Notes
Preface
This refers to Brian Massumi’s interest in how the contemporary form of ontopower operationalizes “the nature of time, perception, action, and decision.” See Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015). See also Pasi Väliaho, Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014).
A much more detailed discussion of the aims of this book comes in the introduction that follows.
See Frederick Suppe, “Operationalism,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d., https://doi.org/10.4324/9780415249126-Q077-1.
Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 343.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “‘More Things in Theory than in Heaven and Earth’—A Conversation with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young by Melle Kromhout and Peter McMurray,” text available at https://digitalpassage.wordpress.com/2014/12/22/winthrop-young-more-things-in-theory-than-heaven-and-earth-are-dreaming-of-interview/.
Michelle Henning, Photography: The Unfettered Image (London: Routledge 2018), 18.
Myles W. Jackson, “Fraunhofer and his Spectral Lines,” Ann. Phys. (Berlin) 526, nos. 7–8 (2014): A65, https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.201400807.
Susan Schuppli, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020), 278.
Alongside Fraunhofer were other nineteenth-century scientists, such as Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff, working on and with the spectroscope in the 1860s.
“Fraunhofer placed the six lamps behind a shutter, 1.5 Bavarian inches (36.0 mm) high and 0.07 of a Bavarian inch (1.68 mm) thick, which was pierced by six narrow slits less than 1.5 inches high and 0.05 of a Bavarian inch (1.20 mm) wide. Each lamp was placed .58 of a Bavarian inch (13.92 mm) apart and directly behind a slit. The light from the lamps would travel 13 Bavarian feet (3.7 m) to a prism, which was made of flint glass with an angle of approximately 40°, where it would be refracted and decomposed into colors. The dispersed light then traveled through a second slit placed directly behind the prism, which accordingly blocked a portion of the emergent beam. Some of the rays were channeled to the site of a theodolite located in Fraunhofer’s laboratory at the very great distance of approximately 692 Bavarian feet (199 m) from the six lamps. The six-shutter mechanism controlled the angles at which light from each lamp struck the surface of prism A, thereby determining the locus of the corresponding spectrum.” Jackson, “Fraunhofer and His Spectral Lines,” A66.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12, no. 3 (2017): 226.
Introduction
Annie J. Cannon, “Biographical Memoir of Solon Irving Bailey,” National Academy of Sciences 15 (1932): 193.
J. Donald Fernie, “In Search of Better Skies: Harvard in Peru I,” American Scientist, September–October 2000, 398.
Fernie, 396.
Dr Raimondi, quoted in Solon I. Bailey and Edward C. Pickering, “A Catalogue of 7222 Southern Stars Observed with the Meridian Photometer during the Years 1889–91,” Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College 34 (1895): 28
Michelle Henning, Photography: The Unfettered Image (London: Routledge, 2017), 7.
Edward Pickering, quoted in Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 38.
Annie J. Cannon and Edward C. Pickering, “Spectra of Bright Southern Stars Photographed with the 13-inch Boyden Telescope as Part of the Henry Draper Memorial,” Annals of Harvard College Observatory 28 (1901): 129-P.6.
Kelley Wilder, Photography and Science (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 34.
Wilder, 31.
Wilder, 34.
Wilder, 34. Furthermore, it would be possible to expand to the longer history of engineering drawing where questions of measurement, techniques of descriptive geometry, and photogrammetry play a central role before such technical images as photography. In this sense, a media archaeology of operational images would become more about Gaspard Monge than François Arago or other pioneers of scientific photography. See Peter J. Booker, A History of Engineering Drawing (London: Northgate, 1979).
Harriett S. Leavitt, “1777 Variables in the Magellanic Clouds,” Annals of the Harvard College Observatory 60 (1908): 87.
Leavitt, 107.
John Durham Peters, Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
“Les lames de plaqué préparées par M. Daguerre blanchissent au contraire à tel point, sous Faction de ces mêmes rayons et des opérations qui lui succèdent, qu’il est permis d’espérer qu’on pourra faire des cartes photographiques de noire satellite. C’est dire qu’en quelques minutes on exécutera un des travaux les plus longs, les plus minutieux, les plus délicats de l’astronomie.” Arago, “Rapport de M. Arago. (Séance du 5 juillet 1839),” in Historique et description des procédés du daguerréotype et du diorama, ed. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (Paris: Susse, 1839), 23–24. John Tresch, “The Daguerreotype’s First Frame: François Arago’s Moral Economy of Instruments,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007): 445–76.
Wilder, Photography and Science.
Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Lindsay Smith Zrull, “Women in Glass: Women at the Harvard Observatory during the Era of Astronomical Glass Plate Photography, 1875–1975,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 52, no. 2 (2021): 115–46.
Zrull, 117.
Zrull, 117.
There are echoes in some aspects of John Tagg’s argument: “Photography as such has no identity. Its status as technology varies the power relations which invest it. . . . It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces.” Tagg, The Burden of Representation (London: Macmillan, 1988), 63.
On the technical image and style, see also Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 124–29. To be fair, this ability to build a whole infrastructure of images around light/absence in gradients was at the back of what photography was meant to be in Daguerre’s (marketing) parlance: “The plate is exposed to light and at once, whatever the shadow projects on this plate, earth, or sky, running water, the cathedral lost in the clouds . . . all things big and little engrave themselves instantly.” Quoted in Maynard, 155–56.
John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of the Diagram (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 7.
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 53
Latour, 53.
Latour, 55.
H. S. Leavitt and E. C. Pickering, “Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud,” Harvard College Observatory Circular 173 (1912): 2.
Both “operative images” and “operational images” appear in English literature on the topic. The German term is operative Bilder.
For work on Farocki, there are many excellent places to start. See, for example, Volker Pantenburg, Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015); Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, eds., Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? (London: Koenig Books, 2009); and Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004).
See Florian Sprenger, Epistemologien des Umgebens: Zur Geschichte, Ökologie und Biopolitik künstlicher Environments (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019). On the somewhat connected notion of the “navigational image” that Doreen Mende has developed based on Farocki’s work, see Mende, “The Navigation Principle: Slow Image,” E-Flux lectures, November 29, 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/video/176025/e-flux-lectures-doreen-mende-the-navigation-principle-slow-image/.
Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images,” Public 29 (2004), 18.
Farocki, 18.
Farocki, 18.
There is a wealth of work on military technologies of perception that, of course, includes work by Virilio, but also studies such as Ryan Bishop and John Phillips, Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Antoine Bousquet, The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves, Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); and Anders Engberg-Pedersen’s forthcoming book, Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2023). On aerial imaging, see Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, eds., Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Emily Doucet, “‘The Idea Was in the Air’: Nadar’s Aerial Media,” Grey Room 83 (Spring 2021): 112–37; Michael Richardson, “Drone Cultures: Encounters with Everyday Militarisms,” Continuum 34 (2020): 858–69; and Hendrik Bender and Max Kanderske, “Co-operative Aerial Images: A Geomedia History of the View from Above,” New Media & Society 24, no. 11 (2022): 2468–92. On Farocki in art theory, see also Hal Foster, What Comes after Farce: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (London: Verso, 2020).
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 47.
Ghamari-Tabrizi, 48.
Patrick M. S. Blackett, “Operational Research,” Operational Research Quarterly 1, no. 1 (March 1950): 3.
Blackett, 3.
William Thomas, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2015), 216. Thomas’s book is in general a recommended entry point to the history of operations research.
A much longer bibliography could be listed, but examples of feminist data studies and related fields include Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020); Jacqueline Wernimont, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019); and Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, et al., eds, Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2021).
Harun Farocki, “Cross Influence / Soft Montage,” in Ehmann and Eshun, Harun Farocki, 64–79. See also Jussi Parikka and Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “An Ecoaesthetic of Vegetal Surfaces: On Seed, Image, Ground as Soft Montage” Journal of Visual Art Practice 20, nos. 1–2 (2021): 16–30.
Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 59.
Harun Farocki, “Industrialization of Thought,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 15 (1993): 76–77.
Virilio, The Vision Machine, 59.
Aud Sissel Hoel, “Operative Images: Inroads to a New Paradigm of Media Theory,” in Image—Action—Space: Situating the Screen in Visual Practice, ed. Luisa Feiersinger, Kathrin Friedrich, and Moritz Queisner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 11–27; and Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989). See also Bousquet, Eye of War; Packer and Reeves, Killer Apps.
See Georges Didi-Huberman, “How to Open Your Eyes,” in Ehmann and Eshun, Harun Farocki, 38–50.
Rosi Braidotti and Matthew Fuller, “The Posthumanities in an Era of Unexpected Consequences,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 6 (2019): 7 (emphasis in the original).
Braidotti and Fuller, 8.
Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 69.
Massumi, 69.
Tom Holert, “Tabular Images. On the Division of All Days (1970) and Something Self Explanatory (15 x) (1971),” in Ehmann and Eshun, Harun Farocki, 92.
Raymond Bellour, “The Photo-Diagram” in Ehmann and Eshun, Harun Farocki, 146. On Foucault and invisibilities, see also Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). I return to the visible/invisible relation and diagrams in chapter 2.
The Harun Farocki Institute website is at https://www.harun-farocki-institut.org/en/.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 12, no. 3 (2017), 219. For a more comprehensive take on computer graphics and images, see also Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021).
Elsaesser, 219. To someone like me, trained as a cultural historian, the word “always” usually sets off alarm bells, but Elsaesser’s underlying argument is valid. It detaches operational from merely the technically determined algorithmic form of automation that emerges in smart systems, robotics, and artificial intelligence since, roughly, the 1990s, and restores a particularly interesting trait to the term.
A perfect example of a detailed analysis of the operationality of remote sensing as part of scientific teams is found in Janet Vertesi’s Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). As she writes based on her fieldwork: “The scientific image itself does not so much document the object out there as document the work of different communities of knowing subjects that enable, produce, and constrain knowledge of the world” (103).
Elsaesser, “Simulation,” 223.
This point can be also very detailed, as Janet Vertesi demonstrates in her fieldwork focusing on the Mars Rover imaging teams: such scientific images produced by the robotic imaging units transform a “natural object as an analytical object, inscribing a value into the very composition of what that object is and what makes it interesting, so that subsequent viewers and image makers will see, draw, and interact with that same object in the same way.” Seeing Like a Rover, 103. Here, operationality is not merely a characteristic of the technological machine but becomes one form of guidance between the community of analysts, operators, and the like. Furthermore, on the broader implications of biopolitics of visual culture, see Pasi Väliaho, Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014).
Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, “A to Z of HF, or 26 introductions to HF,” in Ehmann and Eshun, Harun Farocki, 206
On machine learning and its learners, see Adrian Mackenzie, Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017).
See Joanna Zylinska, “Undigital Photography: Image-Making beyond Computation and AI,” in Photography Off the Scale, ed. Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 231–52.
In reference to the IKKM Weimar conference.
Farocki in Eye/Machine I video (2001), quoted in Volker Pantenburg, “Working Images: Harun Farocki and the Operational Image,” in Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict, ed. Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 49.
Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017).
Cf. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Aud Sissel Hoel and Frank Lindseth, “Differential Interventions: Images as Operative Tools,” in Photomediations: A Reader, ed. Kamila Kuc and Joanna Zylinska (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), 178.
Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” New Inquiry, December 8, 2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/.
Nathaniel Tkacz, Being with Data: The Dashboarding of Everyday Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), 173–76. Tkacz is here drawing on Karin Knorr Cetina’s work.
Paglen, “Invisible Images.” On the quantity and scale of images, see Dvořák and Parikka, Photography Off the Scale.
This resonates with past years of design theory, especially Benjamin Bratton’s work on the vertical diagram of planetary infrastructures and political formations. For more, see Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015).
Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015).
Adrian Mackenzie and Anna Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 4–5.
See Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
Mackenzie and Munster, “Platform Seeing,” 6.
Mackenzie and Munster, 7.
On recursive methods and media theory, see Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Siren Recursions,” in Kittler Now: Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies, ed. Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 71–94.
I also want to note other recent proposals use the notion of “operation,” or “operationality,” as a methodological concept in media analysis. For a take on “operations as units of analysis,” see Kathrin Friedrich and A. S. Aurora Hoel, “Operational Analysis: A Method for Observing and Analyzing Digital Media Operations,” New Media & Society (March 2021), https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444821998645.
This recursive methodology is outlined in more detail in Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Siren Recursions,” 71–94
Massumi, Ontopower, 209.
Massumi, 209.
Here, the work by Celia Lury et al. is relevant in how they outline the question of interdisciplinary methods through concepts that speak to activities of methods of composition of problems and maneuvering in that space of problems. In Lury’s words, outlining a vocabulary of methods as grammatically gerunds, they want to “identify the potential of interdisciplinary methods to compose problems as interruptions of the (historical) present. . . . The aim is to consider how interdisciplinary methods might constitute some aspect of what is given, the present—in all its geo-political complexity—as a problem, which is to say, as a situation that may be methodologically activated in specific, precise ways.” Celia Lury, “Introduction: Activating the Present of Interdisciplinary Methods,” in Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods, ed. Celia Lury et al. (London: Routledge, 2018), 3.
Thomas Keenan, “Counter-forensics and Photography,” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014), 58–77.
Mackenzie, Machine Learners.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994), 7.
Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 2002.
Susan Leigh Star, “This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 5 (2010): 601–17.
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002).
Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, 4.
See some of the work emerging from the project in Dvořák and Parikka, Photography Off the Scale. See also Andrew Dewdney, Forget Photography? (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2021), which offers many arguments that resonate closely with this book in terms of mapping the historical legacy of photography vis-à-vis its radical transformations beyond photography as an epistemic figure. In addition, we should pay attention to the curatorial work that has been significant in reframing questions of photography. Here I am thinking of Katrina Sluis’s important work—but many others could also be mentioned.
Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, trans. Ames Hodges (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2016).
1. Operations of Operations
Frederick Suppe, “Operationalism,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/operationalism/v-1/sections/behaviourisms. Quoting Suppe: “Examples of an operation would be the procedure of laying a standard yardstick along the edge of a surface to measure length or using psychometric tests to measure sexual orientation.”
Percy Williams Bridgman, quoted in Suppe. See also Jimena Canales, Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020), 152.
A more detailed account of a “media archaeology of operations” would pay specific attention to the 1920s and 1930s as the period when the scientific use of the term, the military field of “Operations Research” (OR) and Martin Heidegger’s pair of ontological/ontic operations (discussed later in this chapter) appear in those separate fields. However, that systematic mapping has to appear somewhere other than in this book. For an insight into OR, see William Thomas, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2015).
Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. with an introduction by Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Kathrin Friedrich and A. S. Aurora Hoel, “Operational Analysis: A Method for Observing and Analyzing Digital Media Operations,” New Media & Society, March 29, 2021, 4, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444821998645.
Friedrich and Hoel, 7.
The phrase “hit the ground” is here used in a similar manner as in Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019).
The notion of S/M borrows from Thomas Elsaesser’s use: see 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).
Drilling, training, and educating bodies is one special case of institutionalization of algorithmic procedures executed by humans. See Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine: On the Dominance of War in Friedrich Kittler’s Media Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 4 (2002): 825–54. See also Allan Sekula, “An Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures,” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014): 16–27.
Website at https://www.kulturtechnik.hu-berlin.de/en/.
Horst Bredekamp, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency, trans. Elizabeth Clegg (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018); Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Bernhard Siegert, “Öffnen, Schließen, Zerstreuen, Verdichten: Die operativen Ontologien der Kulturtechnik,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 8, no. 2 (2017): 95–113.
Sybille Krämer, “Die Rettung des Ontologischen durch das Ontische? Ein Kommentar zu ‘operativen Ontologien,’” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 8, no. 2 (2017): 125–41.
As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young puts it, “Indeed, one pithy way to describe the rise of Kulturtechniken in German cultural theory is to label it part of a largescale, albeit largely uncoordinated, Heidegger update. . . . The older Heidegger came to oppose philosophy to Denken (thinking); the study of cultural techniques provides a kind of flanking manoeuvre by relating the thinking of Sein (Being) to the processing and operating of bits and pieces of Seiendes (beings).” Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 10.
Siegert, quoted in Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Material World: An Interview with Bernhard Siegert,” Artforum, Summer 2015, https://www.artforum.com/print/201506/material-world-an-interview-with-bernhard-siegert-52281. For a resonating account drawing on Simondo, see Friedrich and Hoel, “Operational Analysis,” 9.
The idea is echoing André Leroi-Gourhan and “operative chains” of techniques: “Techniques involve both gestures and tools, sequentially organized by means of a ‘syntax’ that imparts both fixity and flexibility to the series of operations involved.” Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 114. Cf. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 70–88.
Macho, quoted in Winthrop-Young, “Cultural Techniques,” 8.
Cornelia Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” trans. Ilinca Iurascu, Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 83–93.
See, for example, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (London: Routledge, 2015); and Jannice Käll, Posthuman Property and Law (London: Routledge), 2022.
In Heidegger’s prose: “Mathematics also is not a reckoning in the sense of performing operations with numbers for the purpose of establishing quantitative results; but, on the contrary, mathematics is the reckoning that, everywhere by means of equations, has set up as the goal of its expectation the harmonizing of all relations of order, and that therefore ‘reckons’ in advance with one fundamental equation for all merely possible ordering.” Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reflection,” in The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 170.
Winthrop-Young, “Cultural Techniques,” 11–12.
See Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
Siegert, “Öffnen, Schließen, Zerstreuen, Verdichten,” 101–3.
See, for example, Bernhard Siegert, “The Chorein of the Pirate: On the Origin of the Dutch Seascape,” Grey Room 57 (Fall 2007): 26–47.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 89, 26.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 22–23.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 89. It is important to note that Barad’s take ends up using the even more specific term “ethico-onto-epistemology” to underline the ethics of knowing, which, while not being emphasized in these passages I am writing, is not to be dismissed either.
Barad, 146.
See Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media, (New York: Routledge, 2020), 94–112.
See Benjamin Bratton, “The City Wears Us. Notes on the Scope of Distributed Sensing and Sensation,” Glass Bead, 2017, https://www.glass-bead.org/article/city-wears-us-notes-scope-distributed-sensing-sensation/.
Here an interesting relation to the question of Mitchell’s metapictures is to be noted as they appear as images that “might be capable of reflection on themselves, capable of providing a second-order discourse that tells us—or at least shows us—something about pictures.” W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 38.
Jennifer Gabrys discusses in more detail techniques of observation and the ideals of invisibility and nonintervention vis-à-vis the broader field of “becoming environmental of computation,” where “earths and environments are programmed.” Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 267.
As Birgit Schneider writes: “Climatology was developed in conjunction with the methods of analytical graphics, there is a broad history of diagrammatic methods of visualization behind the history of climatology.” Schneider, “Climate Model Simulation Visualization from a Visual Studies Perspective,” WIREs Clim Change 3 (2012): 188
The two are not at all disconnected in the history of cartography as demonstrated by Christian Jacob’s significant research. See Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History, trans. Tom Conley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See also William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Matthew C. Hunter, “Modeling: A Secret History of Following,” in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 59. To quote Hunter in full: “Unlike older views that posited modelling as fundamentally mimetic or governed by a criteria of resemblance, this recent literature stresses the cognitive utility and practical necessity of models that represent indirectly, through highly conventionalized techniques, and with substantial suspension of disbelief.”
On the navigational image, see also Doreen Mende, “The Navigation Principle: Slow Image,” e-flux lecture, November 29, 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/live/165096/e-flux-lectures-doreen-mende-the-navigation-principle-slow-image/.
Bernhard Siegert, “The Map Is the Territory,” Radical Philosophy 169 (September/October 20): 13–16. See also Roger Paez, Operative Mapping: Maps as Design Tools (Barcelona: Elisava & Actar, 2019).
On the pairing of continuity and rupture as the fundamental productive tension of media archaeological method in (new) film history and cinema studies, see Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016.
Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 97. On addressing, see Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, “On Addressability, or What Even Is Computation?” Critical Inquiry 49, no. 1 (Autumn 2022), 1–27.
Siegert, 97.
This follows the argument focusing on zero as the placeholder, the imaginary spot, as articulated by Brian Rotman: “The assertion that zero and zero-like signs permeate several, very different, signifying codes and artefacts of the Renaissance is not unexpected if one thinks of changes in these codes in historically materialist terms: the historical emergence of mercantile capitalism rode on the vector of trade, business, commerce, finance, money. And money required a system of writing, which included book-keeping and calculation, to enable it to function as an international medium of exchange. It was precisely to meet this need that double-entry book-keeping and Hindu numerals, both written in terms of zero, were introduced in Italy at the beginning of the Renaissance in the thirteenth century. Zero then was a principal element of Renaissance, that is to say mercantile capitalism’s, systems of writing from the beginning.” Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), 5.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
Foucault, 98.
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 115–36.
Mezzadra and Neilson, Politics of Operations.
See Margaret Davies, Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007); and Käll, Posthuman Property and Law.
David Joselit, “NFTs, or The Readymade Reversed,” October 175 (Winter 2021): 4.
Alberti quoted in Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 99: “[The veil is] woven of very thin threads and loosely intertwined, dyed with any color, subdivided with thicker threads according to parallel partitions, in as many squares as you like, and held stretched by a frame, which [veil] I place, indeed, between the object to be represented and the eye, so that the visual pyramid penetrates through the thinness of the veil.”
Ernst and Peter Neufert, Architects’ Data, 3rd ed., ed. Bousmaha Baiche and Nicholas Walliman (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 1987).
Shannon Mattern, Code + Clay, Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 106.
Mattern, 106.
Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 120. Jeffrey Moro develops important insights into the media techniques of grids in his take on weather prediction: “Grid techniques enable weather prediction to make equivalent real atmospheres and virtual models, further enabling computation’s conceptual and material control over the planet itself.” Moro, “Grid Techniques for a Planet in Crisis: The Infrastructures of Weather Prediction,” Amodern 9 (April 2020), https://amodern.net/article/grid-techniques/.
These techniques of grids become a central element in computer graphics, including their role in enabling random-access, which features as a central part in mediating between the difference of material screens and (digital) images. Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021), 55–86.
Rosa Menkman, “Beyond Resolution” website https://beyondresolution.info/ABOUT.
Adrian Mackenzie, Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 73. Mackenzie defines vector space as “a hyperspace of indefinite dimensions generated by the project mapping of data variables or features into distinct coordinate dimensions” (221).
Mackenzie, 221.
On addressability and computation, see Dhaliwal, “On Addressability.”
Allan Sekula’s argument about the instrumental images of aerial surveillance is also apt in the broader sense of institutions of rationalized analysis from science to military: “The meaning of a photograph consisted of whatever it yielded to a rationalized act of ‘interpretation.’ As sources of military intelligence, these pictures carried an almost wholly denotative significance. Few photographs, except perhaps medical ones, were as apparently free from ‘higher’ meaning in their common usage. They seem to have been devoid of any rhetorical structure. But this poverty of meaning was conditional rather than immanent. Within the context of intelligence operations the only ‘rational’ questions were those that addressed the photograph at the indexical level, such as: ‘Is that a machine gun or a stump?’ In other words, the act of interpretation demanded that the photograph be treated as an ensemble of ‘univalent,’ or indexical, signs, signs that could only carry one meaning, that could point to only one object. Efficiency demanded this illusory certainty. Thus codes were developed for translating an ambiguous two-dimensional image into an unequivocal knowledge of its three-dimensional referent and back again into conventionalized and unambiguous two-dimensional signs on a drawn map. A triangle stood for a dump; a circle with a central dot stood for a trench mortar. A terrain was reduced to a set of coded topographic features, ‘grounded’ by the digital logic of the grid. With the development of camouflage, a low-level language game evolved in which the indexical status of the sign was thrown into question, thereby inflating the suspicions of the photo-interpreter.” Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War,” in Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 35
Sean Cubitt, “Image + After I: Photography as Print and as Scientific Instrument,” Fotomuseum Winterthur, September 1, 2017, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/series/processing/.
Cubitt, n.p.
Schneider, “Climate Model Simulation.”
Allan Sekula, “Traffic in Photographs,” in Photography against the Grain, 77–101.
Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 47.
Browne, 49.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013), 93. See also Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 39.
Mezzadra and Neilson, Politics of Operations, 3.
Mezzadra and Neilson, 3.
See Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015). See also chapter 4 of this work.
Mezzadra and Neilson, Politics of Operations, 5.
Mezzadra and Neilson, 5.
Mezzadra and Neilson, 162.
Mezzadra and Neilson, 67.
See, e.g., Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares (London: Routledge, 2016).
Rossiter, 142.
Rossiter.
Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 3.
See, for example, Melinda Cooper, “Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis,” Theory, Culture, & Society 27, nos. 2–3 (2010): 167–90.
Gökçe Önal, “Media Ecologies of the ‘Extractive View’: Image Operations of Material Exchange,” Footprint, Autumn/Winter 2020, 31–48.
These are topics left with less attention in this book only because there are so many excellent studies on them already. See, for example, Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018); Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018); Antoine Bousquet, The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Paul K. Saint-Amour, “‘Applied Modernism’: Military and Civilian Uses of the Aerial Photomosaic,” Theory, Culture, and Society 28, no. 7 (December 2011), 241–69; and Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves, Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020).
Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
These arguments continue to take shape in the next chapter, focusing on operational images in the context of AI and data. The topic of the “invisible image” has featured prominently as a point of reference in many of the approaches, due in no small part to Trevor Paglen’s mobilization of Farocki’s work. The chapter tackles the question of “invisibility.” It proposes a shift from the centrality of the invisible—as it emerged as a key onto-epistemological hinge for scientific imaging of unseen worlds—to the invisual, a term by Mackenzie and Munster. This term takes a more central place in tying operations of images into questions of platformed data while outlining aspects of machine learning. The operational shift from image to nonimage becomes a central thread of tension throughout the next chapter as images become more like platforms, datasets, and models.
Siegert, “The Map Is the Territory,” 15.
2. What Is Not an Image?
Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 133. See also Tomas Dvořák, “Beyond Human Measure: Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture,” in Photography Off the Scale, ed. Tomas Dvořák and Jussi Parikka (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 41–60.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 6. Peter Geimer builds this case, referring to Barthes, in Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions, trans. Gerrit Jackson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 1.
Erwin Panofsky, “Perspective as Symbolic Form” (1927), in Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, ed. Walead Beshty (Arles: Luma Foundation, 2018), 274.
Panofsky, 21.
Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020), 43.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 18.
On transparency, gender, and labor in photography, see Michelle Henning on the “rendering invisible of reproductive work” in the case of Lucia Moholy. Henning, Photography: The Unfettered Image (London: Routledge, 2018), 44–62.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 200. Foucault’s note was specifically on the reversal of the principle of the dungeon (lack of light) to the excess of light and visibility of the panopticon. My aim is not to bring the discussion in this chapter to the military-surveillance complex or the panopticon, but the notion of representational visibility can still be problematized. On current racial politics of exposure in data and AI systems, see Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” New Inquiry, December 8, 2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/.
Zach Blas, https://www.joaap.org/issue9/zachblas.htm.
See, for example, Gregor Schneider’s Invisible City installation in Athens (Onassis Stegi: 2017) https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-4/fff4-invisible-city.
Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021).
Quoted in Geimer, Inadvertent Images, 140.
Peter Geimer, “Was ist kein Bild? Zur ‘Störung der Verweisung,’” in Ordnung der Sichtbarkeit: Fotographie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie, ed. Peter Geimer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 313–41.
Geimer, 327–28.
See Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 16. The reference to the impossible comes through Rosa Menkman’s artistic research project on impossible images and resolution studies. See https://beyondresolution.info/IM-POSSIBLE-BLOB.
Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 59.
Geimer, Inadvertent Images, 151.
A special thanks to Ryan Bishop for the dialogues on the prefix force of the concept.
Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 40, no. 1 (1981): 15–25. See also Peter Szendy, The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Theory of Images, trans. Jan Plug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).
Adrian Mackenzie and Anna Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 5.
Adrian Mackenzie, Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 92–102. It is here that Mackenzie develops Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the partial observer when writing about machine learning: “Every observer in this domain is partial because the humans cannot see lines or curves in the multidimensional data, the functions that underpin models such as logistic regression or linear regression can transform data in the vector space but can’t show how well they see it, and the processes of optimization only see the results of the model and errors, not anything in its referential functioning” (100).
Sean Cubitt, “Mass Image, Anthropocene Image, Image-Commons,” in Dvořák and Parikka, Photography Off the Scale, 25–26.
Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie, Softimage: Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2015), 5.
Cubitt coins these examples, including Playfair’s, as “proto data media.” Cubitt, “Image + After I: Photography as Print and as Scientific Instrument,” Fotomuseum Winterthur, September 1, 2017, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/series/processing/.
Mackenzie and Munster, “Platform Seeing,” 6.
See Rebecca Uliasz, “Seeing Like an Algorithm: Operative Images and Emergent Subjects,” AI & Society 36 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01067-y.
Artist-scholar Rosemary Lee works with similar questions, investigating machine learning techniques as the site of an expansion of (the meaning of) images. Lee also poses a question that is relevant for pattern recognition vis-à-vis representation: “Could such an image err on the side of hyper-visibility, in which viewers may perceive all an image has to offer on its surface, yet be unable to grasp any meaning from it?” Lee, “Machine Learning and Notions of the Image” (PhD diss., University of Copenhagen, 2020, 147).
Vladan Joler and Matteo Pasquinelli, “The Nooscope Manifested. AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism,” online essay, 2020, https://nooscope.ai/.
Joler and Pasquinelli.
Joler and Pasquinelli, 12.
Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015), 374.
A term that I have, with Abelardo Gil-Fournier, used in our work on environmental surfaces and images. See, for example, the video piece Seed, Image, Ground (2020) at https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/situations-post/seed-image-ground/.
Throughout this discussion of platforms and invisual observations, there’s a strong connection to N. Katherine Hayles’s work on nonconscious cognition as a key parallel theoretical strand. The notion of invisuality speaks to this bundle of sensors and recursive loops of operations: “Nonconscious cognitions are increasingly embedded in complex systems in which low-level interpretative processes are connected to a wide variety of sensors, and these processes in turn are integrated with higher-level systems that use recursive loops to perform more sophisticated cognitive activities such as drawing inferences, developing proclivities, and making decisions that feed forward into actuators, which perform actions in the world.” N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 24.
Bratton, Stack, 374.
Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
“Although extreme, Baudrillard’s conflation of information (and thus computation) with transparency resonates widely in popular and scholarly circles, from fears over and propaganda behind national databases to examinations of ‘surveillance society.’ This conflation is remarkably at odds with the actual operations of computation: for computers to become transparency machines, the fact that they compute—that they generate text and images rather than merely represent or reproduce what exists elsewhere—must be forgotten.” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 19 (Winter 2004): 26.
See, for example, Lev Manovich, Cultural Analytics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020).
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2017); Bratton, Stack.
In Bratton’s definition: “A platform may be defined as a standards-based technical-economic system that may simultaneously distribute interfaces into that system through their remote coordination and centralizes their integrated control through that same coordination. Platform logic refers first to the abstracted systems logic of platforms and the tendency on the part of some systems and social processes to transform themselves according to the needs of the platforms that may serve and support them, both in advance of their participation with that platform and as a result of that participation.” Stack, 374.
Ruggero Eugeni and Patricia Pisters, “The Artificial Intelligence of a Machine: Moving Images in the Age of Algorithms” NECSUS, July 6, 2020, https://necsus-ejms.org/the-artificial-intelligence-of-a-machine-moving-images-in-the-age-of-algorithms/.
Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern, and Joe Shaw, eds., How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables (London: Meatspace Press, 2019).
Instead of “visible/invisible,” Pasquinelli’s term for machine learning operations is another visual metaphor that refers to renaissance and seventeenth-century painting: “Machine learning’s view of the world is also anamorphic: Even if it respects the shape, or topology, of the world, it distorts its proportions.” Matteo Pasquinelli, “How a Machine Learns and Fails—A Grammar of Error for Artificial Intelligence,” Spectres, November 20, 2019, https://spheres-journal.org/.
Jannice Käll, Posthuman Property and Law: Commodification and Control through Information, Smart Spaces and Artificial Intelligence (London: Routledge, 2022).
Sarah Keenan, Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 17.
My aim here is not to venture into questions that experts in contemporary critical legal scholarship already discuss in detail.
Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, trans. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018).
Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London: Verso, 2017), 47.
Approaching these issues from a slightly different angle, more focused on the subject, see Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020).
Sean Cubitt on the politics of the mass image: “A database hoard of unregarded X-rays or unwatched CCTV footage is an affirmation of the world’s existence. It states the facts. It is they rather than the tiny number of photographs we actually pay attention to that constitute the record of reality. The reality they record becomes reality through these records.” Cubitt, Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 225. On cloud computing and data as sites of pattern recognition, see also Amoore, Cloud Ethics, 49.
See Andrew Fisher, “On the Scales of Photographic Abstraction,” Photographies 9, no. 2 (2016): 203–15.
Actionrecognition.net online at http://actionrecognition.net/files/dset.php.
Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 72.
On cinema and cybernetics, see Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, trans. Daniel Hendrickson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
While formatting pertains to “organisation of data into a dataset” (Joler and Pasquinelli, “Nooscope Manifested”), the produced statistical model itself becomes an operation of formatting the world according to its calculated, weighted prescriptions.
Steyerl, Duty Free Art, 47.
Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, “A Life More Photographic: Mapping the Networked Image,” Photographies 1, no. 1 (2008): 9–28. See also Andrew Dewdney and Katrina Sluis, eds., The Networked Image in Post-digital Culture (London: Routledge, 2022).
For a complementary perspective on the visual culture of computing, including on infrastructures of rendering, see Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal’s work including his PhD dissertation (forthcoming as a book): Dhaliwal, “Rendering the Computer: A Political Diagrammatology of Technology,” PhD diss., UC Davis, 2021, Publication # 28540442 on ProQuest.
For an interesting discussion of this history, see Leonardo Impett, “The Image-Theories behind Computer Vision,” #DHNord2020—The Measurement of Images, November 19, 2020, https://www.meshs.fr/page/theimaget201021155656.
See, for example, “Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets,” Excavating AI, September 19, 2019, https://excavating.ai/.
Nicolas Malevé, “On the Data Set’s Ruins,” AI & Society 36 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01093-w.
See Uliasz, “Seeing Like an Algorithm.”
Malevé, “On the Data Set’s Ruins.”
This is a candid reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the haecceity as a singularity consisting of intensities, not merely a divisible instance of a general concept or unit. “A cloud of locusts carried in by the wind at five in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night, a werewolf at full moon. It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 262.
Amoore, Cloud Ethics, 163.
Referring to the JPEG, Hoelzl and Marie write: “The ‘Photographic’ in Joint Photographic Experts Group stands for ‘continuous-tone still images,’ which are images with smooth transitions such as paintings, photographs or drawings, in contrast to ‘discrete tone images’ such as line drawings. For the JPEG group, the ‘photographic’ is no longer tied to a specific recording and printing technology; instead, the term designates an array of digital images that can be compressed in the same manner. Put differently, ‘photographic’ designates a particular aesthetic distribution (continuous-tone) of pixels that can be correlated with each other during the compression process.” Hoelzl and Marie, Softimage, 69.
This is on par with Kember and Zylinska, who argue that new media should not be seen as a collection of “discrete objects” but as processes of mediation and remediation. Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012).
Impett, “Image-Theories.”
Relevantly, Louise Amoore’s use of the term “aperture” carries forward a camera-based technique into the question of a machine learning and cloud analytic, but as she points out, it is actually about cultural techniques of “dividing, selecting, and narrowing the focus of attention.” Amoore, Cloud Ethics, 162. Bootstrapping optical terms is done both to establish a continuity from digital data to earlier regimes of distribution of visuality and to ensure those are not seen only in terms of seeing or optics of vision: they are, fundamentally, about openings and ethicopolitical closures, to paraphrase Amoore.
Daniel Chávez Heras and Tobias Blanke, “On Machine Vision and Photographic Imagination,” AI & Society 36 (2021), https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/on-machine-vision-and-photographic-imagination/18595710?fulltextView=true.
Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 6. See also Jane Birkin, Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021).
Sekula, 5.
Sekula, 58.
Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images.” The phrasing was already used by Paul Virilio in The Vision Machine: “Once we are definitely removed from the realm of direct or indirect observation of synthetic images created by the machine for the machine, instrumental virtual images will be for us the equivalent of what a foreigner’s mental pictures already represent: an enigma.” (60).
On the chemistry of visual culture, see Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion, 2005).
Malevé, “On the Data Set’s Ruins.”
Benjamin, Race after Technology.
“PPB consists of 1,270 individuals from three African countries (Rwanda, Senegal, and South Africa) and three European countries (Iceland, Finland, and Sweden), selected for gender parity in the national parliaments.” The Gender Shades project site is at https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/gender-shades/overview/.
Pasquinelli, “How a Machine Learns and Fails.”
Pasquinelli.
Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 38.
Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012).
This is a point articulated in more detail by Amoore in Cloud Ethics. Furthermore, to note: the notion of bias has its technical meaning in deep learning and this is in danger of getting confused with the more social, everyday meaning of bias. See also Käll, Posthuman Property and Law.
See Noopur Raval, “Interrupting Invisibility in a Global World,” ACM Interactions, July–August 2021, https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2021/interrupting-invisibility-in-a-global-world.
Here, the work of ethnographic studies of various aspects of digital labor has been instrumental in elaborating the embodied aspects and real-world situations of, for example, Turkers, but also the other labor of content moderation, among other things. See, for example, Lilly Irani, “Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk,” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1 (2015): 225–34. See also Ben Burbridge, Photography after Capitalism (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2020).
Malevé, “On the Data Set’s Ruins.”
On topos and media archaeology, see Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine. Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 27–47.
Joanna Zylinska, “Undigital Photography: Image-Making beyond Computation and AI,” in Dvořák and Parikka, Photography Off the Scale, 231–52.
As Rosemary Lee points out in her PhD dissertation about AI and images, there are interesting earlier examples of experimental processes of algorithmization of the operator as a way to create images. As Lee argues, avant-garde examples range from early twentieth-century automatism and procedural practices as well as post–World War II avant-garde techniques of regularity, chance, and procedure, not least in the works of John Cage, Fluxus, etc. But also in early computer art, the idea of the extended site of execution of algorithmic instructions takes place. Quoting Lee: “Vera Molnár, an early proponent of computer art, explored the artistic and aesthetic potential of computational processes in paintings created according to what the artist referred to as an imaginary machine, or ‘machine imaginare’ (1960). Following algorithmic instructions to execute the paintings, the artist took on the conceptual role of a computer—one that (or whom) computes. The computational dimension of these works is attributable, thus, not to a digital computer, but to computation as a procedure enacted in order to produce the work.” Lee, “Machine Learning,” 54.
Quoted in Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “‘Stars Should Henceforth Register Themselves’: Astrophotography at the Early Lick Observatory,” British Journal for the History of Science 30, no. 2 (June 1997): 188. On the standardization of images as labor, he writes: “As historians have come to realize, the assumption that because scientific practices are social they are nothing but social misses what is most interesting: how these practices come to produce things—standardized animals, theories, experimental data, photographs—that are reasonably trustworthy” (202).
Lindsay Smith Zrull, “Women in Glass: Women at the Harvard Observatory during the Era of Astronomical Glass Plate Photography, 1875–1975,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 52, no. 2 (2021): 115–46.
“Labour in a single shot” workshops’ website at https://www.labour-in-a-single-shot.net/en/films/.
I will return later to the topic through a discussion of logistics of the image as it pertains to capitalism and labor through Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015). See also Thomas Stubblefield, “Database Labour: Supply Chains, Logistics, and Flow,” in Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives on Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s Global Video Project, ed. Roy Grundmann, Peter J. Schwartz, and Gregory H. Williams (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 329–45.
On a slightly different level, but related to data and work, Aaron Koblin’s sheep work is one such proxy of labor: 10,000 drawings of a sheep commissioned through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/thesheepmarket/.
“Image-model” is the architecture theorist John May’s term, referring to the contemporary form of statistical images and statistical seeing that relates to possible futures: “Image-models contain simulations of all possible futures.” John May, Signal, Image, Architecture (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019), 97.
Estelle Blaschke, “From Microform to the Drawing Bot: The Photographic Image as Data,” Grey Room 75 (Spring 2019): 65. On questions of active, operational memory in computer history with implications for operational archives, see Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 67. Halpern writes of memory as “an active site for the management and execution of . . . operations.” See also Amoore, Cloud Ethics, 50.
Here, I would not go so far as to claim that diagrams are the opposite of images, but that the operative diagrammatic—as well as the cultural techniques such as tables and charts—features as the persistent distorted doppelgänger variations of the operational image. Wolfgang Ernst’s term “operative diagrammatics” develops C. S. Peirce’s notion of a graphic visualization of a scheme that Ernst, in his own words, extends from the observer to the material circuitry. Instead of reading this as opposite to an image as Ernst implies, I see these as different aspects of the image, actualized in the operational image that can also feature diagrams. See Wolfgang Ernst, Technológos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology and the Computational Machine (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
Janet Vertesi’s Seeing Like a Rover is an excellent case of operational images in scientific remote sensing (such as the Mars Rover). The analysis of digital images demonstrates the different practices of composition at play. This ranges from the centrality of the community of scientists and operators to the described importance of the digital CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) sensor as the basis for photon detection that can be operationalized in relation to diagnostics of material composition: “When paired with optical filters, pixel values reveal information about an imaged object’s ability to reflect light in a particular wavelength. This can be used as a diagnostic tool to identify mineralogical composition” (75). Similarly, an example like the use of false color images is fitting for addressing the invisuality of epistemic imaging. To quote Vertesi again: “False color, to the Rover scientists, does not imply a false image; nor is the image artificially painted to produce spectacular views. Rather, the colors arise from a mathematical relation between pixels across the included image frames, enabling the viewer to see when objects in the scene reflect light in different wavelengths. Thus the distribution of colors in a false color image demarcates, highlights, or otherwise identifies invisible features of the imaged terrain” (80). From Janet Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Joseph Vogl, “Becoming-Media: Galileo’s Telescope,” trans. Brian Hanrahan, Grey Room 29 (Winter 2008): 14–25, 17.
Vogl, 22. See also Dvořák, “Beyond Human Measure.”
See, for example, the special issue of Log journal on “Model Behavior” (Fall 2020) for an overview of discussions in architecture.
Geimer, Inadvertent Images, 146.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 256.
See Amoore, Cloud Ethics, 47–55.
See Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 379–99.
Pasquinelli, “How a Machine Learns and Fails.”
See Birgit Schneider, “Climate Model Simulation Visualization from a Visual Studies Perspective,” WIREs Clim Change 3 (2012):185–93, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.162.
Joler and Pasquinelli, “Nooscope Manifested.”
Amoore’s notion of the cloud analytic is here again a relevant reference point. Amoore, Cloud Ethics.
Amoore.
See, for example, Bernhard Siegert, Passage des Digitalen (Berlin: Brinkman & Bose, 2003); John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of the Diagram (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010); Sybille Krämer, Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis: Grundlinien einer Diagrammatologie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016).
The focus on practice, on praxis, is here indebted to McKenzie Wark’s discussion on the problematic mode of contemplation and erasure of praxis in Object-Oriented Ontology. See Wark, General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2017), 269–85
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?” New Literary History 15, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 503–4.
On the politics of AI, see Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).
Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 383. See also Nina Samuel, “Images as Tools: On Visual Epistemic Practices in the Biological Sciences,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44, no. 2 (June 2013): 225–36
See Dhaliwal, “Rendering the Computer.” See also NVIDIA, “GPU-Based Deep Learning Inference: A Performance and Power Analysis,” White Paper, November 2015, https://www.nvidia.com/content/tegra/embedded-systems/pdf/jetson_tx1_whitepaper.pdf; and Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey E. Hinton, “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (2012): 1–9, https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2012/file/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436e924a68c45b-Paper.pdf.
Gaboury, Image Objects, 27–54.
3. The Measurement-Image
Matthew C. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Mackenzie and Munster scaffold their analysis of platform seeing and invisuality through Henri Bergson’s early twentieth-century ontology that described the universe and matter as images. Adrian Mackenzie and Anna Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 3–5.
Donna Haraway, “Persistence of Vision,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002), 679.
Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 16.
Flusser, 16.
See Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm (New York: FSG Originals/Logic, 2020). Technical images might work by statistical abstractions, but this does not lessen their material force. It only demonstrates that abstractions also organize worlds—for better or for worse. Many cultural theorists still say “for worse” due to an aversion to abstractions seen as disembodied and alienating. Still, there might be more nuanced accounts available about the politics of abstractions that can be developed through discussions of operational images. For example, research on the politics of climate images and models is a good example of awareness of the connection between concrete (in)visual practices and calculated abstractions such as predictions and forecasting. See Birgit Schneider, Klimabilder: Eine Genealogie globaler Bildpolitiken von Klima und Klimawandel (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018); and Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010).
Volker Pantenburg, “Working Images: Harun Farocki and the Operational Image,” in Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict, ed. Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 55.
Nora Alter, “Two or Three Things I Know about Harun Farocki,” October 151 (Winter 2015): 151–58.
Mary Terrall, “Representing the Earth’s Shape: The Polemics Surrounding Maupertuis’s Expedition to Lapland,” Isis 83, no. 2 (June 1992): 218.
Valérie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner, and Bruno Latour, “Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 4 (August 2010): 582.
This topic is also discussed in our recent book Photography Off the Scale, which is one reference point for my chapter here and my colleague Tomas Dvořák’s recent writing on photographic measure. Tomas Dvořák, “Beyond Human Measure: Eccentric Metrics in Visual Culture,” in Photography Off the Scale, ed. Tomas Dvořák and Jussi Parikka (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 41–60; Tomas Dvořák and Jussi Parikka, “Measuring Photographs,” Photographies 14, no. 3 (2021): 443–57.
Harun Farocki, “Commentary from ‘Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges,’” Discourse 15, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 79, 78–92.
Albrecht Meydenbauer, “Das Denkmäler-Archiv und seine Herstellung durch das Messbild-Verfahren,” 1896, online scanned at Landesbibliothek Coburg, http://digital.bib-bvb.de/view/bvbmets/viewer.0.6.4.jsp?folder_id=0&dvs=1662325927377~5&pid=10981138&locale=en_US&usePid1=true&usePid2=true.
Arago quoted in Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 205.
Here the terminology of “immobile mobiles” (Latour) is apt in describing this process of transporting measurements and images as data back to centers of calculation (centers of viewing, seeing, analyzing). Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 32.
On instrumental images and climatology, see Birgit Schneider, Klimabilder: Eine Genealogie globaler Bildpolitiken von Klima und Klimawandel (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018).
Joel McKim, “Into the Universe of Rendered Architectural Images,” Unthinking Photography, June 2019, https://unthinking.photography/articles/into-the-universe-of-rendered-architectural-images. To quote McKim in full: “Other developments in rendering software, by companies like Lumion, are making the translation of CAD drawings to photo-realistic still and animated visualisations virtually automated and instantaneous through the use of image libraries of objects, scenery and materials. Architectural renders, in other words, are increasingly becoming crucial tools within real-time design practices—we could call them ‘operative’ or ‘operational’ images, to use a term employed by both the filmmaker Harun Farocki and the philosopher Sybille Krämer. As operational images, renders need perhaps to be interpreted and questioned less in terms of what they represent, and more in terms of what they are capable of doing, what sorts of effects they bring about, and what kinds of futures they project.”
See Raymond Bellour, “The Photo-Diagram,” in Against What? Against Whom? ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (London: Koenig Books and Raven Row, 2009), 147.
Sybille Krämer, Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis: Grundlinien einer Diagrammatologie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 14–17, 131. See also again Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition.”
Joerg Albertz, “140 years of ‘Photogrammetry’: Some Remarks on the History of Photogrammetry,” asprs.org, May 2007, 504, https://www.asprs.org/wp-content/uploads/pers/2007journal/may/lookback.pdf.
Albertz, 504.
For the price list, see Meydenbauer, “Das Denkmäler-Archiv.”
Lacan in “On the Gaze as Objet Petit a,” quoted in Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021), 38.
On the concept of the navigational image, see the e-flux special issue (June 2019) Navigation beyond Vision at https://www.e-flux.com/journal/101/.
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 17–21.
Weizman, 20.
For several insights into the history of science of technical, instrumental images, see Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
See, for example, Aimé Laussedat, Leçons sur l’art de lever les plans : Comprenant les levers de terrain et de bâtiment, la pratique du nivellement ordinaire, et le lever des courbes horizontales à l’aide des instruments les plus simples (Paris: Impr. Impériale, 1861).
Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Mirror, The Window and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 168–69.
A more detailed media archaeology would pay attention to such key operations as Girard Desargues’s perspective calculation from the mid-seventeenth century. Here, perspectival drawing and modeling moved to a methodology that allowed us to model objects in hypothetical geometrical space. Thank you to Pasi Väliaho for pointing to Desargues’s fascinating work. For a link between perspective and phantom space (as well as architecture), see Iman Fayyad, “Phantom Space,” Log 43 (Summer 2018): 139–52.
Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn: Design beyond Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 101–14. For a detailed analysis on why computer graphics is not about linear perspective as visuality but as instructions for rendering, see Gaboury, Image Objects.
Also, Aimé Laussedat seems to refer to it in such terms at the back of the history of the linear perspective and descriptive geometry. Laussedat, Recherches sur les instruments, les méthodes et le dessin topographiques: Tome 2 (Paris, 1898–1903), 14, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Sciences et techniques, 8-V-27824 (2).
Mary Ann Doane, “Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and the Cinema,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (Winter 1996), 328.
Apophenia in these terms appears in Benjamin Bratton’s work as well as Hito Steyerl’s. See, for example, chapter 5 in Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London: Verso, 2017).
Alphonse Bertillon, “Selections from Theoretical Study of Signalment (1896),” in Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, ed. Walead Beshty (Zürich: Luma and CCS Bard, 2019), 181; Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.
See also Erika Balsom, “Moving Bodies: Captured Life in the Late Works of Harun Farocki,” Journal of Visual Culture 18, no. 3 (2019): 358–77.
Balsom, 363.
Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 40–51.
Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 66
Balsom, “Moving Bodies,” 363. As a sidenote, I point the curious reader to look up a particular measuring device that Alberti proposed in the sixteenth century, which itself was to reproduce proportions and shapes of the human body / sculpture with precision. The device, called “the definitor,” features in Alberti’s De Statua (at least in the first Italian translation of 1568) and is also described in Carpo, Second Digital Turn, 117–19.
“In Western societies, straight lines are ubiquitous. We see them everywhere, even when they do not really exist. Indeed, the straight line has emerged as a virtual icon of modernity, an index of the triumph of rational, purposeful design over the vicissitudes of the natural world.” Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 152
William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 45–77.
Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 94.
Carpo, Second Digital Turn, 115.
Carpo, 115–17.
Gaspard Monge, Géométrie descriptive: 4e édition augmentée d’une théorie des ombres et de la perspective (Paris: Vve Courcier, 1820), 1. For an overview on Mongean geometry as well as an insight into the British alternative context of using isometric perspectives, see Peter J. Booker, A History of Engineering Drawing (London: Northgate, 1979).
Monge, 1.
Kittler, Optical Media, 94.
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Aimé Sanson de Pongerville, Gaspard Monge et l’expédition d’Égypte (Paris, 1860).
John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of the Diagram (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 2010), 156; Booker, History of Engineering Drawing, 92.
Arago, quoted in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), 39 (epub version).
Laussedat, Recherches sur les instruments, 4–6, 14.
Laussedat, 14.
Thank you to Xinyi Wen for pointing me to the case of the graphical telescope by Varley. See Xinyi Wen, “The Quest for ‘Perfect Truth’ Embodiment, Objectivity, and Cornelius Varley’s Graphic Telescope” (MPhil essay, Cambridge University, 2020). Wen is referring to the questions of truth-to-nature and mechanical objectivity as articulated by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010). On camera lucida and Laussedat, see also Stuart I. Granshaw, “Laussedat Bicentenary: Origins of Photogrammetry,” Photogrammetric Record 34, no. 166 (June 2019): 131–32.
Kittler, Optical Media, 118.
See Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Larrie D. Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 252. Furthermore, territorial expansion meant in many cases property expansion, including land taxation rights for the East Indian Company. Thanks for this note goes to Pasi Väliaho.
Schneider, Klimabilder, 146–49.
Josef Maria Eder, History of Photography, 4th ed., trans. Edward Epstean (New York: Dover, 1978), 398 (Orig. pub. 1932).
Granshaw, “Laussedat Bicentenary,” 128.
John Law, “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India,” Sociological Review 32, no. 1 (1984): 234–63. See also Peter Sloterdijk, In the Interior World of Capital, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 98–101.
Richard Copeland’s preface to Beautemps-Beaupré’s An Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying and the Construction of Sea-Charts, trans. Richard Copeland (London: R. H. Laurie, 1823), vi.
Cubitt, Practice of Light, 53.
Laussedat, Recherches sur les instruments, 12n2, 23–24.
Anthony Vidler, “Photourbanism: Planning the City from Above and from Below,” in A Companion to the City, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 35–45.
Cubitt, Practice of Light, 70.
Schneider, Klimabilder, 163–68.
Ingold, Lines.
Ingold, 155–56.
Ingold, 155–56.
See Weizman, Forensic Architecture; Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (London: Verso, 2021).
Sloterdijk, In the Interior World of Capital, 100.
November, Camacho-Hübner, and Latour, “Entering a Risky Territory,” 585.
November, Camacho-Hübner, and Latour, 586–87.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History, 40 (epub version).
For a detailed view that is more complex than what I mention, see Michael Kershaw, “The ‘Nec Plus Ultra’ of Precision Measurement: Geodesy and the Forgotten Purpose of the Metre Convention,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43 (2012): 563–76.
Rankin, After the Map, 280.
Rankin, 281.
Law, “Methods of Long-Distance Control.”
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 15.
In what is now northern Finland, including locations such as Tornio and Kittilä, or “Kittis.”
In what is now Ecuador.
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, La figure de la terre: Déterminée par les observations de Mm de Maupertuis (Paris, 1738), v.
Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth, 28. For travel descriptions of the Northern expedition, see de Maupertuis, La figure de la terre.
Terrall, “Representing the Earth’s Shape,” 219.
On differences between photogrammetry and remote sensing, see also Armin Gruen, “Everything Moves: The Rapid Changes in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing,” Geo-spatial Information Science 24, no. 1 (2021): 33–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/10095020.2020.1868275.
Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition.”
Latour, 220.
Isaac Todhunter, A History of the Mathematical Theories of Attraction and the Figure of the Earth: From the Time of Newton to That of Laplace, vol. 1. (London, 1873), 97.
Terrall, “Representing the Earth’s Shape,” 227–37. In addition, gravity measurements with the help of a pendulum were meant to correlate results about the shape of the earth. “Important pendulum experiments were made at Pello, which is close to Kittis. The result is that a pendulum which oscillates in a second at Paris will make 59 more oscillations in 24 hours at Pello than at Paris” (99).
Terrall, 223.
Terrall, 223.
Terrall, 223.
Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth, 150. The measurement unit of “toise” is about 6.39 feet, or 1.949 meters.
See also Denis Cosgrove, A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
On the point of simulation of the earth from Albrecht Dürer onward, see also Leon Gurevitch, “Google Warming: Google Earth as Eco-machinima,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20, no. 1 (2014): 85–107.
Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth, 133.
Azoulay, Potential History, 5–6.
Gurevitch, “Google Warming.”
Carpo, Second Digital Turn, 120–29.
Gaboury, Image Objects. See also Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of Vision: The War between Data and Images (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017).
4. Operational Aesthetic
Leon Gurevitch, “Google Warming: Google Earth as Eco-machinima,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20, no. 1 (2014): 103. See also Denis Cosgrove, A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Roland Meyer, “Formatting Faces: Standards of Production, Networks of Circulation, and the Operationalization of the Photographic Portrait,” in Format Matters, ed. Marek Jancovic, Axel Volmar, and Alexandra Schneider (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2020), 163. On formats more broadly, see also Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).
Thomas Elsaesser, “Simulation and Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals,” Animation: An Interdsciplinary Journal 12, no. 3 (2017): 214–29.
Rosa Menkman, Beyond Resolution (2020) project page, https://beyondresolution.info/Beyond-Resolution-1.
A reminder that the notion of territory is, itself, already a calculative category as Stuart Elden notes: “It comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain, and measure and control—the technical and the legal—must be thought alongside the economic and strategic.” Elden, “Land, Terrain, Territory,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 6 (December 2010): 799. This approach underpins the relation of the operational image to territory—or territory already itself full of operational schemas of the sort that Elden lists.
Birgit Schneider, Klimabilder: Eine Genealogie globaler Bildpolitiken von Klima und Klimawandel (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018), 115.
Anders Engberg-Pedersen also addresses “operational aesthetics,” and it is the title of one of the chapters in his forthcoming book, Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2023).
See Cormac Deane, “The Control Room: A Media Archaeology,” Culture Machine 16, https://culturemachine.net/vol-16-drone-cultures/the-control-room/.
Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2020).
Elsaesser, “Simulation,” 219. On aesthetics of the interface as “regulation,” see Jan Distelmayer’s argument about the graphical user interface as a site of operations: “This tradition presents the aesthetics of regulation as an ‘order of selectivity’—offering options and reassuring usability as a freedom of choice in the form of menus, buttons, lists, and the like. This ‘freedom as control’ is a question of strictly defined and prepared choices.” Distelmayer, “Carrying Computerization: Interfaces, Operations, Depresentations,” in Image—Action—Space: Situating the Screen in Visual Practice, ed. Luisa Feiersinger, Kathrin Friedrich, and Moritz Queisner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 64.
Ilka Brasch, Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910–1940 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018); Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge:1995), 7–105; Lisa Trahair, “The Narrative-Machine: Buster Keaton’s Cinematic Comedy, Deleuze’s Recursion Function and the Operational Aesthetic,” Senses of Cinema, October 2004, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/comedy-and-perception/keaton_deleuze.
Harris, quoted in Brasch, 44.
Neil Harris, “The Operational Aesthetic,” in Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading, ed. Tony Bennett (London: Routledge, 1990), 402.
Wanda Strauven, “The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 148–63. See also Seth Giddings, Toy Theory (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, forthcoming).
Gunning, “Crazy Machines,” 100. See also Trahair, “Narrative-Machine.”
Marianne van den Boomen, quoted in Distelmeyr, “Carrying Computerization,” 61.
On visibility and software, source code, and more, see also Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011).
See also Ryan Bishop on “autotechnological” education in Bishop, Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Brasch, Film Serials, 58
Brasch, 59.
Brasch, 61. See also Paul DeMarinis, “Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 211–38.
See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Geocinema, The Making of Earths (2020), ZKM Critical Zones exhibition, https://geocinema-zkm.netlify.app/.
See for example Blair Thornton, “Robotics and Autonomy: Exploring Earth’s Inner Space,” lecture given at the 2019 Centre for Machine Intelligence Symposium, University of Southampton, October 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNjVh0VvMNk&feature=youtu.be.
Recursions is also a theoretical figure picked up by Shaoling Ma in her analysis of Chinese state sensing projects as they recursively operate on different scales from policy discourses to questions of surveillance of ethnic minorities. Ma, “Big Earths of China: Remotely Sensing Xinjiang along the Belt and Road,” Critical Inquiry 49, no. 1 (Autumn 2022): 77–101.
See Ma, “Big Earths of China.”
Stefanie Hessler, Prospecting Ocean (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2019).
The Anthropocene Observatory was funded and produced by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW, Berlin) and executed by the Territorial Agency (John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog), Armin Linke, and Anselm Franke.
“Across a number of specific international agencies and organisations, information about scientific research is acquired, registered, evaluated, processed, stored, archived, organised and re-distributed. These behind-the-scenes processes and practices, that lead to the equally complex decision making procedures, form new discourses and figures of shift. The Anthropocene Observatory documents these practices in a series of short films, interviews and documentary materials: aim of the project is to illustrate in detail the unfolding of the thesis of the Anthropocene in its many streams of influence.” The Anthropocene Observatory project, https://www.territorialagency.com/anthropocene.
For an extended discussion of critical zones, observatories, and environmental imaging and art practices, see Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2020).
Digital Earth as a name is not related to Digital Earth as the term used in the DBAR context.
Geocinema Network home page, https://geocinema.network/.
Geocinema Network home page.
H. D. Guo, Z. Liu, and L. W. Zhu, “Digital Earth: Decadal Experiences and Some Thoughts,” International Journal of Digital Earth, 3, no. 1 (2010): 31–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/17538941003622602.
“2009 Beijing Declaration on Digital Earth,” International Journal of Digital Earth, 2, no. 4 (2009): 397–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/17538940903444380.
Z. Liu, T. Foresman, J. van Genderen, and L. Wang, “Understanding Digital Earth,” in Manual of Digital Earth, ed. H. Guo, M. F. Goodchild, and A. Annoni (Singapore: Springer, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9915-3_1.
Liu et al.
Ma, “Big Earths of China.” See also Gabriele de Seta, “Gateways, Sieves and Domes: On the Infrastructural Topology of the Chinese Stack,” International Journal of Communication 15 (2021):2669–92.
Andrew Chatzky and James McBride, “China’s Massive Belt and Road Initiative,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 28, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative.
Chatzky and McBride.
Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari, and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, “Prologue to the Sky River,” Avery Review 53 (2021), http://averyreview.com/issues/53/prologue-to-the-sky-river.
Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess, “The Future Forecast,” e-flux, February 1, 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/new-silk-roads/313108/the-future-forecast/.
Bazdyrieva and Suess.
Huadong Guo, “Big Earth Data: A New Frontier in Earth and Information Sciences,” Big Earth Data 1, nos. 1–2 (2017): 9.
Ma, “Big Earths of China,” 95.
Liu et al., “Understanding Digital Earth.”
Liu et al.
Liu et al.
Liu et al.
John Tresch, “Cosmologies Materialized: History of Science and History of Ideas,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 155. On the multitude of globes, see also Cosgrove, Cartographic Genealogy.
On the powers of administration, see also John Guillory on the information genre. Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 108–32.
See Hai Ren, “Infrastructure as a Planetary Sculpture: The Future of the Belt and Road Initiative in the Anthropocene,” Belt & Road in Global Perspective, March 18, 2021, https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/beltandroad/article/infrastructure-as-a-planetary-sculpture-the-future-of-the-belt-and-road-initiative-in-the-anthropocene.
Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 32.
Geocinema, “Footnotes to the Making of Earths,” n.d., https://geocinema-zkm.netlify.app/.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?” in New Media, Old Media, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 17, 13–25.
Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, trans. Daniel Hendrickson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
Geocinema, “Footnotes.”
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen,” Representations 147, no. 1 (2019): 59–95.
As Cormac Deane argues in “The Control Room” article, at the back of the Control and Command doctrine that materializes in those architectural spaces, a row of imagined spaces of interfaces of control also emerge that feature a peculiar variety of operational images—namely Fantasy User Interfaces. Such fictional entities feature mostly in science fiction cinema, from The Bourne Identity (2002) to Children of Men (2006) and many others. Deane argues that “the FUIs on display in these films enable a scientific, or scientific-seeming, gaze that visualizes features of an environment that are otherwise invisible (infra-red, nano-scale, informational, unrecorded, behind corners, etc.). The FUI often renders bodies, objects, and buildings transparent, producing schematic images of them that can be rotated on several axes.” But observation is often less exciting than prescribed in fantasy images, and diagrammatic invisuality is harder to demonstrate in a pictorial fashion.
Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books 2015), 208, emphasis in the original. See also Thomas Stubblefield, “Database Labour: Supply Chains, Logistics, and Flow,” in Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives on Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s Global Video Project, ed. by Roy Grundmann, Peter J. Schwartz, and Gregory H. Williams (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 329–45.
Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, 213–14.
Bazdyrieva and Suess, “Future Forecast.” In this passage they quote Huadong Guo et al., “Big Earth Data: A New Challenge and Opportunity for Digital Earth’s Development,” International Journal of Digital Earth 10 (November 2017): 1–12.
On this sort of double geography and data, see Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020), 29–55.
Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 159.
See Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity & Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg, 2016).
For a critical reading, see also chapter 2, “The Ship: Transatlantic,” in Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).
Bazdyrieva and Suess, “Future Forecast.”
See Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
For a longer discussion of ground truth and “fake” geographies, see Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka, “Ground Truth to Fake Geographies: Machine Vision and Learning in Visual Practices,” AI & Society 36, 1253–62 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01062-3.
Asunder project website at https://asunder.earth/.
On workshops and artistic methods, see Daphne Dragona, “What Is Left to Subvert? Artistic Methodologies for a Post-digital World,” in Across and Beyond: A Transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions, ed. Ryan Bishop et al. (Berlin: Sternberg, 2016), 186–98.
Part of the transmediale 2018 theme Face Value and in collaboration with other colleagues from the Winchester School of Art, including myself, Miha Brebenel, and Ryan Bishop. https://2018.transmediale.de/program/event/surface-value-landscape-prediction-an-amt-workshop-day-1.
On visual culture and the politics of Earth observation platforms such as Global Forest Watch, see Birgit Schneider and Lynda Walsh, “The Politics of Zoom: Problems with Downscaling Climate Visualizations.” Geo: Geography and Environment 6, no. 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.70. See also Lisa Parks, “Signals and Oil: Satellite Footprints and Post-communist Territories in Central Asia,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (2009): 137–56.
Landscape Prediction, Gil-Fournier’s GitHub page: https://github.com/abe-/landscape-prediction.
I am here referring to the complex set of epistemic, design-led, speculative work at Strelka Institute’s Terraforming think tank / education program that ran from 2020 to 2022. See https://theterraforming.strelka.com/.
“This specifically modern form is what we call firmative speculation, a firming (from the late Latin firmã) or solidifying of the possibilities of the future. It is a speculative mode that seeks to pin down, delimit, constrain, and enclose—to make things definitive, firm. The ur-image of such agency is the firm, a type of business house (emerging in Germany in 1744) that capitalizes on market conditions, working toward an optimal level of production that will ensure maximum profit and minimum cost while always on the lookout for fresh opportunities for expansion—aggressively pushing its products through advertising, shaping new needs, and consuming publics.” Uncertain Commons, Speculate This (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), https://speculatethis.pressbooks.com/chapter/chapter-1/.
Melinda Cooper, “Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, nos. 2–3 (2010): 170.
Cubitt, Finite Media, 160.
Christina Vagt, “Physics and Aesthetics: Simulation as Action at a Distance,” in Action at a Distance, by John Durham Peters, Florian Sprenger, and Christina Vagt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 52.
Jimena Canales, “Operational Art,” in Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen (Baltimore: University of Maryland Press, 2014), 37–54.
Canales, 45–46.
On the centrality of the plot and tricks in design, see Benedict Singleton’s work. For an overview, see Benedict Singleton and Robin Mackay, “Yarncast: Plots, Platforms and Sinister Designs,” Urbanomic, Feb 2, 2015, https://www.urbanomic.com/podcast/yarncast-benedict-singleton-plots-platforms-and-sinister-designs/.
Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics.
5. The Post-lenticular City
Viola Zhou, “Drones Light Up Shanghai’s Sky with a QR Code (That You Can Scan)” Vice, April 20, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/88n9vb/shanghai-drone-show-qr-code.
Lawrence Grossberg, “The In-Difference of Television,” Screen 28, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 28–46.
Grossberg.
Katherine N. Hayles, “Addressing Space: Augmented, Enfolded, and Exfolded Hybrid Models and Their Implications,” lecture given at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, June 11, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCWI4_HonjI. On Shanghai urbanism, see Anna Greenspan, Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold, The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018), 81–120. See also Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).
See Jannice Käll, Posthuman Property and Law (London: Routledge, 2022).
See Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, “A Life More Photographic: Mapping the Networked Image,” Photographies 1, no. 1 (2008): 9–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/17540760701785842.
See Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken, Automating Vision: The Social Impact of the New Camera Consciousness (New York: Routledge, 2020), 55–71.
N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media (New York: Routledge, 2020), 94–112.
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 62.
Lidar imaging is divided into two kinds: “Topographic lidar typically uses a near-infrared laser to map the land, while bathymetric lidar uses water-penetrating green light to also measure seafloor and riverbed elevations.” National Ocean Service, “What Is Lidar?” https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/lidar.html.
Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). See, e.g., Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
On computer graphics, see Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021).
Some, like John May, go as far as to claim that photography and imaging are two radically separate things: “Unlike photographs, in which scenic light is made visible during chemical exposure, all imaging today is a process of detecting energy emitted by an environment and chopping it into discrete, measurable electrical charges called signals, which are stored, calculated, managed, and manipulated through various statistical methods (Bayesian, Gaussian, Poissonian).” May, Signal, Image, Architecture (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019), 45.
Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 58.
Peter Galison, “Images Scatter into Data, Data Gather into Images,” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 319.
On modeling as following, see Matthew C. Hunter, “Modeling: A Secret History of Following,” in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 45–70.
McCosker and Wilken, Automating Vision, 65–67.
See ARCore overview at https://developers.google.com/ar/discover.
Sean Cubitt, “Mass Image, Anthropocene Image, Image Commons,” in Photography Off the Scale, ed. Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 25–40.
Erika Balsom and Harun Farocki, “The New Constructivism: Erika Balsom and Harun Farocki Discuss Parallel I–IV,” in Harun Farocki: Programando o Visível, ed. Jane De Almeida (São Paolo: CinUSP, 2017), 130.
Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Some of these questions—and some of the answers—pair up with what Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman define as the “hyperaesthetic”: capacities of sensing beyond the photographic image that acknowledge that all matter can be read in relation to questions of aesthesis and thus become an element in this expanded notion of imaging. See Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (London: Verso, 2022), 71–82. Susan Schuppli’s work also speaks directly to this expanded notion of sense and imaging. For more, see Schuppli, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020).
Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
“Thus, supposing the composition of the atmosphere to be unchanged at the heights investigated, its density at these heights will be known, after making various corrections, if we can project a sufficiently strong beam of light to allow for the light scattered in a given region being detected and measured by photo-electric apparatus after collection by a large reflector.” Edward Hutchinson Synge, “A Method of Investigating the Higher Atmosphere,” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 9, no. 60 (1930): 1015.
Friedrich Kittler, “A Short History of the Searchlight,” in Operation Valhalla: Writings on War, Weapons, and Media, ed. and trans. Ilinca Iurascu, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, and Michael Wutz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021), 62–68.
Edward Hutchinson Synge, “A Suggested Method for Extending Microscopic Resolution into the Ultra-microscopic Region,” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 6, no. 35 (1928): 356–62.
Jimena Canales, “Einstein’s Discourse Networks,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 5, no. 1 (2014): 23.
Wolfgang Ernst, Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media, trans. Anthony Enns (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Joanna Zylinska, Posthuman Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017).
American Geosciences Institute, “What Is Lidar and What Is It Used For?” https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/what-lidar-and-what-it-used.
William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 15.
Rankin, 15.
See also Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Scanning: A Technical History of Form,” in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practices, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 71–102.
Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn: Design beyond Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 122.
Carpo, 122. As Sean Cubitt points out, the charge-coupled device or the CCD chip is also an interesting technical object of what I call “invisuality” (after Mackenzie and Munster) in this book: it regulates how data is shifted “from spatial to temporal and back to spatial ordering” as it organizes the incoming (photon) data via a clocking mechanism. “The CCD imposes a very specific order on the light it gathers, governed by mask, column, and clock and characterized by whole-number steps of equal duration and area. The result is an array of discrete, ordered units.” Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 101.
The interconnected ecology of sensing is central to what Gabrys writes about planetary-sensing networks too. These are less about navigation in the concrete sense of the term but part of a similar operational epistemology of sensing that also includes prediction/forecasting at different scales: “Sensors working together within a network establish a computational pattern of correspondences, where the physical sighting, sensor type, coding, and correlating of data coalesce into an environment of sensor data that inform observations. When the ‘system is the sensor’ and the network operates as a sort of distributed instrument, it might be possible to create models and forecasts of ecological processes and, through these sensor systems, act upon environments.” Gabrys, Program Earth, 43.
Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020).
Kaja Silverman, “What Is a Camera? or: History in the Field of Vision,” Discourse 15, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 3–56.
This operational aesthetic has some of its roots in the military history of the twentieth-century in the form of operational research, but the expansion to new institutional situations of management has spread across a much wider societal field since the Cold War.
Moholy-Nagy, quoted in Cubitt, Practice of Light, 95.
David Mattison, “Mountain Photography,” in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, vol. 1, ed. John Hannavy (London: Routledge, 2008), 949.
Peter Ainsworth, “Between Real and Virtual, Map and Terrain: ScanLab Projects, Post-lenticular Landscapes,” Philosophy of Photography 10, no. 2 (2019): 269–81.
See, for example, Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
May, Signal, Image, Architecture, 45.
Ainsworth, “Between Real and Virtual,” 273.
ScanLAB, “Post-lenticular Landscapes,” n.d., https://scanlabprojects.co.uk/work/post-lenticular-landscapes/.
ScanLAB.
Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 15–25.
Geoff Manaugh, “The Dream Life of Driverless Cars,” New York Times, Nov 11, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/magazine/the-dream-life-of-driverless-cars.html.
McCosker and Wilken, Automating Vision, 65.
Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, “Rendering the Computer: A Political Diagrammatology of Technology” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2021), ProQuest #28540442.
NVIDIA, “Solutions for Self-Driving Cars & Autonomous Vehicles,” n.d., https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/self-driving-cars/drive-platform.
NVIDIA, “NVIDIA Drive videos,” n.d. https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/self-driving-cars/drive-labs/.
See also Benjamin Bratton, “The City Wears Us: Notes on the Scope of Distributed Sensing and Sensation,” Glass Bead, 2017, http://www.glass-bead.org/article/city-wears-us-notes-scope-distributed-sensing-sensation/?lang=enview. Bratton writes: “For example, driverless cars are emblematic of big heavy machines sensing/learning in the streets. Their proprioceptive sensors include wheel speed sensors, altimeters, gyroscopes, tachymeters, touch sensors, while their exteroceptive sensors include multiple visual light cameras, LiDAR range finding, short- and long-range RADAR, ultrasonic sensors on the wheels, global positioning satellite systems/geolocation aerials, etc. Several systems overlap between sensing and interpretation, such as road sign and feature detection and interpretation algorithms, model maps of upcoming roads, and inter-car interaction behavior algorithms. Along the gradient from fully to partially autonomous, the humans inside provide another intelligent component that may be variously copilot or cargo, and together they form a composite User ambling through the City layer of The Stack.”
Directly quoted from the ScanLAB project page at https://ScanLABprojects.co.uk/work/dreamlife-of-driverless-cars/.
This formulation is partly an implicit reference to and riffing with Brian Massumi’s ways of talking about movement.
Manaugh, “Dream Life of Driverless Cars.”
Christian Doppler, “Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einiger anderer Gestirne des Himmels,” facsimile reproduced with a translation in Alec Eden, The Search for Christian Doppler (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1992), orig. pub. 1842.
Ryan Bishop and John Phillips, Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 101.
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen,” Representations 147 (Summer 2019): 69.
Geoghegan, 69.
Photography thus also relates to the history of spatial computing and sensors: “We can divide sensors into two large groups, passive and active. Passive sensors detect and observe electromagnetic radiation that is absorbed, reflected, or scattered from objects, and they use an external energy source from the physical environment, such as the sun. An active sensor provides its own energy source, which is directed at the object. The sensor then measures the response to the object. When we use a camera without a flash, the camera is a passive sensor, observing and recording light from the sun reflected from the objects in the camera’s lens. A camera that uses a flash provides its own light for the object and then measures and records the light that is reflected off of the object.” Sashi Shekhar and Pamela Vold, Spatial Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019), 69.
Jimena Canales, “Flash Force: A Visual History of Might, Right, and Light,” in Seeing with Eyes Closed, ed. Elena Agudio and Ivana Franke (Berlin: Association of Neuroesthetics, 2011), 34–41.
As Geoff Manaugh writes: “Humans are not the only things now sensing and experiencing the modern landscape—that something else is here, with an altogether different, and fundamentally inhuman, perspective on the built environment.” Manaugh, “Dream Life of Driverless Cars.” Humans of course never were the only ones, considering the various scales of sensing and experiencing from animals to bacteria, from organic surfaces to technical media even prior to recent computational infrastructures. See Shannon Mattern, A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences (New York: Princeton University Press, 2021). See also Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Manaugh, “Dream Life of Driverless Cars.”
See also Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and Networks,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 6 (2011): 91–112.
Chun.
Talbot, quoted in Maynard, Engine of Visualization, 152. Cf. Fuller and Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics, 79, on “the image-being of all material surfaces” in this light too.
See Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka, “‘Visual Hallucination of Probable Events’: On Environments of Images, Data, and Machine Learning.” In Big Data: A New Medium? ed. Natasha Lushetisch (New York: Routledge, 2020).
Manaugh, “Dream Life of Driverless Cars.”
See Mattern, City Is Not a Computer.
Bratton, “City Wears Us.”
Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of Vision: The War between Data and Images (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017).
See, e.g., McCosker and Wilken, Automating Vision.
Adrian Mackenzie and Anna Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 7.
Mackenzie and Munster, 18.
Fei Wang, Sanping Zhou, Stanislav Panev, Jinsong Han, and Dong Huang, “Person-in-WiFi: Fine-Grained Person Perception Using WiFi,” arXiv, March 30, 2019, 2, https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.00276.
Wang et al.
Adrian Mackenzie, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
Wang et al., “Person-in-WiFi,” 2.