Capturing Light

Around 1889, Harvard College expanded its influence far outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. Having joined the College Observatory (first as a student, later as professor of astronomy), Solon Irving Bailey was sent much farther south, to Arequipa in Peru, to establish a new field station. This operation was to switch the hemisphere and find a spot elevated enough for ideal observation of the light traveling from distant celestial objects. Astronomic photography had a long history already by the 1890s, but this need for a new observatory emphasized the additional demand for what we would now call scientific infrastructure. After New Year’s Day in 1889, a boat trip from San Francisco took Bailey and his family to their destination identified earlier, “attracted by reports of the clear sky and slight rainfall on the high plateau of Peru, where also the whole southern sky is visible.”1 While the rhetorical emphasis on the clean, crisp observation place puts all of the weather conditions easily outside of history and into the physical sphere important for astronomy as a science of observation of laws (out there) and not things (here), during the difficult trip to find the perfect spot, Bailey observed and (in passing) noted the colonial legacy of the region: “I should place the population of the valley near Chosica in the days of the Incas at six thousand. Today there are perhaps five hundred. This well illustrates how Peru has changed since she fell into the hands of the Spanish conquerors.”2 Such awareness in his thoughts and diary did not, however, prevent the expedition from (re)naming the place they came to in a softer but still imperial manner: Mount Harvard. The eponymous name was entirely in tune with the aims of Edward Pickering, the long-standing and renowned director of the Harvard College Observatory, to establish posts in the north and the south, “so the entire sky would be available for Harvard’s research.”3

Besides a number of adventurous anecdotes from that trip, the relation with a media technological context is especially interesting. Two themes concerning light intersected during the years Bailey spent in Peru, both of which were essential to the scientific work, while producing an aesthetic quality to the geographical placement. The sunlit high-altitude plains—causing occasional mountain sickness for the party looking for a suitable observation spot—provided ideal landscapes while the photometric (measurement of the brightness of light) and photographic techniques provided technologies for the capture of slowly shifting objects in the night sky. Not that such exact spots of observation were known in advance; some of Bailey’s memoirs from the trip read as a persistent search for locations where measurements can be made, leading him to echo earlier advice about the exploratory spirit: “Of the clearness and steadiness of the atmosphere in these different places, there is no certain knowledge, and your only way is to investigate it for yourselves.”4 The investigation aimed to take pictures to send back to the college in Cambridge. Besides telescopes, the comparative analysis of photographic evidence became a key technique that needed a reliable data supply. It was, in some way, a case of what Michelle Henning has called “the unfettered image”: fixed as image, but migratory and journeying as an object.5 Here, what migrated were the comparative observations of the vast space outside the planetary sphere.

As per the Harvard Observatory aim, to be able to observe the night sky from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres gave a particular advantage to astronomers. Moreover, with the help of the photographic media, Southern data was relatively easily transported back to Cambridge for comparative, computational analysis. In Pickering’s words, “For many purposes the photographs take the place of the stars themselves, and discoveries are verified and errors corrected by daylight with a magnifying glass instead of at night with a telescope.”6

Bailey’s field station’s photographs were sent north. This part of the logistical story has become more well-known in recent years, particularly the (female) computer pioneers of data analysis and astronomy, including Annie Jump Cannon and her work on star classifications7 and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, among others. Leavitt, later awarded the title “Curator of Astronomical Photographs” (held earlier by Williamina Fleming), left lasting contributions to the field (even if here the focus is only on parts that relate to the media technological operations that serve as infrastructure and instruments of astronomy as a science). Leavitt’s research impacted astronomy by demonstrating important traits about the periodicity of brightness, an essential element in measuring distances across the vastness of outer space. In addition, the Peruvian night sky had been photographed and recorded on glass plates that Leavitt stacked on top of each other for comparative data analysis and to produce insights into the shifts of moving stars, which in our case illuminates a key theme: early in its first official century, photography was already a measurement device that not only took pictures of people and things but offered a way to analyze the world, including the extraterrestrial.

As such, the point about technical images and measurement has already been articulated; for example, Kelley Wilder gives a good overview of some of the practices of astronomical imaging before and after the Harvard period in question and opens up important points more generally too. Besides photographs where “the ability to measure appears to be a useful but unintended byproduct,”8 there were various intentional practices, mostly scientific, where this cultural technique was central. In astronomy, this included the Venus transit plates of 1874 and institutionalized work such as Carte de Ciel of the 1880s, “one of the most influential photographic observation projects in astronomy.”9 Beyond astronomy, Raman spectroscopy and photogrammetry were “methods that bent photographic observation to mathematization,”10 with surveying as a technique that was, as Wilder outlines, “heavily dependent on the idea of measurable photographs.”11 Here, the commentary on measurement serves to illuminate the expanded scope of operational images to be followed throughout this book.

In aptly contrasting ways, the title of Leavitt’s 1908 paper, “1777 Variables in the Magellanic Clouds,” rings poetic, while the opening sentence nails the argument about images as infrastructures of analysis and comparison in a pithy, informative fashion: “In the spring of 1904, a comparison of two photographs of the Small Magellanic Cloud, taken with the 24-inch Bruce Telescope, led to the discovery of a number of faint variable stars.”12 Where Bailey had engaged with the landscapes of Peru, its altitudes and terrains, the shipment to Cambridge provided the other side of this landscape; in Leavitt’s reading, the Magellanic Clouds—or, more precisely, their photographic recording—provided a dynamic, periodic landscape of light to be interpreted. Leavitt writes about light that she has been observing on those records: “The variables appear to fall into three or four distinct groups. The majority of the light curves have a striking resemblance, in form, to those of cluster variables. As a rule, they are faint during the greater part of the time, the maxima being very brief, while the increase of light usually does not occupy more than one-sixth to one-tenth of the entire period.”13 Surely, Leavitt and others would have cursed Tesla’s Spacelink satellite program that hinders the subtle balance and periodicity of the sky with its mass flooding of the orbit. However, around the 1890s and 1900s, the night sky was still stable and observable through the gridded transparency of the glass plates that opened up possibilities of comparative analysis.

While the sky had been pictured, read, observed, interpreted, and calculated for millennia, as John Durham Peters argues in his media theoretical insight to astronomical star-gazing, the scientific analysis of movement and light became particularly interesting toward the fin de siècle.14 The employment of both media of visual technologies (photography and spectral analysis) and the possibilities to harness the planet’s spherical shape—Northern and Southern Hemispheres into a binocular view of sorts—as part of the astronomic observation unit from Peru to Massachusetts provided the backbone for broader infrastructures of knowledge. The intersections of media and the sciences (in this case, astronomy) have impacted the transformation of photography as it became “digital” and how it has been part of data analysis and planetary infrastructure. And, as will be argued in chapter 3, even the shape of the planet measured in geodesic triangulation can be considered part of the story of the extended planetary image.

As already mentioned, this link to scientific uses of photography, including in astronomy, should not be particularly surprising considering that perhaps the most famous words in the early history of photography (or, more specifically, the daguerreotype) were given by an astronomer, François Arago, in his 1839 address. This talk was given to convince the French Academies of Art and Science about the benefits of the new technique, which was why the talk aimed to make sure it was seen as a scientific one and therefore included specific attention paid to the various uses of measurement: beyond people or things, landscapes or scenes, this was a medium to measure photometrically the brightness of transmitted light and thus also provide an insight into what lies beyond this particular planet and how that can be easily recorded on a plate. Thus, the instrument became a central part of an experimental apparatus that unfolded a whole visualization process in developing an image.15

As pointed out by Wilder, the nineteenth-century history of photography was filled with astronomical works and interests: William de Wivelselie Abney, E. E. Barnard, William Crookes, L. J. M. Daguerre, John Draper, Paul and Prosper Henry, Jules Janssen, Hermann Krone, Adolphe Neyt, Warren de la Rue, Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, and John Adams Whipple are among a list of practitioners relevant to both sides of the technical expertise. Wilder argues that “much of their work revolved around adapting emulsions and photographic instruments to astronomical observation, and they produced everything from spectra of starlight, to photometric readings, to iconic images of the heavens.”16 While much of the focus in earlier research has been on the apparatuses and their relation to both histories of technology and, in some cases, scientific discourses of validity and reliability,17 adding an emphasis on Leavitt opens a particularly interesting avenue of consideration not only for the history of photography but also for the theoretical topic at hand, operational images. Through Leavitt and the work of the numerous female scientists at the observatory,18 questions of photographic plates as instrumental infrastructures for operations of measure become underlined.

However, discussing Leavitt gives us insight into the work of remote sensing and images that become operationalized for data analysis, in addition to dispelling the often overly male-inventor and scientist-focused narratives (including those concerning operational images). This applies to many of the other contributions too: the photographic plate collection becomes the scaffolding for advanced work in spectral classification and cataloging (Annie Jump Cannon) and remote sensing (calculation of “chemical composition of stars”19 in Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s work), alongside the Leavitt Law as an example of operational images, too: “a tool to calculate distance in space with the use of Cepheid variable fluctuations.”20 Leavitt’s and others’ contribution thus is not so much on photography as a particular technology or genre of images but as the basis for an analysis of data and an extraction of features that become significant for questions of remote sensing. Such work becomes part of the lineage of operational images that are less interesting as images on their own but rather as part of a broader infrastructure of skills, labor, techniques, and technologies, and how institutions21 assemble images for their particular needs and uses.

Less interesting as pictures, even if armed with a poetic allusion of deep space, but useful for the trained scientific eye, such photographs become an infrastructure for analysis. Leavitt’s comparative analysis identifies light and subsequently tables the sources of light as varieties of data points in the Magellanic Clouds. Besides its straightforward operational use in astronomy, it leads to interesting considerations concerning the role of the image. Far from the usual focus of art history, such images are one element in the extended role played by computation and data. And not digital in the sense we refer to them as now, but as part of the institutional uses where photographic images are essential in being able to scale and inscribe the distant movement into the flat (paper and glass) world of pictures and observation tables.22 In short, the photographic functions primarily as detection instead of depiction; subsequently, detections are also turned into calculations. Photography—or the photographic—condenses massive scales of measurement of light.23 As such, the intersection of earth, sky, light, shadow, and astronomy, and images through which to calculate are among the contrasting currents that define our interest in the actions of images.

Leavitt and her fellow computers are part of astronomy as well as an alternative genealogy of visual practice that finds a resonating counterpoint in more recent times: infrastructures of visuality, images tabulated as data, data that becomes a diagram, and image models that enable ideas of remote sensing (spectra and periodicity of light as signals of distance, material composition, movement) to emerge as a key paradigm of visual—and invisual—culture. Bailey’s travels to the Southern Hemisphere that ended up in Arequipa to manage the Harvard field station can be named as a starting point for this story about the long chain of operations of images ending up as diagrams, graphs, and tables. This is not to say that diagrams weren’t already part of the Enlightenment period repertoire of managing data and images: as Bender and Marrinan note, the practices of diagrams in the modern sense emerged in the pages of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia of the late eighteenth century, “A diagram is a proliferation of manifestly selective packets of dissimilar data correlated in an explicitly process-oriented array that has some of the attributes of a representation but is situated in the world like an object.”24 Here, in their words, image-diagrams are more Pollock than Rembrandt, which in our case could be reconfigured to: more like the scattered light beams of stars in the night sky (Pollock) than pictorial, representational images (Rembrandt). Although, as becomes obvious later in the book, the two are not always so separated.

Science studies likely have a lot to say about this combination of assemblages of diagrams and their material contexts, as instruments facilitating the collecting of data but also as the transforming, translating, and rather literally transporting of these epistemological observations from the field to the laboratory. Henning’s notion of the “unfettered image”—already mentioned earlier—is discussed in the analysis of scientific images and data too. Bruno Latour’s rather influential take on techniques of soil sampling in the Amazon exemplifies this through the specialist instrument of the pedocomparator: “The pedocomparator has made the forest-savanna transition into a laboratory phenomenon almost as two-dimensional as a diagram, as readily observed as a map, as easily reshuffled as a pack of cards, as simply transported as a suitcase.”25

This book is not concerned with such instruments but instead with the variety of objects and techniques that briefly featured in the ministory of astronomy and photographs. Nonetheless, a soil scientist’s instrument is a useful parallel for us because the methodological transformation will be recounted in different ways and alternating variations throughout this book: the photograph is only one stop in the long chain of routes and operations of images, and the variety of techniques are interlinked from instruments to diagrams, and from three-dimensional materials or landscapes to flattened images, diagrams, and the formalized registers of analysis. One can run images through similar filters as is evident in the STS type approach offered by Latour. To continue for a short while with the argument mediating abstractions and objects: “[the pedocomparator] is lighter than the forest, yet heavier than the paper; it is less corruptible than the vibrant earth, but more corruptible than geometry; it is more mobile than the savanna, but less mobile than the diagram that I could send by phone if Boa Vista had a fax machine.”26 Importantly, diagrams enter the picture, too:

With the diagram, in contrast, the forest-savanna transition becomes paper, assimilable by every article in the world, and transportable to every text. The geometric form of the diagram renders it compatible with all the geometric transformations that have ever been recorded since centers of calculation have existed. What we lose in matter through successive reductions of the soil, we regain a hundredfold in the branching off to other forms that such reductions—written, calculated, and archival—make possible.27

The useful takeaway here is that we should look at the operative transformations of the image as it pertains to the multiple materials and their abstractions, and abstractions coming back to transform the materials. What STS does with mapping the route of material objects of science, we can try to do with images as they work in institutions. This will be a key part of what this book establishes as the operational in the operational image.

In our example of the astronomical something shifted when light was observed, recorded, and sent across a geographical distance—perhaps a lot of things transformed from the planes of observation and appreciation of high-altitude air and clear skies to the photographic exposure and the plates that became one chain along the way before Leavitt, Cannon, and others interpret and synthesize (compute) these into the pithy but important results that ensued (see Figure 2): “A straight line can readily be drawn among each of the two series of points corresponding to maxima and minima, thus showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the variables and their periods. The logarithm of the period increases by about 0.48 for each increase of one magnitude in brightness.”28

Where is the image here in this description, in such tables, curves, and diagrams? On the photographic plates or their analysis, the moments of exposure in the Peruvian landscapes, in the logistics of transporting those images to Cambridge, in the trained analysis of composite photographs, or somewhere else along the way of transforming light? Or, perhaps, the notion of operational ties together a multitude of such material events, sites, and their abstractions and assembles them into a useful notion of the operational image that, as a term, itself is invented much later and for a different purpose, but might itself become useful to speak of infrastructure, logistics, and images that transform from visual to invisual, from ways of seeing to ways of calculating.

The Operational Image

This book opened with the excursion into the Peruvian light that turned into the Harvard-based astronomy of calculation, comparison, analysis, the write-up of scientific papers, and some pictures that got published. However, most of the thousands and thousands of technical images were never seen but by few pairs of eyes. But the book itself, as should be obvious by now, is on operational images.29 The term by the renowned German filmmaker, artist, and writer Harun Farocki (1944–2014) appeared in the early 2000s in his video installation trilogy Eye/Machine I-III (2001–3) that investigates autonomous weapon systems, machine vision in industrial and other applications, and the broader move from representations to the primacy of operations. Farocki’s film installation series presents this switch as a particular kind of an image that emerges in those institutional practices although also articulating it through the various histories and spaces that condition both the emergence of such images and their industrial base: these include military test facilities, archives, laboratories, and factories.

The institutional line of references is familiar in many of Farocki’s films that have investigated how contemporary images are intimately tied with the modern forms of industrial production, detaching from a history of images only as visual culture, to histories of chemistry, violence, labor, exploitation, and data. Already in Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), Farocki mapped a similar terrain of investigations of how to read landscapes, aerial imagery, targeting systems, and also other forms of modeling, simulation, and aesthetic techniques as they operate in the world in the fundamentally material sense. The film will also be featured later in this book—even if my aim is not to offer an analysis of Farocki or his works as such.30

Nonetheless, the work with images about images sets a scene and opens up an artistic, epistemic, and research-focused agenda. Eye/Machine III (2003) is one such example where operational images are articulated across a set of cases: factory scenes of data and measurement to infrared aircraft detection systems, laser scanning of built structures, and engineering to robotic navigation systems that sense the space around them. Images produced in those situations are drawn from machine-vision systems of perception, embodied and embedded in autonomous or remote systems, and working through an artificial environmental relation where the image is a crucial part of movement and guidance.31 Operational images are, in Farocki’s words, “pictures that are part of an operation,”32 implying the primacy of action and function instead of a picture to be seen and interpreted for meanings. Perception is tightly coupled with action, immediate or delayed. This coupling systematically operationalizes terrains and targets. Hence guidance systems, movement, tracking, measurement, and precision are some of the terms that take precedence in such images that are often, across a visual history, bluntly put, “inconsequential.”33 It is also a condensation of an aesthetic program that relates to what images are seen, which ones are archived, and which of the multitude of images are merely used and erased:

Images that appear so inconsequential that they are not stored—the tapes are erased and are used again. Generally the images are stored and archived only in exceptional cases, but exceptional cases one is sure to encounter. Such images challenge the artist who is interested in a meaning that is not authorial and intentional, an artist interested in a sort of beauty that is not calculated. The US military command has surpassed us all in the art of showing something that comes close to the “unconscious visible.”34

The operational aesthetic returns in chapter 3, but before that, a word or two about where we are heading: while military contexts of machine vision have taken most of the space of commentary and attention when it comes to Farocki’s notion and its articulation in moving images and photography, it is clear that the breadth of examples tells a larger story than merely about genealogies of military vision systems. This is not to dismiss such a key trait. Farocki’s examples from a 1942 instructional film showing the operations of a V1 guided missile to the 1990s military systems that became a key topic for art and media theory from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio are persistently apt in the context of contemporary drone warfare and in the media archaeology of military vision.35 Even Farocki himself reads “the US military command” as part of a new aesthetic operationality of visibility.

Furthermore, this concerns not only perception and sensing that are turned into images but also operations. The history of the centrality of “operations” can be traced to Operational (or Operations) Research (OR) in the U.S. and British military since the 1930s and especially in the war years of the 1940s: quantifiable analysis of military operations for purposes of optimization, something that then developed into the Cold War continuation of “speculative fabrications of systems analysis”36 such as the RAND corporation in the United States. These are institutional-level “machine learning systems” that aim to formalize, train, and model based on available quantitative data. Learning itself becomes a formalized operation.

For OR pioneers and controversial practitioners such as Herman Kahn,

the successes of operations research in World War II proved the greater effectiveness of mathematics over time-honored tactics. Systems analysis was unquestionably superior, in his view, despite the common belief that “experience” has been a better guide than “theory” in this kind of work.37

Of course, an opposition of theory vs. experience was a bit of a simplification considering how the pioneer of Operational Research Patrick Blackett (later Baron Blackett, and later also featured in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow) had defined the pillars of OR as based on “observation, experiment and reasoning.”38 A broader understanding of the scientific method had been rolled out and integrated into how space, strategy, tactics (including the evaluation of success of tactics), and logistics were to unfold based on data.

Nonetheless, to keep with Kahn’s exaggeration in spirit and style, perhaps OR did more for “theory” than French 1960s structuralism and poststructuralism. Perhaps not, and it is definitely not the sort of theory we usually practice or want to practice in the humanities, but one point was made clear: experience is secondary, formalizable design and planning are primary. To program the battlefield, you program people first, while later on you have programmable machines such as the ones that populate examples of operational images as we know them now. Besides naming them as computers, they are more specifically, for example, platforms, as will be argued in chapter 2.

To deal with large-scale systems, logistics, and abstractions, one had to fine-tune a different mindset: “In decisions regarding weapons systems development such as choosing between long-range bombers with big fuel tanks or short-range bombers with refueling capacities, ‘no one can . . . answer by instinct, by feeling his pulse, by drawing on experience,’” as RAND economist Charlie Hitch put it.39 In short, the centrality of complex calculations (e.g., logistics), the massive amount of data to be processed, decisions to be taken, and the multiple scales of abstraction were not commensurable with the cognitive capacities of humans in the traditional sense of even trained officers. The necessity to be able to rationalize, theorize, model, and potentially automate decision-making in the context of complexity persisted from the war to the postwar period—for example, in management theory, making it a part of systems thinking where any decision was part of a meshwork of other decisions, by other actors, in a recursive loop.40 Cultural techniques of quantification connected to modelling was one particular route offered in this history of what “operations” came to mean on and off the battlefield.

Numbers count landscapes and what moves through them; they count routes and their optimal relations; they count possibilities and potentials; and numbers are the backbone for both images and industrialization. Data is not infallible and simply “objective,” as critical data studies have shown over and again,41 but it can be effective whether it is correct or not. Rolling out data-driven decisions, systems, and operations is also an intervention in landscapes, social relations, values (financial and other), and more. While leaving a longer discussion of logistics and operational images for later, it shows already much of the relevant context that elaborates the implicit conditions of emergence of what Farocki coins in his terms and in his audiovisual work by way of the “soft montage”42 of archive and inconsequential images. One peculiar context of such images would then be the over 70-year history of military-driven operations research and subsequent management theory and some 150-year history of photographic-driven data analysis. In some ways, this all condenses into “an industrialisation of vision”43—or even “industrialisation of thought,”44 as Farocki himself coined his interest in cinema and perception, directly echoing Virilio’s work on the “veritable market in synthetic perception.”45 The contemporary versions of that coinage relate to questions of artificial intelligence, machine vision, but also the genealogy of the concept of operations as it pertains to images, institutions, spaces, and nonhuman visuality. AI will be featured particularly in chapter 2.

The industrialization of vision has been often coined as part of the industrialization of destruction, a theme that connects Farocki to the 1980s (and later) theorization of war and visuality.46 Technical processes of abstraction, images that are primarily for targeting and destruction feature as part of a genealogy of rationalized violence that human bodies are subjected to. As such, Farocki’s scene for operational images could be seen as a crystallization of much critical theory, thematically visible in the focus on the Holocaust, the Vietnam War (napalm in Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire, 1969), the Gulf War, and the prison-surveillance-capitalist complex that features in many of his works.47 But this book argues that there needs to be nuance in how this concept of the operational image is read and used, avoiding the temptation of packing all sorts of abstractions—and abstract images of technical and calculational use—into one camp of a kind of Enlightenment gone awry, a stream of violence and extraction that is merely about military power in the restricted sense of warfare. This is not to ignore the operational violence of capitalism (chapter 1 and throughout) or the colonial uses and functions of measurement and their neocolonial forms (chapters 3 and 4); but to take a position against abstraction on principle would be a mistake, leading us to insufficiently nuanced readings about technical images. We have plenty of those already, and in the context of environmental imaging, remote sensing, AI and platform culture, and many other crucial topics, we cannot anymore afford to miss the more detailed high-res insights.

In other words, one additional step proposed in this book includes a shift from military operations to the other, closely aligned use of force that defines the current landscape of operations: “Operations Other Than War.” This is not a nonmilitary form of power, but one that builds on particular logistical capacities and systemic, technological potentials of power primed for the contemporary planetary situation, from environmental issues to humanitarian assistance to enforcement of exclusion zones to handling pandemics. In some ways it relates to the twentieth-century lineage of operations research, but it also becomes a way to tap into the contemporary moment of logistical wiring of bodies and territories. In Rosi Braidotti and Matthew Fuller’s words, the “conflict is played out, triggered, and modulated through means that include finance, smuggling, culture, drugs, media and fabrication, technologies, resources, psychological operations, networks, international law, ecologies, economic aid, and urban terror. War becomes postdisciplinary, multiscalar, creative, and highly mediatic and technological, deploying specialized multiskilled teams and techniques.”48 In other words, war and conflict become part of the extended repertoire of media techniques of confusion, doubt, and misinformation, often paired with the deployment of “ruses, proxies, ambiguous agency, hyperbole, the operationalization of ‘mistakes’ and unattributable forces.”49 Hence, we can ask, What format of operational images speak to this state of war and violence?

We might not (always) be at war, but we are (always) mobilized and operationalized. This could also be referred to as the perceptual and operational fine-tuning of the “nonbattle,” a term first introduced by Virilio and developed by Brian Massumi. Operations and actions are embedded in a broader field of intensities and potentials, possibilities, and the modeling of futures. “In the nonbattle, the relation between action and waiting has been inverted. Waiting no longer stretches between actions. Action breaks into waiting.”50 The operational is nested here in the significance of knowing how soft power can work effectively. Massumi continues: “Soft power is how you act militarily in waiting, when you are not yet tangibly acting. . . . In the condition of nonbattle, when you have nothing on which to act tangibly, there is still one thing you can do: act on that condition. Act to change the conditions in which you wait.”51

Operations that act on the conditions of existence and conditions of further operations sound like a version of Virilio that Massumi restages and like a proposal that could come from the direction of Foucault’s analysis of architectures and diagrams. Diagrams feature in this book as one reference; one could also consider images as tableaux of information52 (in reference to Gilles Deleuze’s terms) that cut across traditional scales of experience, space, and meaning, and rearrange those like the abstract images rearrange the current technological cities (see chapter 5 for a discussion of the urban technologies of light and data). Indeed, the Farocki in question here is somewhat less the critic of Enlightenment reason (in the lineage of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) than a media archaeologist mapping what is visible, what is sayable, and importantly, what is countable. This line of arguments pulls Farocki from a thematic analysis of modern rational images to a method of mapping archaeologies and genealogies of images as they become working material for critical thought. This material, though, is thoroughly conditioned by a recursive loop between industrial production and images in and out of war. Raymond Bellour calls this, rather aptly with a Foucault-inspired undertone, the photo-diagram—another phrasing of the methodological positions at play in operational images. Bellour’s note on Farocki’s material is fruitful for our purposes: “The photographs as well as the actual film recordings are equally ordered pieces of evidence of a reasoned assessment of the nature of the visible as defined on the basis of the very invisibilities that form it, leading to so many machinic and asubjective regulations, normativities and constraints.”53

Operational images have been discussed in cinema studies by, for example, Volker Pantenburg, Thomas Elsaesser, Pasi Väliaho, and Erika Balsom, and in contemporary art discourse by Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Lawrence Lek, among others. The Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin navigates among cinema, art, and discursive work as a “platform for researching [Farocki’s] visual and discursive practice and supporting new projects that engage with the past, present, and the future of image cultures.”54 Farocki’s name stands at the intersection of multiple genealogies, practices, and concepts that are not reducible to a story of an auteur. I do not claim that previous writing about him has done this either; indeed, already Elsaesser identified many of Farocki’s works as “contributions to media archaeology, as well as an essential part of the prehistory of digital images”55 where questions of interface, simulation, and, indeed, operation become central hinges for an appreciation of particular kinds of genealogies of which the digital is only one technical term. As Elsaesser puts it, “These changes we tend to associate with the digital turn, but operational images just remind us that moving as well as still images have many histories, not all of which pass through the cinema or belong to art history. Digital images may merely have made these parallel histories more palpably present, but operational images, as Farocki clearly saw, have always been part of the visual culture that surrounds us.”56 Two intersecting, closely related points sum up this argument: On the one hand, it can be seen as a term that speaks to techniques of measurement, analysis, and synthesis through techniques of images but in particular institutional situations and uses. Operational images organize the world, but they also organize our sense and skills in terms of how we are trained to approach such images, from the photogrammetric mapping of landscapes to pattern recognition, astronomy datasets to Mars Rover imaging practices.57 On the other hand, the term relates to practices (and labor) of testing, administering, and planning also reflected in the sites of filming (in addition to what was mentioned above) where Farocki himself worked. These range from schools to offices to management training centers, and army field exercises, to paraphrase Elsaesser. To also quote his summary: “To operational images correspond operating instructions for life.”58 As instructions of life, the term implies the broader use of the term “algorithmic” as the training of bodies, setting institutional routines, and rehearsing automation in ways that tie machines to laboring human bodies. Imaging practices become operational in how they tie bodies into collective routines.59

What characterizes Farocki’s films as an “education image” (to refer to Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun) is exactly this particular quality to attend to such material spaces and signs and images that define learning (“work desks, typewriters, books, diagrams, and equations that constitute the scenographies of learning”) as well as “scenes that dramatize narratives of learning.”60 But after learning becomes about machine learning and training refers to the training set, we also have to adjust the scope of these cultural techniques. The work of labeling images in practices of supervised machine learning is one scene of the training of both neural networks and the people involved in sustaining those networks.61 The discourse of the photographic, but also “education” and work, become thus restaged in ways that are not merely the factory or the earlier use of the industrial scene but globally distributed across platforms of logistics such as Amazon Mechanical Turk.62 Not that one image replaces the other, but the educational image, navigational image, instructive image, and operational image take place at moments and sites of transition, exchange, and transformation. The electronic switch—and its relation to the circuit and circuit board, the techniques of control and optimization—defines the way both twentieth-and twenty-first-century operations and (technical) images63 become the historical site of connection even if not all I say in this book is reducible to such technological ur-scenes.

In other words, societal operations are part of the broader framework of discussion of this particular aspect of visual culture, even if it at first seems in exact contrast to Farocki’s own somewhat fragmented words about operational images: “Images without a social goal, not for edification, not for reflection.”64 Indeed, while Pantenburg picks up this phrase from Farocki, it is not meant that the topic is devoid of politics in relation to a variety of societal institutions. While the images are not interesting to look at as images, they have multiple chains of operations through which they are linked to a long line of institutional, epistemological, and other uses that trigger a different aesthetics that speaks to questions of what is now, perhaps, called the nonhuman image65 and the nonrepresentational image as they circulate across institutional sites and uses, from education to training and technicians to algorithmics of the everyday. As such, this book toes a fine line between an emphasis on the notion of operationality—while not wanting to ignore that it is the image, here, that ties the discussion to being a contribution to visual and screen studies, photography, and moving image—and the transformation of those in relation to questions of data and even artificial intelligence (machine learning).

Before outlining some key terms, let me offer this interim summary of the claims and arguments of this book: First, operations and operationality are key concepts for contemporary visual and media theory while moving beyond the visual, the visible, and the lens-based. The term “invisual” (introduced below) will become a significant addition in this context. Second, the operational image is irreducible to being merely about digital images, big data, or artificial intelligence (machine/deep learning). Those recent developments are not ignored but placed into a historical dialogue with questions of data, sensing, and spatial uses of images. Third, the term is “transdisciplinary,” and as such, it links discussions in media theory, art studies, digital aesthetics, architecture, and critical infrastructure with visual culture studies. In this book, I am also interested in the context of how concepts bind together different disciplines. Concepts, too, operate.

The Media Theory of Invisuality

Operational images refer to those practices and infrastructures of images that are not necessarily particularly interesting to watch or see. Nonetheless, they organize much of what contemporary culture fundamentally looks at, including figures, graphs, diagrams, trajectories, models, plans, simulations, control screens, spreadsheets, and so on. Images might not necessarily want anything, but they do lots and get lots done.66 This is not necessarily an emptying of the image from desire and subjectivity but just demonstrating that those two terms always work as collectives and assemblages, as infrastructures and operations. Thus a media theoretical insight into this situation implies that we need to be aware of specific technological contexts of visuality and its transformation of some two hundred years of technical images (photography, photogrammetry, and more), even if in this book we go back also to the early 1700s and the geodesic measurement and production of the planetary image (see chapter 3). As Hoel and Lindseth put it:

Operational approaches provide promising possibilities for rethinking images for at least three reasons: first, they offer dynamic approaches that analyze phenomena into doings and happenings rather than into things and static entities; second, they offer relational approaches that conceive identity in terms of open-ended processes of becoming; and third, by so doing, they allow us to ascribe agency to images, and crucially, to conceive agency as distributed across interconnected assemblages of people, practices, and mediating artifacts.67

The above is a useful, underlying methodological guideline that should be kept in mind throughout this book. Furthermore, it features the various projects and examples included in these pages. This dynamic notion of the image that speaks of them as temporal, relational, and agential is particularly visible in recent audiovisual and written work that picks up a similar approach.

Trevor Paglen’s homage to Farocki and operational images related it to an informational, even data-driven framing. As a version of the image as information-tableau, Paglen’s artistic-practice-informed writing identifies invisible images and machine vision as the regime of operations that define the transformation of visual culture—images that are “made by machines for other machines” but also such “invisible images [that] are actively watching us, poking and prodding, guiding our movements, inflicting pain and inducing pleasure.”68 Images have agency, but that agency is distributed across vast operational spheres, which are also geographically dispersed. While we could argue that all images, including the visible ones, are known to do exactly that—cause bodily reactions and affects from pain to pleasure and much more—it is the odd but necessary view to a data-driven understanding of images that suggests this methodological angle as to how the operations bring such instructions of life into existence. As “doings and happenings,” operational images could actually turn out to be less about images than about situational awareness and (automated) decision-making that concerns many of the contemporary data situations, such as dashboards.69

Operational images are in Paglen’s narrative both logistically crucial (automated vision and sorting systems that read car plates, shipping containers, faces, etc.) and quantitively plenty: billions and billions of images not merely taken but uploaded and processed on platforms such as Facebook. “DeepMask,” TensorFlow (Google), and other platform-integrated forms of operationalizing digital images as they “identify people, places, objects, locations, emotions, gestures, faces, genders, economic statuses, relationships” are included in Paglen’s useful entry list of ways of seeing as an intervention in the world. AI systems are part of the scene that help to realize the essential shift: “The machine-machine landscape is not one of representations so much as activations and operations.”70 Following on from this pithy summary, I aim to discuss in more detail how this landscape—which sometimes is literally a landscape as a territorial formation in urban and nonurban situations—operates through different layers of abstractions that are essential to how the logistics of the image and logistics of planetary space coalesce.71 Indeed, it is thus no surprise that one of the key topics to focus on is the logistical image as it facilitates the global flows of goods and people and how it turns things across the scale into a massive AI training set.72

Picking up on the link among operational images, data, and platforms, a key term (and featured in this book’s subtitle) is the invisual. Throughout the book, I refer to the pairing of the visual-invisual to draw this continuum as a territory of transformations that concerns images and their role as aesthetic–epistemic agents. Focusing on how contemporary visual culture is operationalized in the automated procedures of digital platforms, Adrian Mackenzie and Anna Munster have proposed the concept of the invisual to help to shift the focus from the mere quantity of images to how they are being aggregated. This collective of images, their ensemble, is to be considered as material and generative forces, even if they take shape as image datasets. Mackenzie and Munster argue that they organize “all kinds of platform cultural actions and forms.”73 While this theme could be addressed as the gradual shift in complex systems on the coupling of perception and action—and thus corresponds to a particular reading of cybernetics, image, and design74—it is here also useful as a way to focus on how data and visuality are entangled in contemporary digital infrastructures of platforms.

Invisual culture suggests that while the image persists in contemporary platform culture, it does not feature as a visual image in the optical or experiential sense. Mackenzie and Munster’s argument about invisual perception captures this transformation, which is furthermore the underpinning focus of this book too:

Such a mode suggests that while visual techniques and practices continue to proliferate—from data visualization through to LIDAR technologies for capturing nonoptical images—the visual itself as a paradigm for how to see and observe is being evacuated, and that space is now occupied by a different kind of perception. This is not simply “machine vision,” we argue, but a making operative of the visual by platforms themselves.75

What Mackenzie and Munster elaborate as the invisual—that is, as “a new mode of nonrepresentational observation”76—is in this book mapped through past and current modes of operationality. The tension between old and new is not returned to any ideas of natural vs. technical, analog vs. digital, but assumes perceptual techniques of sense and image guide and misguide, include and exclude, educate and miseducate. These images are organized in relation to a set of technological contexts or infrastructures, apparatuses, and instruments defined by operative ontologies of cultural techniques (see chapter 1). Thus the shift for the subject is not merely from “human to machine” (whether platform, AI, machine vision, or something else) but in relation to institutional sets of affordances that define what images as operative techniques are. The institutions can be military but can also be scientific organizations and discourses, colonial expeditions, corporate AI, massive scale national remote sensing and data platforms, and environmental sensing services, as well as different kinds of art and design practices.

Contemporary digital platforms format and operationalize images as part of their invisual perception and aggregation. Mackenzie and Munster’s work will be one of the reference points for the development of the ins and outs of operationality, but I also want to emphasize that this book is not solely about (digital) data, AI, and platforms, even if it is my contention that writing any book on operational images after the emergence of “platform seeing” (Mackenzie and Munster’s term) cannot stay the same as it would have before such an ensemble of image techniques. This is why I stay focused not only on an exegesis of the concept of operational images as it has been specifically used by Farocki, Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and others, but how it becomes operational in a manner that is highly recursive:77 To investigate the turn to operational images, one reads contemporary forms of operationality through historical sources and cases that also inform the contemporary reading.

The recursive operation of back and forth cross-reading of different cases helps to detach from a linear assumption that would assign “the digital” a role (it often enjoys) as a totalizing historical shift or that would suppose “data” is a recent invention of big data infrastructures. Operational images, as a concept and an area of methodological questions regarding images, thus itself becomes operationalized: as per the above definition of one of the key aims of this book, it helps to understand how data and visuality, space (urban and nonurban) and image define each other, and how this image is temporally dynamic.78

A Manual

I want to add a word on the methodological approach that tries to build some elements from the theme (of operations) into a guideline. The book is a sort of a manual that can take you to places but doesn’t give a full map of every detail. Instead of a historical analysis that would offer one holistic genealogy of the term “operations”—for example, how it emerges in Farocki’s work, or how it ties military imaging into a twentieth-century story about machine vision, or how it fits with media archaeology of measurement and photogrammetry—I work with the concept as a force of its own.

What does that mean? First, the term “operation” is not merely employed to point to historical instances; it does not become a tool that, like a spotlight, moves across historical practices and technologies. Instead, the term itself is set to motion, too; the spotlight turns on itself. Second, this implies the already mentioned recursive task of how historical and contemporary examples and theoretical arguments are set to influence each other.79 “Operational images” is a heuristic term that helps to excavate media archaeological traits of past image practices in relation to contemporary data cultures, and in the process, it also changes pace and becomes respecified, retrained, reoperationalized. Third, picking up speed from Massumi again, we can refer to “conceptual persuasion,” which is not about a concept that is operationalized for particular tactical uses (such as to persuade) but rather carries its own force in the abstract so as to recognize the potential “strangely effective force immanently inflecting events, abstractly energizing their verging onto self-completion.”80

Aptly, for Massumi, the note on persuasion speaks to his interest in “operative logics” such as preemption as a force of contemporary soft power of the military–security complex as it spans across the field of social institutions. The idea that, for example, preemption is then a “force of attraction around which the field of power is bending” is intriguing.81 What would this mean for operational images? Not merely images placed in the social use of institutions, but as forces of attraction that bend fields of power, vision, sensing, subjectivity, information, data, and so on, differently? It is almost like the operational carves its own space as much as it acts upon someone else’s (institutional) orders: a vexing thought to follow throughout the book, as it introduces friction to the otherwise direct functional use of operation for specific institutionally defined purposes.

Surrounded by such questions that set the mood of this book, the text is also a chance to explore how some of the theoretical propositions and arguments emerge from collaborative work and what I recognize as part of the methodological setup, as part of the “ways in which” and the “how” of the text’s procedure.82 Explication and speculation; historical examples and archival work; contemporary articulations such as those in the field of visual arts. This book sets in motion a “conceptual persuasion” that connects such instances into an argument that is added to, chapter by chapter.

Many of my collaborations informing this book have been with artists and designers. To prioritize any of these collaborations is not to suggest that artistic knowledge is in some way superior over many other fields that work with images and define what an image can do but to recognize the role artist-scholars have already played in defining this field and how it can be further articulated across historical and contemporary practices. Farocki himself is the key example, but we can name others, too, whose work discusses a similar territory of ideas in cinema, photography, and other practices of visual culture. Allan Sekula and the notion of instrumental image would be a good sparring partner in this discussion; it is another concept that has escaped beyond the field of photographic discourse and has been subsequently linked to investigations of contemporary logistics and critical forensic methods.83 Paglen and Steyerl have already made an appearance and will do so again. Both are examples of artist methods articulated in projects for galleries and texts that are not entirely academic but are influentially rearticulating the field of theoretical discourse of visual arts beyond the gallery and media art festivals or museums.

In this book, besides referring to established work by such established artist-writers, I make space for contemporary practitioners to enter the debate as collaborators and co-creators. In other words, some of the topics and projects described in the chapters, such as Geocinema’s Framing Territories, as well as my work with Abelardo Gil-Fournier, are not merely presented as artworks for analysis. Instead, the theoretical concepts and ideas are informed by the dialogue, in various exchanges, and in different forms of objects (visual, data, concepts) that were part of those shared situations with the artist-scholars. I had the opportunity to work with Geocinema, closely following their unfolding project, which also means acknowledging how they influenced my way of opening up operational images to concerns of contemporary practice (see chapter 4). Similarly, Gil-Fournier and I have worked on art and other projects together, and our continuing dialogue has been part of writing this book too. The two of us are writing a joint book on environmental imaging, surfaces, and operational images, which also continues some themes appearing in this book. Many others could be mentioned: Rosa Menkman’s Impossible Images artistic research project has been running in parallel to my writing; Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s audiovisual work on measurement is being finished as I complete the final edits of this text on questions of measurement; Aura Satz asked me the question, in passing, if there is a sonic equivalent to operational images while she is working on her current project on sirens. I never could answer that, but the question stuck in my mind as many other leads, thoughts, problems, and suggestions circulate in and through such interactions.

I thus find it methodologically important to underline the broader network in which the conceptual work is situated. Such a network often becomes the invisible scaffolding for published work, but anyone engaged in institutional and extrainstitutional work knows about the force of such infrastructure. The concept of operational images becomes a discussion drawn from written and audiovisual archives of examples and encounters in contemporary situations of practice-based making, including not just (fine) art but also design and architecture. For example, working as part of the Strelka Institute’s Terraforming program has become a part of composing this book through a specific shared space of concerns, concepts, and methods. Indeed, developing this concept not merely as a designation of a territory—“this is an operational image, this is not”—but as an articulation of relations of visuality and invisuality, agency, and labor becomes a way to reflect on the dynamics of concepts also in practice-driven work.

The operational image, as a concept, has a persuasive force that becomes involved in different studio, theoretical, field, and other practices across disciplines. Such a stance also expresses the idea that concepts are not merely stable positions that populate a generic map of “theory” but instead already traveling dynamic entities that transform material and semiotic situations—while also being affected by such situations. Concepts are practiced in institutional situations (archival research or empirical studies, for example) and nonacademic artistic situations (experimental work with machine learning datasets, for example). Both examples already incorporate multiple kinds of competencies and techniques.84

Seeing concepts as a dynamic part of methodological work echoes some of the thoughts by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the centrality of concepts for scholarly activity that shifts focus away from contemplating or reflecting. Against the shop window of ready-made and off-the-shelf concepts and methods, I am more invested in this constructive sense of concepts as operative in their own right as they mark a singularity:

You will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them—that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not be confused with them but that shelters their seeds and the personae who cultivate them. Constructivism requires every creation to be a construction on a plane that gives it an autonomous existence. To create concepts is, at the very least, to make something.85

While Deleuze and Guattari offer a more detailed insight into how concepts are bordered by affects, functions, and percepts, we can follow this short lead to arrive at some methodologically useful map instruments (if a method is about a path and a road, we do not really want to know where we will end up, but rather what happens during those trips and travels). I do not claim the operational image is a concept for philosophy proper, but it is a situation of artistic practice and writing that produced a concept that shifts across disciplines; thus, the territory in question is, in this case, an aesthetic-epistemic-conceptual one that then marks a specific entry into the trajectory of movement of the visual-invisual.

A similar trait is also clearly expressed by Mieke Bal’s development of conceptual work as its own methodologically significant form of inquiry.86 Bal’s language echoes the idea of boundary objects (as used in science studies and the history of science)87 but specifically in relation to concepts and their role in mediating between different disciplinary perspectives and creative practices. Indeed, the notion of a traveling concept is thus one that speaks to the dynamic multiplicity of the concept’s work—never just an ordinary word but a delineation of a matter of forces and their territories, of situations and their expansive repercussions. Giuliana Bruno has built a whole methodological–territorial complex around this idea of motion/emotion in Atlas of Emotion: topographies of affect, concepts, film, and architecture are codetermining instances that are teased out by way of writing but that also emerge out of historically situated bodies.88

Incorporating the idea of traveling into a discussion of media and its materials, as well as of concepts such as the operational image as it moves across different disciplines, we can quote Bal: “But, after returning from your travels, the object constructed turns out to no longer be the ‘thing’ that so fascinated you when you chose it. It has become a living creature, embedded in all the questions and considerations that the mud of your travel spattered onto it, and that surround it like a ‘field.’”89 As noted earlier, also concepts change as they travel (not only between countries or disciplines but, for example, to and from archival sources); a concept can be a sticky enough surface that grabs hold of its encounters, leaving a smudge, a scar, a trace. Those encounters are part of its reformulation: it carries a history that impacts how it operates as an intervention into the contemporary field.

In such a field of traveling concepts and dynamic, collaborative investigations, this book sets out to investigate the web of concepts and their living contexts of visual and invisual cultures. In this book, the operational image becomes a tool to investigate layers of practice; it establishes bridges across institutions and leaps into different discussions where this theme is present and where this concept is explicitly or implicitly being used: media studies, art and architecture, infrastructure and visual culture studies.

While this book emerges from the Operational Images and Visual Culture project and is situated in the Department of Photography at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, it has multiple institutional contexts. As a persuasive force, the term has a conceptual intensity that transforms what photography is or how it is being understood (and has a link to much of the discussions in post-photography and current networked and digital practices of photography),90 and this also leads to us asking questions about the “others” of photography in a manner familiar from media archaeological methodologies: Beyond visible spectra of light, what other practices of light are part of the histories of the present? Which practices and institutional epistemologies are implied in these situations?

The chapters of this book respond to such questions. I have already noted some of the themes in this introduction, and a summary of what follows will suffice. After this introductory chapter, I turn to chapter 1, “Operations of Operations.” This chapter outlines some of the recent uses of the notion of “operation” in theory, with a special focus on operative ontologies. The chapter already starts to move toward some of the thematic directions of the book, including operations of capitalism and links between visuality and data (grids). But chapter 2, “What Is Not an Image? On AI, Data, and Invisuality,” especially dives into the topic. Here, the starting point is Trevor Paglen and others’ interest in the invisibility of technical images, especially in the context of artificial intelligence, which is laid out in my text through three different sites where image operations have been identified as a crucial part of politics of data: the platform, the dataset, and the model. The chapter also goes deeper into Mackenzie and Munster’s concept of invisuality, which becomes a useful reference point for those techniques where visibility, invisibility, and data also meet with questions of, for example, property and capitalism. If operational images are often considered as part of advanced military technologies, then how does the hypothesis that primitive accumulation and colonization across an intersectional sphere of force (land, class, race, sex) are part of what to consider as war add to our analysis and methods?91

Operational images as nonrepresentational forces of production are central to how the argument develops. Chapter 3, “The Measurement-Image: From Photogrammetry to Planetary Surface,” investigates the so-called measurement image from Farocki’s work to a short historical investigation of photogrammetry. Also, the planetary image as one of measurement is addressed by way of a quirky historical case of the two 1730s geodesic expeditions that measured the earth surface to draw maps to navigate. Questions of infrastructure and logistics feature across the chapters. Chapter 4, “Operational Aesthetic: Cinema for Territorial Management,” deals with some of these issues through operational aesthetics, not just as aesthetics in art but as preparation of capacities of sense and perception. As outlined in chapter 1, much of the recursive nature of operative ontologies and operational images is how they are images about images, and here artistic work, such as Geocinema’s, demonstrates the operations of large-scale remote sensing and data as part of the operational images of geopolitics. Chapter 5, “The Post-lenticular City: Light into Data,” focuses on invisuality and examines transformations of urban sensing and images through a case study of lidar. Beyond being a single technology of laser scanning of the urban and nonurban environment—used, for example, in autonomous vehicles—it also links to an alternative genealogy of light: What forms of light off the visible spectrum but present as intensive pulses are nested in techniques of images and invisuality? How are the platforms of sensing and observation reformatting the city, such as those investigated through aesthetic and design methods such as Scanlab’s?

The book ends with a conclusion, “A Soft Montage of Operations,” that returns to the night sky and beyond through Event Horizon, the black hole imaging project, while drawing together some final points about the centrality of operational images as a hinge that opens up cross-disciplinary investigations. What the conclusion offers is also this, a line that I want to emphasize from the beginning: this book maps the histories and afterlives of the notion of operational images and, hopefully, offers insights on methods too.