See Andersen and Pold, Metainterface.
Quoted from the Abandon Normal Devices festival website (2016), https://www.andfestival.org.uk/city-cant-see/. Where the City Can’t See was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices, St Helens Heart of Glass and University of Salford Art Collection.
A trailer of the film is available at https://vimeo.com/188626212.
Cf. Andrejevic, Automated Media, 94–112.
David Meyer, “How Cloud Computing Contributes to Autonomous Driving—A Thought Experiment,” MS&E 239 (blog), July 11, 2018, https://mse238blog.stanford.edu/2018/07/davidmyr/how-cloud-computing-contributes-to-autonomous-driving-a-thought-experiment/.
Mark Hansen, Feed Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Erich Hörl, “The Environmentalitarian Situation: Reflections on the Becoming-Environmental of Thinking, Power, and Capital,” Cultural Politics 14, no. 2(2018): 153–73; Florian Sprenger, Epistemologien des Umgebens: Zur Geschichte, Ökologie und Biopolitik künstlicher environments (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019); Gabrys, Program Earth.
Zylinska, Posthuman Photography.
Volker Pantenburg, “Manual: Harun Farocki’s Instructional Work,” in Against What? Against Whom? ed. Anthe Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (Cologne: Walther König, 2009), 98, 93–100.
Bratton, “City Wears Us.”
See Gabrys, Program Earth, 43.
As Otto von Gruber put it in the 1930s, “The problem of automatic plotting instruments concerns the representation on a map of an object shown on photograms, without the need for carrying out computations point by point or for graphical constructions.” Von Gruber, Photogrammetry: Collected Lectures and Essays (London: Chapman & Hall, 1932), 276.
Sprenger, Epistemologien des Umgebens.
Parikka, Insect Media.
On navigation, see Doreen Mende, “The Navigation Principle: Slow Image,” e-flux lectures, November 29, 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/live/165096/e-flux-lectures-doreen-mende-the-navigation-principle-slow-image/.
Following this navigational focus, it’s clear how the operational image relates to the instrumental image as in Allan Sekula’s use of the term: these sorts of images operate in automated systems and as part of large-scale infrastructural technologies, where such images include those used in aerial imaging, military systems, automated navigation, or robotic object recognition guided movement (an example being the factory assembly reliance on automatism and action).
Andersen and Pold, Metainterface; Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015): 220–26.
Mattern, A City Is Not a Computer.
See Käll, Posthuman Property and Law; Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-pandemic World (London: Verso, 2021), 51–59.
Conclusion
Thank you to Robert Pietrusko for clarification and discussions about the process of construction of the black hole image. Pietrusko was part of the team that participated in the film Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know (2020), directed by Peter Galison, that features the work of the Event Horizon Telescope team project. Any possible misunderstandings in the following elaboration are to be credited to me.
Peter Galison, “How Do You Photograph a Black Hole?” MoMA, May 17, 2021, moma.org/magazine/articles/563.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
ESO, “First Image of a Black Hole,” April 10, 2019, https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1907a/.
Farocki had referred to the phantom image and the phantom shot as a persistent feature of cinema and animation: a perspective impossible for a human to occupy, like in the early cinema of the 1920s of a “camera that had been hung under a train,” or then in the age of intelligent weaponry, “the film that takes up the perspective of the bomb,” or the impossible physical worlds conjured in animation, including computer images. Farocki, “Phantom Images,” Public 29 (2004): 13.
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, “A Method to Image Black Holes,” June 6, 2016, https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/method-image-black-holes; Katherine L. Bouman, Michael D. Johnson, Daniel Zoran, Vincent L. Fish, Sheperd S. Doeleman, and William T. Freeman, “Computational Imaging for VLBI Image Reconstruction,” Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2016, 913–22, https://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2016/html/Bouman_Computational_Imaging_for_CVPR_2016_paper.html.
Galison, “Photograph a Black Hole?”
Benjamin Bratton, The Terraforming (Moscow: Strelka, 2019); Orit Halpern, “Planetary Intelligence,” in The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies, ed. Jonathan Roberge and Michael Castelle (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 227–56.
Halpern, “Planetary Intelligence,” 232.
See Janet Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 215–37.
On calibration, cleaning, and disciplining of images, see Vertesi, 53–103.
On the nonexistence of the digital image, see, for example, Wolfgang Hagen, “Es gibt kein ‘digitales Bild’: Eine medienepistemologische Anmerkung,” Archiv für Mediengeschichte 2 (2002): 103–12; Claus Pias, “Das digitale Bild gibt es nicht: Über das (nicht-)Wissen der Bilder und die informatische Illusion,” Zeitenblicke 2, no. 1 (2003), https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/4082. See also Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021) as well as Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal’s ongoing work on rendering, which already moves the question from primacy of ontology to operations. On questions of digital images, I thus also want to point to a quote by Sean Cubitt that resonates with the centrality of “operation” in the media theory of Wolfgang Ernst: “It is not that digital images ‘don’t exist’ when they are not being run by software: films and TV shows in the can could be said not to exist by the same token, as could a photograph kept in a drawer or a painting secreted away in a private cabinet. Rather, each rendering of an image to a display or printer requires a unique run of the code. Similar to running an otherwise inert filmstrip through a projector, running code is an action encouraging a potential medium to become itself. In cinema the sense of event, and in domestic television viewing the familiarity and comfort of real-time flow, give this becoming a role in consumption. The on-demand, packet-switched Internet refers us to run time, the time during which software executes the instructions in the code. Even more than live broadcasts, this brings us to real time, even though, in every instance, code and software have to be written in advance of their run.” Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Print to Pixel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 243.
In addition to existing scholarship on scientific photography, for recent work on the history and philosophy of photography articulated between light, materiality, and measurement, see the special issue Light Sensitive Material starting from the introduction. Michelle Henning and Junko Theresa Mikuriya, “Light Sensitive Material: An Introduction,” Photographies, 14, no. 3 (2021): 381–94. See also Tomáš Dvořák & Jussi Parikka, “Measuring Photographs,” Photographies 14, no. 3 (2021): 443–57.
Quoted in Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 259.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Making the World Superfluous: An Interview with Harun Farocki,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 184.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2005), 13–25.
Harun Farocki, “Controlling Observation,” trans. Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim, in Elsaesser, Harun Farocki, 294. On recent work on the invisual operations of carceral capitalism, see Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018).
Thomas Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist,” in Elsaesser, Harun Farocki, 24.
Christa Blümlinger, “Slowly Forming a Thought While Working on Images” in Elsaesser, Harun Farocki, 168.
Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki,” 19. See also Nora Alter, “Two or Three Things I Know About Harun Farocki,” October 151 (Winter 2015): 151–58.