation might be scrutinised as visual feeders for predictive algorithms.75

Gil-Fournier uses next-frame prediction as an example technique for the production of ensuing fabricated images. This technique mobilizes video prediction and convolutional neural networks as forms of temporal pattern creation that starts to resemble simple abstract forms on-screen, which can (still) be connected to the operational sense of an image: they are meant to speak of plausible futures (urban growth, deforestation, or any identifiable surface-level change). As such, the link to Geocinema’s investigation of DBAR and Asunder’s imagined landscapes of an automated “environmental manager” are two points of resonance for such a practice, where next-frame prediction becomes de facto, a fabulated next territory prediction.

There is already a range of operations explicitly mentioned in the workshop description: aerial images and flattening (as one part of imperial power), terraforming (as an aspect of contemporary geoengineering but also including speculative proposals beyond geoengineering),76 predictive algorithms (as mediated governance), and then, of course, video too: a technique of temporal modulation but now also data visualization and simulation. Video becomes part of the discussion of artificial intelligence and data; terraforming opens up as visual activity. The assemblage concerns the operational loop between visuality, geological operations, urban developments, landscape changes, and what can be called the planetary-scale image factory.

Gil-Fournier also asked what sort of mechanisms create plausible futures that emerge from the historical set of data about geographical and geological patterns, urban and nonurban development, and the surfaces through which these are analyzed. However, before one rushes to answer, it is the question or definition of plausibility that is at stake. What form of criteria, institutional decision, or rationality decides on plausibility concerning something that by definition should be contingent? In this case, plausibility—itself by design a rather vague notion unless specified into an institutional work of standardization of expectations and parameters—can be seen, for example, as part of such futures that are useful for the futures market and various other value (capture) mechanisms that work with immaterial/speculative assets based on access to data and how to execute the processing of data in relevant ways. Besides its use for environmental monitoring, prediction stands at the center of various techniques of speculation that tie together contemporary institutional operations and modeling of futures. There is a long history of how speculation becomes a technique to pin down futures—firmative speculation, as coined by the “Uncertain Commons” collective.77 Speculation grows into a multifaceted discourse of potentials and imaginaries and their capacities to be enacted. Furthermore, the predictions based on machine learning readings have also become a service (even if this aspect works at a different scale than that of Gil-Fournier’s experimental small-scale workshop). In other words, the mechanism for this data-landscape prediction is already becoming fine-tuned as one aspect of input into the turbulent financial machine, the data-service industry, and their links to different operations of planning, construction, geopolitics, and data platforms.

Melinda Cooper argues that the sort of futures methodologies that we recognize from climate change and other modeling and simulation services share a temporal emphasis with finance: “the multiple future worlds attendant on alternative actions in the present.”78 Actions feed forward to a future, or a few futures, that feed(s) back. Such techniques map and measure Earth’s surface changes while participating in transforming those surfaces: the images are potential avenues to intervention—whether environmentally focused policy changes or capital investment that terraforms regions in its own image. Multiple economic, technological, and data-intensive feedback loops complexify this picture. Indeed, as Sean Cubitt noted in a different context, relevant here too: “The concept of environment is then an abstraction that nonetheless acts as if it were a reality.”79 In some form of an indirect response, such projects as Asunder and Gil-Fournier’s work(shop) show that environments are calculated as abstractions that then take place as reality in the operational chains of territorial planning, decision-making, and reformatting. As art and speculative design projects, they also investigate the invisual side of logistical images as one form of the operationalization of futures.

Operational Aesthetic: Take 2

If our first take on the operational aesthetic stemmed from a historical focus on questions of procedural framing circa mid- to late-nineteenth century (whether real or faked, a trick or actual workings of a mechanical process), what does the above discussion of contemporary media artistic methods imply? The operational aesthetic that spread across vast geographical distances in the wake of such remote communication technologies as the telegraph already implied a peculiar relation of contemporaneity as synchronization of bodies in relation to absent bodies: we are in touch across distances, and this implies a particular aesthetic of operations across distances too. But as Christina Vagt notes, “Computer simulations belong to a long history of action at a distance through models but also through concepts,” which opens up a slightly different lineage to consider “aesthetic procedures that create their own specific objects of study.”80

The vast planetary-scale infrastructures such as DBAR present even a more complex set of demands for an operational aesthetic that needs to engage with the logistical image in ways that map spatial and temporal distances while engaging with the data worlds of simulation and modeling. The reaching out to futures—the forecasting—is one case of techniques of speculation that is fully integrated into financial, environmental, and geopolitical mechanisms of working with (remote sensing) data. This operational aesthetic has also moved from the fairground (P. T. Barnum) to the battleground (Control and Command), if one follows a cue from Jimena Canales’s take on operational art, not only as it is used in military parlance but also with implications for contemporary art and visual culture, including Farocki and Paglen.81 Canales narrates the “not what but how” of the operational aesthetic through a scene from Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) that recounts the pros and cons of tele-technologies—namely the optical telegraph. Quoting Canales:

The Count of Monte Cristo, in one of his elaborate plots to accumulate wealth and sink his enemies, went to visit a telegraph—a technology that during the first half of the 19th century worked by transmitting light signals across long distances. “I have been told,” Monte Cristo told the humble operator, “that you do not always understand the signals you repeat.” “Certainly, sir; and that is what I like the best,” the operator responds. “Why do you like that best?” “Because then I have no responsibility; I am a machine and nothing else.” Upon hearing those words, Monte Cristo recognized a moment of opportunity and seized it, bribing the operator into repeating signals that he did not understand. The signals, announcing that King Don Carlos, who had been imprisoned in France, escaped from Bourges and returned to Spain, caused Monte Cristo’s enemies, holders of Spanish bonds, to lose a million francs. Reflecting on his success, he exclaimed: “I have just made a discovery for 25,000 francs, for which I would have paid a 100,000.”82

The operational aesthetic turns to cunning ends as a manual of manipulation of knowledge by means of plots and tricks. Money can be gained, but also other things. The plot defines one form of a trick that features as a central design element in unfolding the logic—even logistics—of technological operations.83 Canales’s discussion focuses on the links between Trevor Paglen’s photographic art as a version of the logistical image—for example, the work on CIA rendering flights as images show logistics in operation, organizing space, knowledge, secrets through an infrastructure of people and planes and schedules. She also links this work with a broader discussion of operational art as it relates to a military discourse of Operations Other Than War, somewhere between tactics and strategy. In contemporary technical terms, that sphere is one of the technical operations taking the place of subjective agency, evaluation, and decision-making, bringing operational art into an aesthetics of images that have the capacity to concatenate actions. It could also be seen as part of the already mentioned history of Operations Research as it defined the mobilization of specialist scientific analysis and teamwork of experts from military operations to society at large: problem-focused observation and analysis that was to aid executive decision-making in firms and organizations. This becomes integrated into different forms of scientific management during the Cold War period, and it becomes one aspect of “Think Tank Aesthetics” from the Ops Room to the modernist art of “pattern recognition,”84 radically expanding the regime of the image too (as argued earlier in this book). Beyond modern art and architecture but not disconnected from it, Operations Other Than War is the sphere where many operational images are said to take place and where art has a double meaning, both of military craft and artistic practice. Pattern recognition persists as an art of detection, observation, and image analysis beyond the gallery or the studio.

As a version of the how, not what that relates to the operational sphere framing of territories as aesthetics/art, it is visible on two interconnected layers: operations that imply the centrality of images—of technical and even automated images—as one center of agency; and then, the contemporary media art methods that bring together cinema, video, photography, and digital techniques that make sense of such logistical procedures and their mass impact on territories. In outlining this argument, I want to add that this chapter’s discussion is not a full-fledged definition of art or the aesthetics of operational images. The survey of artworks and practices is not meant to be complete. But the chapter has shown the various strands of concern that relate to questions of process and image, spatial framing and infrastructures of data, labor with data, and how this labor engages in the logistics of images.

Next, I continue this discussion through urban traffic, where operational images continue their navigation through the city, mapping the urban realm (and beyond) as a dynamic sphere of light—a different site of invisual culture than what is implied in traditional photographic terms. Some of the themes in this chapter carry on with a discussion of technologies of lidar and other practices of light that feature another take on the nonrepresentational operations of images. The city takes center stage as it is driven through by autonomous vehicles and is defined by invisual images: sometimes seen through interfaces and sometimes automating the traffic of cars, data, and people.