1736, 1858, 1989

The previous chapter dealt with the fundamental question of what is visible against the backdrop of the invisible and the invisual. The brief genealogy moved from scientific photography to questions of data and AI. Along the way, addressing data became more central than the image in the representational sense, although it is not always clear that the two are separate. Data can be extracted from the depictive and the picturesque, which is historically part of the colonial legacy of the modes of representation as they proliferated across vast territories from the Caribbean to India and Southeast Asia, for example, alongside other data operations such as trigonometric surveys.1 In many instances and across gradual development, computation and calculation become operations of the digital image that not only were rendered but also were rendering the rest of the world as data and images.2 As usual, much more could be written and said about that particular topic, reflecting the centrality of AI for operationalizing both images—as datasets, for a range of applications—and different surfaces, planes, plans, territories, and volumes of the world as images. In the previous chapter, this was discussed as the question of formatting but resonates with the account about technical vision articulated by Donna Haraway already in the 1990s: both organic eyes and technological sensors build in “translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life,” that are developed into an account about vision as organization: “There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organising the world.”3

The point should be read literally: vision systems program possibilities of action. Technical images work as instrumental interfaces to that which cannot be grasped by fingers, hands, unmediated human perception, and as Vilém Flusser argued, focus on how “elements such as photons or electrons, on one hand, and bits of information, on the other hand, [are made] into images.”4 Images as ways of partitioning the world are based on apparatuses that “grasp the ungraspable, visualise the invisible, and conceptualise the inconceivable.”5 In this fundamental sense, images are interfaces where the epistemic and the operational coalesce. In other words, it is not only the images that we may manipulate but the data and/or territories which those images stem from and return to. Hence, operational (see Figure 5). They are formatted and, in the process, become instruments of reformatting.

Image instruments operate beyond anthropocentric life. They can also be about the amplification of, for example, processes of growth in a precision farming system or the integration of blockchain into agricultural practices.6 While the topic concerning agriculture, farming, and growth is picked up in a book that I am currently writing with Abelardo Gil-Fournier—on operational images, vegetal surfaces, and territorial management and data—the tie-in between images that are programmable and executable becomes a core concern already in the present volume. Images are part of the operational infrastructures of executing and programming different material surfaces and events, alongside the list of potential actions that the “operational” in the operational image can incorporate: targeting, analyzing, comparing, tracking, navigating, extracting, trapping, projecting, forecasting, measuring, and quantifying. I am sure others could be added to this list that features slightly different variations in different chapters. So when Pantenburg writes about Farocki’s operational images that “in this capacity to ‘act,’ . . . could be called the cynical inheritors of the aims and hopes that political or educational filmmaking has always fostered,”7 we can continue his line of thought. Technical and automated images are politics by other means: in large-scale technical systems, in institutional work of execution of commands, and in ways that are often read as part of the logistical mapping of the earth but one determined by the partial view that Haraway mentions. Thus, as per Farocki’s interest and ours, we ask: What is the political and educational image-making format that pertains to this ecology of automation? Could operational images in this key also educate the political potential of such systems, including measure and quantity?

This chapter focuses on measuring by starting with some of Farocki’s work, which channels genealogies of measurement shifting between the photographic and the cartographic, between measuring earth surfaces and measuring that is established by images. Farocki’s assemblage of moving images, the soft montage,8 becomes a starting point for a media archaeological argument of sorts. An early warning for those desiring a straightlaced story of technical images: while we begin from the story offered by Farocki regarding vision and photogrammetry (in photographic terms), this chapter will venture in a slightly aberrant direction, including geodesic measurement of the planet, one that I argue is a constitutive part in the longer history of planetary imaging and design.

Instead of offering comprehensive historical narratives, the following sections are meant to link to contemporary work on measure, data, and quantity in technical images and photography. The question of measurement will be discussed in terms of the multiscalar planes (image planes or planes made into images) that are at play in our historical examples that I hope will also frame the question of the multiple historical layers of the operational image circa 1736, 1858, and 1989. Those dates might seem random, but they have a structuring heuristic function: Farocki (1989), photogrammetry (1858), and geodesic measurement (1736). At the back of the cultural technique of measurement is the paradoxical push and pull between the seemingly straightforward quantification brought about by the precision of measurement and the de facto conflict that measurement involved, such as in the early case of the measurement of the earth: “Precision of measurements was a matter to be interpreted, attacked, defended, and represented.”9

Measurement implies standards, scales, instruments, and methods; it implies precision and mediation of that precision. This is also where images come into play: to mediate precision through images (such as in photogrammetry) and make the earth itself into an image by establishing it as measured lines (trigonometry in geodesy and later more advanced cartographic techniques). To claim maps as “platforms of calculation interface”10 becomes the link to the operational aspect of predigital instrumental images too.11 However, I want to start with Farocki himself and the rather famous scene in his film Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), which introduces central ideas of operational images.

The Measurement-Image

Sandwiched between shots of scientific wave modeling and historical photographs of unveiled Algerian women in 1960, Farocki inserted the story of Albrecht Meydenbauer, often cited as a pioneering figure of (architectural) photogrammetry (see Figure 6). Farocki narrates the near-fatal accident Meydenbauer had in 1858 when measuring the facade of Wetzlar Cathedral in Germany. Even Meydenbauer himself annotated the picture of the cathedral with the spot he almost fell from. This story is often mentioned as a historical anecdote and in commentaries related to Farocki’s operational images, but it is worthwhile to voice it again. According to the legend, and what Farocki tells us, this episode led to the desire to formalize a way of reading measurements from photographic documents of buildings in order to reshuffle questions of proximity and distance, objectivity, and personal danger—and to avoid the necessity of climbing up dangerous facades or cathedral rooftops when you can just take pictures. But for Farocki, it was also the broader context of the double aspect of such a peculiar image that was of interest: such measuring images can record what is destroyed, while images that measure are also used for military targeting. In Farocki’s voice-over:

The first major scale measurement based on photography was achieved in 1868 at the fortress of Saarlouis. Later, Meydenbauer initiated the establishment of memorial archives, which creates a correlation, in the sense that the military destroy and the curators of monuments act to preserve. He wrote: “Perhaps some would find it incredible, but it is a fact proved by experience: in a scale picture one does not see everything, but one sees many things better than on the spot.” This capacity to see better is the reverse side of mortal danger.12

Meydenbauer’s subsequent work on the use of photogrammetry consisted of a technical element—a specialist camera for the purpose of making such measurement-images (Meßbild)—and an institutional basis in cultural heritage. The latter concerned a Cultural Heritage Archive (Denkmälerarchiv) that was to be designed to keep data of buildings destroyed or otherwise lost to time. This archive plan was steeped in a nationalist celebration of German culture (and its classicist European narrative) that was first recorded and saved as buildings and then recorded and saved as data about the design. Hence this was meant as a collection of “reliable images” and “geometrical drawings”13 where photographic technology proved a reliable instrument. As Meydenbauer narrates, what was imagined in perspectival terms as a technique could be reverse-engineered with the help of the measurement-image that photogrammetry provided: technical images could provide a more accurate infrastructure of data records than the history of art historical drawings with their possible mistakes in the representation of measures and ratios. However, as a technical image, this was no ordinary photograph for that very same reason: it was built to measure and reproduce measures accurately. To be sure, the attention to detail of the architectural plan and the facade had been a central part of the photographic discourse at least since Arago, emphasizing indeed, precision: “All these pictures [of Parisian monuments] could be examined with a magnifying glass, without losing any precision.”14 The portability of precision and detail15 became part of the features of this data practice of storage and analysis that also had colonial uses (as I will argue later), putting a twist to the idea of the cultural heritage archives underpinned by colonial expeditions, such as the French in Egypt.

As such, the photogrammetric images are best seen in the lineage of scientific instruments, but they incorporate many other layers too that tie them into a discussion of operational images before and beyond digital computation and automation.16 Strictly speaking, automation does feature in Farocki’s frame for Meydenbauer too: the opening minutes of Images of the World also include the plotter printer that draws an architectural facade, establishing a link between the 130 years of historical distance from Meydenbauer to contemporary image practices: facades not only measured from an image but also reproduced in automated procedures of drawing a (vector) line, which now, in 2022, seems low-tech compared to current rendering practices used in architecture and planning (see Figure 7). Such include a broader infrastructure of computational power and the ability to mobilize a much wider digital array of data, “image libraries of objects, scenery and materials,”17 facilitating this virtual life of architectural operational images. But as far as our focus on measurement, lines, and plot(s) in images and territories goes, the link is apt, and it becomes a channel that reroutes us in the right direction.

Before Farocki starts to use the term “operational image” in the military context of targeting, pathfinding, and navigation, this reverse side of measurement and reconstruction features as part of the cinematic narrative. It builds a suggestive historical case closely related to then-circulating discourses about the Enlightenment, rationalization and visual culture, simulation, and modeling. This sequence of images and narrative includes thus the cultural heritage data collection by Meydenbauer as it does scenes of the unveiling of Algerian women for identity card pictures, as well as references to the Enlightenment—in German as Aufklärung, which includes the then meaning of the term as a period of rationalization as well as a military term referring to (aerial) reconnaissance (Luftbildaufklärung).18 What’s implied is that the Enlightenment starts from techniques of vision in the spirit proposed by operational ontologies: abstractions are bootstrapped into the world by specific operators at play that establish key material and epistemic divisions; the aerial image, the survey, the measurement-image could be quoted as such operative procedures.

Farocki’s work condenses multiple cases of archives, data, photography, and measurement in ways that become instructive of a whole genealogy of operational images that operate by way of manufacturing planes or, in Sybille Krämer’s words, cultural techniques of flattening: the ability to create such artificial objects as flat surface planes of different materials that enable diagrams, maps, measures, and other examples of operational graphics. Such planes bring together images and numbers under the auspices of measurement.19

Meydenbauer’s late nineteenth-century architectural and topographical measuring surveys are one part of the genealogy of remote sensing as they establish ways of remote capturing data that can be processed and synthesized later. The image is also a data-transporting device. The measuring-image works with the ability to capture scales, which guides the development of the bespoke instrument built in 1867 by Emil Busch in Rathenow.20 In Joerg Albertz’s summary, the photogrammetry apparatus included:

• the definition of the image plane by means of a mechanical frame, against which the photographic plate is pressed before exposure;
• the integration of an image coordinate system realized as crosshairs that are imaged on the photo plate during exposure;
• a compact camera design with a fixed focus to define the principal distance (or calibrated focal length);
• mounting on a tripod with the possibility to adjust the camera axis horizontally, the image plane vertically, and one of the image coordinate [axes] again horizontally.21

Analyzing this apparatus in the context of the operational image demonstrates a shift from focusing on the image to the operations that produce this particular kind of measurement-image. As Meydenbauer emphasizes: these are not just any photographs, but this plane is integrated with a bespoke measure of its own that can be read through an analyst’s eyes. While the technique soon developed into its own service—the Königlich Preussische Massbild-Anstalt at Schinkel-Platz 6 in Berlin—for production (40 x 40 cm), copying, and enlargement, the implications of the technique went beyond this particular price catalog.22

Measurement, as a core cultural technique at play that also includes auxiliary techniques like flattening, quantification, and standardization, is executed both through such techniques that integrate image planes with mechanical frames and, in doing so, establish a bespoke coordinate system for “navigation” of this plane. This way, the facade, the building in its right proportions, or the territory/landscape becomes integrated into an image, as an image. The pictorial qualities become secondary to the mathematical proportions, the descriptive geometric dimensions. In Lacan’s words: “What is an issue in geometric perspective is simply the mapping of space, not sight.”23 Not that the two are always opposite: the pictorial can be measured and be operative, as many of the techniques featured in this chapter, and this book generally, show. Data and the pictorial can similarly meet in the very same images in question, but the epistemic, aesthetic questions and the operations executed become the separating thread.

My interest is centered on this: What ways of life can the image establish? What possibilities does it prescribe, enable, and disable? Which routes are implemented into an image that becomes a special case of cartography—a navigational image indeed.24 Also, the other aspect of cultural techniques is here visible too: What operations does the subsequent image make possible, which institutional context is it executed in, and does “automation” mean digital automation or the sort of algorithmic power that institutions hold through their tasks, priorities, orders, and goals. This would then be the other way of reading through Farocki’s sequences as well: scientific facilities, painting, and architectural studios, but also, the Auschwitz concentration camp and the later (re)analyzed aerial reconnaissance pictures revealing the details of the chimneys of a crematorium. The images operate in a multitude of different ways: as technical images or measuring images but also later reread as different forms of evidence that Eyal Weizman has included in his work developing a methodology of counterforensics.25 What Weizman brings out in forensic architecture’s work is the double aspect of a photographic image: “At the threshold of detectability, both the surface of the negative and that of the thing it represents must be studied as both material objects and as media representations.”26 This kind of methodology could be seen as a special case of architectural imaging employing operational images and a nod to the question above about the slightly less cynical political and educational uses of operational images.

As material objects that become integral to cultural techniques of measurement and information, photographs are an example of what in this book counts as technical images.27 In other words, I am keen to backtrack from the usual preference of focusing on digital images (in discussions of operational images) to some of the constitutive ways geometry, data, measurement, and navigation are implemented onto picture planes in so-called analog images too, including in drawing but also in practices such as topographic surveys.28 Photographs and drawings are not the same—far from it—but there are some constitutive commonalities in relation to questions of measurement that will be brought to bear on the question of the operational image. Although I am not going to rehearse in detail the well-known history of linear perspectival painting as perhaps the best-known example of mathematics of Renaissance images that still operates at the back of many of our assumptions of the construction of images that construct patterns of vision. But in reference to this story from Brunelleschi to Alberti to Galileo’s “perspective tube” and its later variations in astronomic imaging, Samuel Edgerton summarizes the stakes well as far as this genealogy is one of invisuality as much as visuality and as far as it concerns technology as much as “art”: “Indeed, linear perspective may have been more important to the history of modern technology than to art and science. With this remarkable tool [of the grid] it was now possible to plan complex machines by means of exacting pictures to scale, thus allowing each connecting part to be previewed and tested from every aspect on two-dimensional paper before being manufactured into irrevocable three-dimensional fabric.”29 Although Edgerton adds that “even modern computer modeling is based on the rules of linear perspective,” I instead emphasize it the other way round: such mathematics of the image constitutes the earlier media archaeology of modeling, simulation, testing, and measurement that find their multiple instances in some of the examples in this chapter too.30 Mario Carpo also makes a similar point in his archaeology of architectural practices: from Leonardo and Alberti onwards, qualification of precision through lines (and color for Leonardo) was also a way of carrying “measure” through painting techniques and material existence. In such ways, the invention of perspectival techniques was also a notation system and an effective data compression system that operated upon the flat surface.31

Hence, significantly for our purposes, as image surfaces, photographs contain geometric ratios that can be reverse-engineered not only for such purposes of data collection and analysis that Meydenbauer mentioned but also for more advanced pattern recognition. You could call it a version of an encoding–decoding scheme,32 but this one deals less with meanings than it does with quantifiable information. As pattern recognition, it also becomes a later iteration of what can be read from the informational surface that we call “an image” (see chapter 2), whether it is seen as an information-rich entity in its singular existence or as it is serialized into a dataset. More on that soon below.

Paradoxically, in many ways, the measurement image is an information filter that reduces some information while bringing out particular geometric details. In Mary Ann Doane’s words: “There was an overcrowding of detail in the photographic method,”33 which becomes both an issue (how to see anything meaningful) and a promise (multiple hidden and invisual layers to be discovered even with the risk of data apophenia: seeing patterns where there are none.)34 This resonates with the points raised in the previous chapter about invisibility, disappearance, opacity, and data. True, Doane was talking of another kind of data visualization than what we were discussing: Etienne Jules Marey’s chronophotography as scientific imaging. But the points apply here, too, and constitute a central issue in different administrative and scientific practices of the late nineteenth century (and onward): the realization of an information-rich world captured in information-rich photographic plates demands a way to mediate between image and classification, identity and variation (or even falsification). The ones in charge of different metric practices—such as a combination of photography and anthropometrical techniques—knew this very well, such as Alphonse Bertillon being occupied with judicial matters and mass photography of his period in the 1890s: “Thus, the solution of the problem of judicial identification consists less in the search for new characteristic methods of individuality than in the discovery of a method of classification.”35

The image became a way to capture measures and proportions (but also, in Marey’s case, temporal patterns and movement) and links the practices to a particular operationalization of technical images. The photogrammetric measure of Meydenbauer and the measurement-lines (Hilfslinien) included in Marey’s chronophotographic studies represent a layer of production of data teased out with the help of the image.36 Or, more accurately, such image practices in the late nineteenth century become helpful when trying to capture what later practices of quantification and analysis can do with the measured-image. In this manner, photogrammetric images and other measurement-images are part of the techniques of machine-readability and “insights not available to the eye alone.”37 Instead of eyes, however, there were images.

Measurement Lines

Marey’s chronophotography is for a good reason a go-to example for a lot of photography and cinema scholars. It stands out both in media archaeological terms when considering the early cinematic experiments in the light of scientific imaging and how movement becomes captured as aesthetics and as data.38 While the understanding of sensation and observation went through an enormous transformation in the latter half of the nineteenth century in experimental psychology and related laboratory sciences, the role of images was not restricted to being mere auxiliary instruments. Instead, the image and what it framed had built up its own reality, stretched between two poles: the linear perspective and the subsequent capacities of technical images by the late nineteenth century.

The frame of an image had become a central unit of reference that was meant, in Marta Braun’s words, “to enclose a temporal and spatial unity.”39 The organizational capacity of the frame was also to synthesize so that it, as a cultural technique, defined “a single instant in time and in a single space”—although this is precisely what became problematized. The frame included multiple layers of movement, a “series of positions in space,” but even more so, it included a multitude of data points on the information-rich surface. This becomes obvious when we look at the more abstract images Marey produced: graphs, diagrams, and data visualization and notation systems (see figures 8, 9, 10) that not only were produced from captured human and other animal movement but also presented another answer to the question, What can the image frame (or in the context of photography, what can the plate contain) as it shifts away from representational content to an administrative entity of the quantitative kind? This is also part of the genealogy of the logistical image (see chapter 4) as far as it concerns enumeration.

Here, frames, plates, and lines are ways of showing more than the image contains at first sight. They measure and thus produce a second-order data reality, both productive and limiting, both filtering and amplifying simultaneously. As Erika Balsom puts it: “The integrality of the body vanishes into an array of lines. Paradoxically, to analyse the motion of a body, the body itself must disappear, as it is replaced by symbolic representation.”40 We can refer to this also as a production of measurement and, based on measurement, a production of data.

Lines crisscross bodies; What could be a more modern scene of an image even if a fully-fleshed out story would be likely to start in painting and the Renaissance techniques of measurement and data compression?41 Lines help decipher the metric specification of the disposition of a body in movement while the image itself is less and less understandable as a visual product: it features more naturally in the realm of the invisual as the previous chapter outlined. Lines organize territories into areas, even grids (see chapter 1) and thus are also part of the history of data organization from paper maps to GPS.42 Usually, we think of territories produced in such a way—as “plots,” a term central for questions of property—but the plotting appears on and in images too.

The production of bespoke measuring images from photogrammetry to Marey and much in between also implied the reverse to be true. In fact, much of the discourse around photogrammetry, metrophotography, and measurement assumed as much about the readability of lines, angles, and measures (see Figure 15). In other words, measurement images picked up on a range of existing techniques that had dealt with ratios in painting and (land) surveys and thus condensed a lot of that knowledge gradually since the mid-nineteenth century. The point was not only to start producing a particular kind of an operational image but also to start understanding existing capacities of deciphering the world in those terms. Artists might be a special case of trained ability to draw lines according to meticulous mathematical rules that guide the hand, but mathematics could also provide tricks such as trigonometric functions and technical aids. For example, Kittler mentions Lambert’s late eighteenth-century contribution to the early history of photogrammetry in this light, for as someone who turned to Leonhard Euler’s trigonometrical functions: “He no longer determined perspectival geometry as relationships or proportions between lines, like Euclid or Pythagoras, but rather as transcendental functions of an angle of vision.”43

Geometry became one stop on the route that led to a particular kind of imaging practice. As a branch of descriptive geometry, historical sources about photogrammetry repeatedly feature mathematician Gaspard Monge’s work, which can be contextualized as part of the history of technical imaging,44 as Carpo writes:

Technical drawings evidently require an easier and more direct way to notate spatial measurements. In a famous passage of his treatise On Building, Alberti recommends that architects should avoid perspective and use instead other kinds of nonforeshortened, scaled drawings, similar to what modern designers would call parallel projections in plans, elevations, and side views. Mathematically formalised by Gaspard Monge only at the end of the eighteenth century, parallel projections remained the primary notational tool of all design professions almost to this day. Monge’s method used two sets of parallel projections to univocally notate the position of any point in space onto two planes that, if needed, can be drawn on the same sheet of paper: descriptive geometry is a brilliant mathematical invention.45

Monge’s work promised to do exactly this: to offer an infrastructure of notation as a guideline. It was meant as a helpful way to understand plots of land (as surveyed) in relation to plots on paper (as images and diagrams). The opening page of his Géométrie descriptive gives the whole game away in a matter of paragraphs, explaining the aim to be what we would now refer to as the operational image that deals with data: to be able to store on two-dimensional surface representations that information about a multidimensional world and its qualities, and then to be able to read all kinds of operational truths from those image surfaces.46

In Monge’s universe, any natural surface can be “considered as composed of points,”47 which are then plotted into both the abstraction of those points and their relations (lines). What we now call data points are, of course, a variation of this thesis that still in Monge’s time was tied to a particular transfer operation between the world and its representation on the surface of an image (a drawing, a map, and later, a photograph). In such technical images, one reads points and their positions like one would read a map of locations, which is exactly the point when one realizes this as one point in the archaeology of invisuality, or how the shift from the primacy of figurative, pictorial visuality to operations of data is executed in relation to such image practices. This focus in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century is phrased as the “new question of how the optical actuality of the world can be reconstructed from the data available to the eye as sensations,”48 but we can be even more precise when it comes to some of these discourses and their institutional uses: measurement is put to particular use in describing anything as data. In short, none of the measurements was unmotivated but part of a lineage of military and colonial uses of operational images as they plot territories.

Consider the lineage of such practices of precision in the French context. Monge’s contribution to art and science was tuned to the national interests from the military design of fortifications to colonial expeditions such as Egypt in the late 1790s, where his expertise in surveys and measurement came in handy.49 Descriptive geometry was for a long time nothing short of a military secret.50

While the scientific aspect of measuring and imaging was already a central part of the military–colonial complex in France, it was later reinscribed into an imaginary past of photography, thanks to Arago. As Ariella Azoulay argues, the imperial premise of photography related to this expedition and its later reflection in photographic (data capture) in Arago’s often quoted words from 1839:

While these pictures are exhibited to you, everyone will imagine the extraordinary advantages which could have been derived from so exact and rapid means of reproduction during the expedition to Egypt; everybody will realize that had we had photography in 1798 we would possess today faithful pictorial records of that which the learned world is forever deprived of by the greed of the Arabs and the vandalism of certain travelers. To copy the millions of hieroglyphics which cover even the exterior of the great monuments of Thebes, Memphis, Karnak, and others would require decades of time and legions of draughtsmen. By daguerreotype one person would suffice to accomplish this immense work successfully.51

Arago imagined what Egypt would have looked like through photographic images. Even if photography was a later technical invention, the expedition included draughtsmen with camera obscura devices, natural scientists with other instruments,52 and Monge armed with his descriptive geometry. All were on board the trip already; these represent the inklings of an operational image of capture and violence that often surrounds actual military operations in this extended sphere of Operations Other Than War: an operational aesthetic.

During the expedition, a lot was measured, and a lot was drawn. The camera obscura was used as a technical aid for measurements to “obtain exact perspectives of monuments.”53 The camera lucida was integrated into survey techniques and apparatuses such as the telescope and included, for example, patents such as the graphical telescope in 1811 by Cornelius Varley. Such techniques were employed while photography was starting to gain ground toward the middle of the century, but as Xinyi Wen argues, the point was not a straightforward imitation of the qualities of assumed objectivity of mechanical imaging.54 In the ecology of operational practices in relation to institutions of survey, military, and expeditions, the instruments of precision were anyway prescribed in relation to what sort of measurements could be produced, including for very pragmatic ends. Instead of one apparatus of technology that would have enabled stored images “to be transmitted across space and time and then sent again to another point in space and time,”55 scientific institutions trained people to see, measure, and draw in ways that could be brought home with relative confidence in the accuracy—and usefulness—of the drawings. From colonial institutions like the East India Company to the scientific context of the Royal Society of London, training into epistemic, even kinds of “forensic,” images was a central concern for operational needs.56

Thus the route of reading the history of technical drawing and imaging takes us to interesting institutional insights. The French Egypt expedition—as well as many other French, English, and other scientific expeditions—is an example of the operational images in colonial use, as a particular colonial visual epistemology even. Also, the charts of the British and the French and the East India Company provide another context where the exact measurement of location had been for a long while of crucial importance, as the “overall investment in science would also bring substantial returns in colonial trade and international geopolitics.”57 Nautical charts, after all, were a crucial intersection of data that had become operationalized in the form of a navigational image that was about not merely territorial contours but also invisible forces such as magnetism. Edmund Halley’s 1701 Sea Chart would be an early example.58

Hence it is clear that some of the “investment in science” was for very practical reasons. In histories of photogrammetry, the occasional mentions of hydrographic engineer Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré are for reasons less to do with individual images than to do with techniques for formalizing instructions for their reproduction. This institutional operational knowledge was handed down to other naval officers and hydrographic engineers as “the principles of the picture-measuring method.”59 The importance here, besides a particular chart of an archipelago in the South Pacific, or the coastline of Australia, is found in the method. Naturally, what had to be brought back were accurate topographic maps of colonial coastlines of interest. Such methods were also brought back that could be codified for further use. One can describe it as the operationalization of geometric descriptions, measurements, drawing techniques, photography, and other apparatuses (graphic telescope, camera lucida) for specified institutional purposes.

The description, reproduction, and employment of such methods thus become part of the institutional pragmatics of the image that is not purely scientific but relates to questions of measure and precision, navigation, and surveying. For example, in Beautemps-Beaupré’s case, seemingly far removed from photography but essential to the measurement-images and apparatuses, he “produced many sea charts by making not only angular observations from both boats and the shore (essentially using the intersection method to plot prominent points) but also, importantly, sketches and views of the primary topographic features to avoid errors” (see Figure 11).60 You would not want to send erroneous data back as it would just escalate later errors, whether in navigation or other procedures. You had to trust your instruments and your images (maps); the navigational calculation of paths was, at its core, a need for such drawings and the distances they helped to cover. Empires and nations run on the accuracy of maps, and they run on the ability to manage distances.61

Management of distance was one form of remote sensing of sorts. The preface to the English translation of Beautemps-Beaupré’s An Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying and the Construction of Sea-charts emphasized the importance of seeing and measuring accurately at a distance as concerning “The mode of conducting a survey on a coast without landing, the most difficult and delicate of all hydrographic operations.”62 In short, this also concerns the implications of taking distance that also featured Meydenbauer’s anecdote about photogrammetry in Farocki’s account: a theme of significant importance across an ecology of practices of measuring images. To observe features like coastal lines at a distance, to mark them down accurately, and thus to bring them back across a geographically vast distance was a key feature that has persisted in how we describe these types of images, from aerial observation to remote sensing. Managing distances was already a key feature of such pre-photographic ways of surveying that also included techniques of managing the relation between the pictorial view and geometrically exact maps.

The same theme repeats and builds up in accounts across the nineteenth century. Colonel Laussedat’s influential work picked up on Beautemps-Beaupré’s but brought it from the sea to the land and moved it to the air. A combination of descriptive geometry and technically enabled ways of seeing from a distance, such as with aerial balloons and photography (or drawing), started to mark a specific task where images were seen as one element in the operative chain of measuring (see figures 12, 13, and 14). Laussedat and others’ work can be described as a description of methods, as training manuals of how to produce and read operational images, and as such part of the broader history of “the diagram as a form of visual instruction.”63 Furthermore, their existence was specific to what now would be called (in almost mundane terms of academic jargon) interdisciplinary image practices. The metrophotographic and photogrammetric practices were indeed recognized no longer only for topographic and physical geographic measurement but also for their importance in other arts and sciences, such as meteorology, oceanography, and astronomy, as explained by Laussedat, in hindsight, at the end of the nineteenth century.64 Later, it became part of aerial urbanism executed in photographic images in the early twentieth century and onward.65

The focus on images about imaging becomes a central feature of operational images as they are understood in this book: both the ways images participate in cultural techniques such as measuring and how to institutionalize certain practices are understood as part of the story of operational images. From Renaissance and Early Modern diagrams describing how the mathematics of linear perspective functions to diagrams in contemporary science and engineering papers that describe the computational procedure of AI techniques from training sets to models, there’s at least one stop between the images where abstraction takes place through measurement-lines and shapes. Like in manuals demonstrating how to use photogrammetry, the image content aptly fades into the background, and abstract lines take precedence.

The production of photographic images follows as part of a production of aiding lines that helped decipher the abstract shapes in and of an image as particularly useful. This genealogy of reading the image as and through grids, lines, curves, angles, and proportions persisted in different ways across any dividing line of drawing versus photography. Laussedat, but also later Meydenbauer and his architectural and topographic interests, was part of the more institutional aim to turn photographs into a set of lines; to turn the photographic image into a drawing of recognizable, calculable relations; to filter it into a particular logic of lines and shapes of geometric value.

The abstraction of the moving body in cases much more often discussed, such as Marey’s work on chronophotography, was historically parallel to techniques that managed to look at concrete images of facades and landscapes in abstract ways. This example in Figure 15 from an early twentieth-century photogrammetry (or “metrophotographie”) manual would be a case in point in readjusting what we consider the frame and the photographic plate in relation to its potential abstract layers with the help of guidelines.

Lines, forms, and geometric data overflow the frames of photographic plates. Saconney’s list of examples in the 1913 manual Métrophotographie is a good technical condensation of those issues that characterize a particular stance to the image. Images are one thing whereas it is the institutional context where the technics become truly operational: cultural heritage data of architectural facades might be one, but as is clear by now, the emerging possibilities of aerial observation (for example, for the French military) offered by photography elevated by balloons, kites, and airplanes were one context of development. The history of photogrammetry as part of technical drawing and other images relates, in many ways, to the demonstration of those principles as a midway point between what linear perspective was in terms of calculating the image and ratios of surface planes and what is forwarded from the nineteenth century to current architectural imaging, for example.

Geometric lines and shapes, triangles of trigonometric calculation, lines of all sorts across drawing, maps, and photography—the point and the line persist as part of the construction of the image as data. There is an entire media history of the line from the diagrams of Renaissance painting and rays of light “being subordinated to a Euclidean geometry of the ruled line,” as Sean Cubitt argues. From Albrecht Dürer’s studies of images of measure (such as “Underweysung der Messung” of 1525) to the industrial lines of twentieth-century animation (from horses to a famous mouse) to vector graphics, Cubitt demonstrates the fundamental productive logic of the line: it is fundamental to cultural techniques of plotting and grids. Cubitt argues that “as the instrument of composition and the medium of abstraction, line’s central job is to abstract form from the manifold of perception, to select and translate reality and the experience of it into signs, and in composing the schematic of the image, to extract edges from what can actually be seen: colour and texture.”66

We can also add to the mix the lines that emerge outside drawing and other arts: the multitude of scientific, mathematical lines. One special case is graph theory, as it emerges in Leonhard Euler’s work and as a solution to the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem in 1736. Here the abstraction of urban topography of the city into nodes and edges also serves as the creation of graphs across different flat planes—that is, planar graphs and subsequently all the multidimensional ways nodes and edges become practiced through more recent data science. A complex living city is calculated as optimized routes. Lines and points turn into data (points and graphs). In some cases, it also happens the other way: tabulated data turns into instrumental maps—such as the data visualization in the nineteenth-century case of isothermal maps that Birgit Schneider connects to the emerging and influential turn of planetary climate cartography that makes invisible forces—like statistically ordered temperature averages—visible across vast geographical terrains. The drawn and continuously fluctuating horizontal lines mark a different planetary space than visible terrain.67

Lines are vanishing mediators that make areas, forms, and objects stand out as measured entities. What is tracked as thresholds of visibility and invisibility are also, in another register, thresholds of visuality and invisuality: things seen contain operative potentials as data. The line as material and textured entity might disappear in this linear operationalization—a point that Tim Ingold makes68—but when disappearing, it also brings into existence other things through this artificial geometric procedure.

For Ingold, the line becomes a key instance of knowledge practices. Straight lines have a particular role in the institutions we are dealing with in this chapter (not that topographic lines are necessarily straight, even if relations could be calculated as geometric proportions). Both as plotlines and guidelines, they organize space and surfaces in ways that relate to Krämer’s argument about cultural techniques of flattening, including producing surfaces with the help of lines and then lining up those surfaces in ways that become constitutive of different (graphical) practices of knowledge such as diagrams. To quote Ingold:

The straight line is implicated in this vision in two quite distinct ways: first, in the constitution of the surface itself; secondly, in the construction of the assembly to be laid upon it. For the first, imagine a rigid line that is progressively displaced along its entire length, in a direction orthogonal to it. As it moves, it sweeps or rolls out the surface of a plane. . . . For the second, imagine that the plane is marked with points, and that these points are joined up to form a diagram. This, in a nutshell, is the relation between our two manifestations of the straight line. One is intrinsic to the plane, as its constitutive element; the other is extrinsic, in that its erasure would still leave the plane intact. In what follows, and for reasons that will become evident as we proceed, I shall call lines of the first kind guidelines, and those of the second plotlines.69

Diagrams, graphs, tables, charts, maps, and other administrative and calculating media that constitute the “other” of the photographic image are described as cultural techniques of the line that also operationalize the surfaces they fabricate. Here the recursive operations described in chapter 1 are again in full view. As guidelines, they produce surfaces; as plotlines, they manufacture mathematical, geometrical, even statistical data. This data then defines those surfaces produced, and in a chain of operations, the material, aesthetic, and epistemic elements define each other. And consequently, such operational chains become a central trait for technical images from Meydenbauer to Marey and a shared part of the history of topographical and geographic surveys and measuring images that is the final section of this chapter.

The Geodesic Lines of Earth: A Planetary Measure

What if we invert the problem of lines that leads into Farocki’s cinematic condensation of images, data, operations, and measurement? What if we invert the order of priorities in our discussion that has so far been about images, but perhaps should be about operations, and in this case, about lines that plot and guide?70 In other words, besides the genealogy of images equipped with lines that help us to see what the composition of images and decomposition of measures from images is about, we look at lines as the primary instance of constituting what becomes an image. Lines across photographic or other images are an instance of the measurement-image as it emerges in photogrammetry in France and Germany across the nineteenth century, leading up to figures such as the clumsy Meydenbauer risking his life. But I want to propose that we look at lines that constitute the earth as an image already before instances of photographic lines and much earlier than digital images: thus, lines that constitute plots, work in territorial surveys, and become the link between topography and the (visual and invisual) image are here instances in the long media archaeology of measure and quantity.

For the discussion of the operational image, I dived straight into the world of Meydenbauer’s photogrammetry through Farocki’s film. What followed was the broader question of the photogrammetric view to areas and images. This entry through Farocki helped to identify the thematic strands that also feature in this chapter: distance, measure, institutional techniques, visual production, and the military with its logistical pragmatics. Thus, Images of the World and the Inscription of War is an operating manual in its own right. At the same time, it articulates the centrality of measuring lines that relate not only to dominant state practices but also to such methodological discourses as forensic architecture.71

However, the constitution of lines is also present in several historical instances, if one were to write a proper historical outline of photogrammetry from Johann Heinrich Lambert’s 1759 book Perspectiva liber (The free perspective) to Laussedat’s work on constructing a world of measuring lines that he called métrophotographie and that included both drawing and photographic techniques. As mentioned, the inversion of the line is an interesting way to start looking at planetary techniques such as the plotting (of territories) as operational ontologies at the base of architectural and property practices. In addition, looking to geodesic arc measurement as an element in establishing grids is a central part of the story in mediating planetary surfaces, landscapes, architectural facades and what we see as (photographic and other) images. Hence, I am interested in how the question of lines defining measurement-images becomes replaced onto different scales and institutions of imaging—for example, concerning geometric, planetary data.

In Peter Sloterdijk’s worlds, maps and other depictive, planimetric media present “globalisation as an image,” which should be taken in the most literal terms of cultural techniques of making flat planes in the service of navigation and other operations. “Imperialism is applied planimetry,” he continues, “the art of reproducing orbs as surfaces and worlds as charts,”72 which here applies to naval charts as much as topographic surveys, as well as the transformation of the image into a picture plane that helps to measure territories and other dimensions too. This resonates with the point mentioned earlier: maps are interfaces for calculation, and the maritime map is one example in history where “The map is indeed like a 2D slide-rule that incorporates in a precalculated format huge masses of information.”73

In other words, the planet is operationalized as a map-image with plotlines and guidelines; navigation is not about a mimetic relationship between the world and representation in the image (map) but a coordinating movement on surfaces of different materials and variables of terrain.74 While navigation is a cultural technique related to such questions of the porous border of outside and inside, world and image, it is underpinned by the existing precalculated and codified measurements. In other words, the question of who decides on which measures are to be used resonates closely with Azoulay’s point about “the right to dissect.” This refers to the right to plot and extract that becomes integrated into a history of photography as imperial techniques: “The right to dissect and study people’s worlds—the Napoleonic expeditions are a paradigmatic example—and render their fragments into pieces to be meticulously copied is taken for granted.”75

This should serve as a particularly apt example that will offer ground for the argument is the French geodesic expedition in the 1730s, as it transports the book’s themes to the question of the large-scale image (as large as the planet, in fact). Similarly, many of the later expeditions and projects would be of interest even if outside the scope of this book. Geodesic practices link to different threads of relevance: the establishment of the standard of the French meter as one ten-millionth of the terrestrial meridian bears the traces of the geodesic measurement that feeds back into the standard through which territorial measurements become comparable.76 The link among the practice of measurement, establishing standards, mediating images, and sensing or calculating practices is why geodesy is interesting for the discussion of operational images. Some of that becomes even clearer in the context of the twentieth century as the shift from (paper) maps to radio navigation to GPS offers a narrative of technical media and nonrepresentational images. For example, the ability of GPS to deal with the issues of earlier triangulation and trilateration by way of its satellite-based signal-operated measurement was to provide not only accuracy but a new kind of “intangible knowledge space of electronic points that shares space with the physical world but does not refer to it.”77 The interconnection of different institutional needs becomes characteristic of the GPS and global coordination as an infrastructure for operational uses “integrating day-to-day surveying of property boundaries or engineering work with intercontinental war, without any special effort.”78

At the back of that point about our current satellite-based targeting and measurement, the 1730s expedition might seem rudimentary. It was, after all, still tied to the surface of the earth instead of being able to calculate the basis of the navigational image from the orbit. But, in much more painstaking conditions, the expedition was launched to measure the exact shape of the earth—a question of not merely metaphysical but practical interest for the purposes of navigation and those themes of long-distance colonial control79 that were already mentioned in our discussion of naval hydrography, for example. What Mary Louise Pratt has called “Europe’s first major international scientific expedition”80 and the launch of a new kind of “planetary consciousness”—alongside the classificatory system published by Carl Linnaeus (or later von Linné) in 1735—the expedition consisted of two teams whose comparative perspectives were to resolve the debate that had lingered on for years across both sides of the Channel: whether Newton’s account regarding the shape of the earth (as an oblated spheroid) or the competing (erroneous) version promoted by the astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini (a prolated spheroid) was correct.

The French–Anglo debate was about methods, calculations, and observations, and it resulted in the two parties being sent to measure how the earth’s surface had laid its lands. While De Maupertuis’s trip via Sweden to Lapland81 did their trigonometric measurements for the Arctic Circle view, the comparative results were gained from the rather infamous, slightly earlier launched trip by La Condamine, Godin, and Bouguer to Peru.82 In this manner, by way of the first instance of planetary comparative measurement, the latitude lines could be measured closer to the North Pole and the equator so that both measurements would reveal that clinching detail about the shape. Or, as de Maupertuis puts it in 1738 in La figure de la terre, after having returned from Lapland in August the year before: to be able to see and position oneself on the globe and maps made of grids of latitude and longitude is useless unless one knows the accurate length of their degrees. And those vary based on where you are.83 This expedition found its way there and back in a substantially shorter time and with fewer problems than the other party, which had years of issues, not least because of the unruly behavior of some of its leading scientists.

The goal in the back of the head of Maupertuis, prepping for the wintery conditions and to record interesting anthropological details of Sami indigenous peoples’ culture, was to prove that “the length of the degree of latitude actually increased as one moved northward.”84 This amounted to saying Newton was right by empirically measuring what he had proposed through calculations. The whole debate between Cartesians and Newtonians demonstrates multiple layers in the narrativization of scientific arguments around the early eighteenth century—with such figures as Voltaire with his rhetorical might heavily involved—and are a highly fascinating case study for historians of science. Indeed, as Mary Terrall puts it, it involves how participant writers and scientists “turned observations, calculations, and theories into . . . representations, and then tried to mobilise consensus among their colleagues and among a broader public”85 in order to gain consistency for those representations. Here, the theme of “representation” is also taken literally as about the operational image of the earth and its measure—both as a scientific and geopolitical issue.

To record and compare the exact measure of the length of a degree of the arc of the meridian is one version of the problem of lines that cuts the globe into grids and plots. The image/frame of the grid becomes essential for all sorts of purposes obvious in contexts of data and cartography, but to establish the grid in the first place was an operation not any less significant for the history of imaging. The technical operations that mapped the earth into a particular shape are thus here a significant precursor to the late 1960s and early 1970s revelations of the earth as seen from space—and one milestone in the project of planetary design scaffolded on a photographic image and the imaginaries it triggered—but the surface-level images are at least as significant in our story. While the techniques of such a combination of manual measurement by chains and trigonometric calculations have been replaced by the GPS that circulates the planet and senses it into a dynamic composite image, we are still articulating things across the three-hundred-year period of a media archaeology of operational images.

Remote sensing takes two kinds of forms out of which images are produced. You can build instruments that observe signals from afar, or you can travel great distances in order to bring back the necessary data for an image. Sometimes images are the things that do the carrying. This, too, is “remote sensing,” even if by other means and perhaps with scare quotes needed to emphasize the extended meaning of the term.86 While this geodesic work of measuring the true shape of the earth is an apt example of the work of “immutable mobiles” that Latour refers to as the function of data capture in maps, diagrams, and other portable objects of knowledge, it is also one example in the logistics at the back of establishing “centres of calculation.”87

The production of images, maps, and (geometric) lines played a central role in the double work of operational guidelines and plotlines (see Figure 16). In addition to producing measurement data and images (mostly of methodological value), the trips presented an interesting mix of instruments, observations, and calculations. To quote Terrall detailing the 1730s expeditions:

All parties agreed on the general design of the technical operations, which included triangulation for determining terrestrial distances and stellar observations for determining latitude. Meridian observations of the angular distance of designated stars from the zenith, taken at two different observing stations, defined the difference in latitude between the two locations. Their angular separation could then be compared to the linear distance between them, computed by triangulation. The end result is a comparison of latitude, expressed in degrees of arc, with length on the ground. On a sphere, the length of a degree would be equal all along the meridian. On an elongated sphere, the length would decrease from equator to pole, and conversely for an oblate sphere.88

The instruments for the Northern expedition were designed and made in England and France: a transit telescope, a pendulum, a clock, quadrants, and a zenith sector. The use of the telescope, itself part of the story of visibility and invisibility as briefly mentioned in the previous chapter, was in this case used in combination with the zenith sector to provide exactitude in relation to the position of stars. This enabled the observer to be positioned on the earth’s surface and in relation to stars.89 In subsequent scientific quarrels (and there were several), the validity and proper use of the instruments were also raised.90 But besides a story about scientific communities, it stands as one of locations: Is the world seen as an image constructed by local cartography (in this case, the French observatory and trigonometric measurements restricted to the French territory in Europe) or by comparative expeditions that, by traveling to a remote place (from the perspective of the imperial powers of Europe), also established the possibilities of future travel: “improved methods of navigation”91 and “colonial expansion.”92 Hence, the word “utility” used for the geodesic measurement is repeated in their own words, such as Maupertuis’s report from 1738, as it is observed in later writing analyzing “the promise of extending the Crown’s reach to distant corners of the globe.”93

Meanwhile, in Peru: When in 1738 the news about Maupertuis’s success reached the scientists in the other part of the world, it did not entirely mean their trip became superfluous, despite the disappointment about how delayed they were. A spoiler: the project took several more years to finish. The Northern expedition confirmed the key result already: a degree of latitude at the Arctic Circle was 57,437 toises compared to the measure in Paris of 57,060 toises.94 Game over for the race to measurement. Luckily for Bouguer, La Condamine and others, besides the shape of the earth, the comparative results from the Arctic Circle and the equator would be useful for navigational purposes, which still made the other trip worth the while.

While I could continue narrating the various peculiar and fascinating details, I want to focus on the scalar image that was produced. The multiscalar vision coded into measured areas as cartographic images, as planimetric media, consisted of the comparative arctic–equator bifocal vision. Also, another kind of comparative, bifocal view was part of the measurement: a local site could be matched to a planetary scale. In short, to map and measure a region (length of a degree of latitude) as an image was to map and measure the planet in the same go. This local image (see Figure 17) was mathematically the baseline for what the planetary “looked” like, not as a representational image so much as a navigational image of size, form, and possible directions. The trigonometric measurement on the surface in relation to the astronomical comparison of location helped establish a surface-measured view yet abstracted across vast distances predating the later composite images of Earth from space.95 Later versions of images of Earth, from the Earthrise to the Blue Marble, are heavily circulated and quoted as iconic planetary images, but in many ways, the earlier ones, such as the technical data produced through the 1730s expeditions, should not be forgotten either.

The precise area south of the city of Quito (nowadays Ecuador’s capital) is both the concrete location of the measurement lines (or chains) as well as the site of abstraction of the mathematical measurements that coordinate a simulation of the earth.96 Thus, below is the description of the geodesic procedure while also containing the principles of this simulated, operational image where the lines measured on the earth’s surface enable this abstraction:

After the expedition confirmed the length of the chain of triangles, routine astronomical observations and mathematical calculations were all it should take to determine the length of a degree of latitude. Once they had the overall length of the chain, the scientists would take simple star sightings to establish the latitude at each end. Dividing the length of the chain by the difference in latitudes would produce a single number, the length of a single degree of latitude at the equator. When this was compared to the length of a degree back in France, they would know the true figure of the Earth for the first time.97

This describes something that is not merely a drawing and predates photographic and contemporary satellite techniques of earth observation. Yet the mix of observations and notation functions as an element in this very short sketch of the media archaeology of the operational measuring image.

The episode is but one in the history of many influential expeditions that followed—such as Humboldt and Darwin’s voyages—but it serves as an apt example in linking geodesy and topographical surveys as the backdrop to what comes out as photogrammetry. The Peruvian case is interesting and contrasts to the much smoother-running Lapland expedition. Instead of the Swedish military lending a helping hand, Bouguer and La Condamine and others relied on forced labor and slaves, and the whole trip could also be characterized as mathematical precision and measurement under conditions of altitude sickness (in the heights of the mountainous area) that the European scientists suffered from. This would then present a further context for the earth-departing abstractions and the labor of operational images, which also depended on colonial slavery, among many other aspects. The planetary images are also labored images, an observation that returns us to the core elements in Farocki’s work too.

But instead of ending with Farocki, I want to recall a point made by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay on photographic imperialism that I hope helps us connect to themes that will emerge in the next chapter:

In a split second, the camera’s shutter draws three dividing lines: in time (between a before and an after), in space (between who/what is in front of the camera and who/what is behind it), and in the body politic (between those who possess and operate such devices and appropriate and accumulate their product and those whose countenance, resources, or labor are extracted). The work of the shutter is not an isolated operation, nor is it restricted only to photography. If shutters in the service of petty sovereigns were limited only to cameras and were not operative in other domains—wherein the violence perpetrated by the sharp movement of their blades hits bodies at a greater proximity—the departure of the camera and the photographer from the scene would not necessarily be part of a devastating regime.98

The description is a powerful way of accounting for the practices of drawing and photography that this chapter has discussed. But the shutter was not the only means of division, and the photographic is only one part of a lineage of operations. Indeed, the shutter is premised on dividing lines: temporal, spatial, and embodied. On the one hand, those lines are part of various institutional practices interested in topography, coastal lines, navigation, and the militarization of descriptive geometry (as per Gaspard Monge); on the other (even if very much related), they are lines of operative ontologies through which abstractions and simulations start to take place. The lines that return in more recent imaging, from cartographic techniques to GPS and the composite world views such as Google Earth,99 are of a different technical order but relevant when outlining the question of the operational image. While these sorts of practices were often backed up with the imperial prestige of scientific or military institutions, we should not forget how flawed they were: the idea of a hegemonic practice of measurement as the practice of power must be complemented with the persistence of errors, stupidities, drunken mishaps, and sheer incompetence too. Consult the Bouguer and La Condamine expedition as a case in point. Imperial operations—and operational images—are full of errors and are far from the disembodied rational gaze they are (sometimes) projected to be. A different book should be written on this topic alone: the inoperative image.

Human errors and technical glitches included, I am tempted to bring into play some further themes that relate to contemporary digital imaging practices that work by way of measurement, triangulation, and laser scanning.100 But I will return to those kinds of data worlds in chapter 5. What is at stake here are the operational possibilities of measurement as a way to move from three-dimensional worlds onto two-dimensional planes, and in some cases, back into three-dimensional models and simulations (for example, in architectural and other spatial, urban practices). Computer graphics is one later variation—and quite a significant one—in such a media archaeology where images and data are in productive tension.101

Hence the argument about the measurement line returns both to the filtering and productive force of the line. Those forces are integrated into several capture mechanisms, including surface territories and image surfaces across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, even if this chapter has more or less focused on such earlier cases, it is tightly connected to both the broader argument about operational images and, as the next chapter will show, contemporary practices of Earth observation (and Earth rewriting). Next, earlier points about invisual images and data and the planetary composite images are discussed in relation to the operational aesthetic.