Operational_Images_From_the_Visual_to_the_Invisual_----_(Introduction_Between_Light_and_Data)

INTRODUCTION
Between Light and Data
Capturing Light
Around 1889, Harvard College expanded its influence far outside
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Having joined the College Observatory
(first as a student, later as professor of astronomy), Solon Irving
Bailey was sent much farther south, to Arequipa in Peru, to establish
a new field station. This operation was to switch the hemisphere and
find a spot elevated enough for ideal observation of the light travel-
ing from distant celestial objects. Astronomic photography had a
long history already by the 1890s, but this need for a new observa-
tory emphasized the additional demand for what we would now call
scientific infrastructure. After New Year’s Day in 1889, a boat trip
from San Francisco took Bailey and his family to their destination
identified earlier, “attracted by reports of the clear sky and slight
rainfall on the high plateau of Peru, where also the whole southern
Copyright © 2023. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
sky is visible.”1 While the rhetorical emphasis on the clean, crisp

observation place puts all of the weather conditions easily outside
of history and into the physical sphere important for astronomy as
a science of observation of laws (out there) and not things (here),
during the difficult trip to find the perfect spot, Bailey observed and
(in passing) noted the colonial legacy of the region: “I should place
the population of the valley near Chosica in the days of the Incas
at six thousand. Today there are perhaps five hundred. This well
illustrates how Peru has changed since she fell into the hands of
the Spanish conquerors.”2 Such awareness in his thoughts and diary
did not, however, prevent the expedition from (re)naming the place
they came to in a softer but still imperial manner: Mount Harvard.
The eponymous name was entirely in tune with the aims of Edward
1
Parikka, J. (2023). Operational images : From the visual to the invisual. University of Minnesota Press.
Created from upenn-ebooks on 2025-01-15 10:22:52.
2 Introduction
Pickering, the long-standing and renowned director of the Harvard

College Observatory, to establish posts in the north and the south,
“so the entire sky would be available for Harvard’s research.”3
Besides a number of adventurous anecdotes from that trip, the
relation with a media technological context is especially interesting.
Two themes concerning light intersected during the years Bailey
spent in Peru, both of which were essential to the scientific work,
while producing an aesthetic quality to the geographical placement.
The sunlit high-a ltitude plains—causing occasional mountain sick-
ness for the party looking for a suitable observation spot—provided
ideal landscapes while the photometric (measurement of the bright-
ness of light) and photographic techniques provided technologies
for the capture of slowly shifting objects in the night sky. Not that
such exact spots of observation were known in advance; some of
Bailey’s memoirs from the trip read as a persistent search for loca-
tions where measurements can be made, leading him to echo earlier
advice about the exploratory spirit: “Of the clearness and steadi-
ness of the atmosphere in these different places, there is no certain
knowledge, and your only way is to investigate it for yourselves.”4
The investigation aimed to take pictures to send back to the college
in Cambridge. Besides telescopes, the comparative analysis of pho-
tographic evidence became a key technique that needed a reliable
data supply. It was, in some way, a case of what Michelle Henning
has called “the unfettered image”: fixed as image, but migratory and
journeying as an object.5 Here, what migrated were the comparative
observations of the vast space outside the planetary sphere.

As per the Harvard Observatory aim, to be able to observe the
night sky from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres gave
a particular advantage to astronomers. Moreover, with the help of
the photographic media, Southern data was relatively easily trans-
ported back to Cambridge for comparative, computational analysis.
In Pickering’s words, “For many purposes the photographs take the
place of the stars themselves, and discoveries are verified and errors
corrected by daylight with a magnifying glass instead of at night
with a telescope.”6
Bailey’s field station’s photographs were sent north. This part of
the logistical story has become more well-k nown in recent years,
particularly the (female) computer pioneers of data analysis and
Introduction 3
astronomy, including Annie Jump Cannon and her work on star

classifications7 and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, among others. Leavitt,
later awarded the title “Curator of Astronomical Photographs” (held
earlier by Williamina Fleming), left lasting contributions to the field
(even if here the focus is only on parts that relate to the media tech-
nological operations that serve as infrastructure and instruments
of astronomy as a science). Leavitt’s research impacted astronomy
by demonstrating important traits about the periodicity of bright-
ness, an essential element in measuring distances across the vast-
ness of outer space. In addition, the Peruvian night sky had been
photographed and recorded on glass plates that Leavitt stacked on
top of each other for comparative data analysis and to produce in-
sights into the shifts of moving stars, which in our case illuminates
a key theme: early in its first official century, photography was al-
ready a measurement device that not only took pictures of people
and things but offered a way to analyze the world, including the
extraterrestrial.
As such, the point about technical images and measurement has
already been articulated; for example, Kelley Wilder gives a good
overview of some of the practices of astronomical imaging before
and after the Harvard period in question and opens up important
points more generally too. Besides photographs where “the ability
to measure appears to be a useful but unintended byproduct,”8 there
were various intentional practices, mostly scientific, where this cul-
tural technique was central. In astronomy, this included the Venus
transit plates of 1874 and institutionalized work such as Carte de

Ciel of the 1880s, “one of the most influential photographic observa-
tion projects in astronomy.”9 Beyond astronomy, Raman spectros-
copy and photogrammetry were “methods that bent photographic
observation to mathematization,”10 with surveying as a technique
that was, as Wilder outlines, “heavily dependent on the idea of mea-
surable photographs.”11 Here, the commentary on measurement
serves to illuminate the expanded scope of operational images to
be followed throughout this book.
In aptly contrasting ways, the title of Leavitt’s 1908 paper, “1777
Variables in the Magellanic Clouds,” rings poetic, while the open-
ing sentence nails the argument about images as infrastructures
of analysis and comparison in a pithy, informative fashion: “In the
4 Introduction
spring of 1904, a comparison of two photographs of the Small

Magellanic Cloud, taken with the 24-inch Bruce Telescope, led to
the discovery of a number of faint variable stars.”12 Where Bailey had
engaged with the landscapes of Peru, its altitudes and terrains, the
shipment to Cambridge provided the other side of this landscape;
in Leavitt’s reading, the Magellanic Clouds—or, more precisely, their
photographic recording—provided a dynamic, periodic landscape of
light to be interpreted. Leavitt writes about light that she has been
observing on those records: “The variables appear to fall into three
or four distinct groups. The majority of the light curves have a strik-
ing resemblance, in form, to those of cluster variables. As a rule,
they are faint during the greater part of the time, the maxima being
very brief, while the increase of light usually does not occupy more
than one-sixth to one-tenth of the entire period.”13 Surely, Leavitt
and others would have cursed Tesla’s Spacelink satellite program
that hinders the subtle balance and periodicity of the sky with its
mass flooding of the orbit. However, around the 1890s and 1900s,
the night sky was still stable and observable through the gridded
transparency of the glass plates that opened up possibilities of com-
parative analysis.
While the sky had been pictured, read, observed, interpreted, and
calculated for millennia, as John Durham Peters argues in his media
theoretical insight to astronomical star-gazing, the scientific analy-
sis of movement and light became particularly interesting toward
the fin de siècle.14 The employment of both media of visual tech-
nologies (photography and spectral analysis) and the possibilities

to harness the planet’s spherical shape—Northern and Southern
Hemispheres into a binocular view of sorts—a s part of the astro-
nomic observation unit from Peru to Massachusetts provided the
backbone for broader infrastructures of knowledge. The intersec-
tions of media and the sciences (in this case, astronomy) have im-
pacted the transformation of photography as it became “digital” and
how it has been part of data analysis and planetary infrastructure.
And, as will be argued in chapter 3, even the shape of the planet
measured in geodesic triangulation can be considered part of the
story of the extended planetary image.
As already mentioned, this link to scientific uses of photography,
including in astronomy, should not be particularly surprising con-
Introduction 5
FIGURE 1. A flyspanker and a photographic plate likely used and annotated

by Leavitt for the research on the Small Magellanic Cloud. As handheld ref-
erence for standard magnitude of stars, flyspankers were made from exist-
ing astronomical plates of stars with different values of visible brightness.

They were sorts of “model image” instruments. Courtesy of Harvard College
Observatory, Photographic Glass Plate Collection.
sidering that perhaps the most famous words in the early history of
photography (or, more specifically, the daguerreotype) were given
by an astronomer, François Arago, in his 1839 address. This talk was
given to convince the French Academies of Art and Science about
the benefits of the new technique, which was why the talk aimed
to make sure it was seen as a scientific one and therefore included
specific attention paid to the various uses of measurement: beyond
people or things, landscapes or scenes, this was a medium to mea-
sure photometrically the brightness of transmitted light and thus
6 Introduction
also provide an insight into what lies beyond this particular planet
and how that can be easily recorded on a plate. Thus, the instru-
ment became a central part of an experimental apparatus that un-
folded a whole visualization process in developing an image.15
As pointed out by Wilder, the nineteenth-century history of
photography was filled with astronomical works and interests:
William de Wivelselie Abney, E. E. Barnard, William Crookes,
L. J. M. Daguerre, John Draper, Paul and Prosper Henry, Jules
Janssen, Hermann Krone, Adolphe Neyt, Warren de la Rue, Lewis
Morris Rutherfurd, Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, and John Adams
Whipple are among a list of practitioners relevant to both sides of
the technical expertise. Wilder argues that “much of their work re-
volved around adapting emulsions and photographic instruments
to astronomical observation, and they produced everything from
spectra of starlight, to photometric readings, to iconic images of the
heavens.”16 While much of the focus in earlier research has been on
the apparatuses and their relation to both histories of technology
and, in some cases, scientific discourses of validity and reliability,17
adding an emphasis on Leavitt opens a particularly interesting ave-
nue of consideration not only for the history of photography but
also for the theoretical topic at hand, operational images. Through
Leavitt and the work of the numerous female scientists at the ob-
servatory,18 questions of photographic plates as instrumental infra-
structures for operations of measure become underlined.
However, discussing Leavitt gives us insight into the work of
remote sensing and images that become operationalized for data

analysis, in addition to dispelling the often overly male-inventor and
scientist-focused narratives (including those concerning operational
images). This applies to many of the other contributions too: the
photographic plate collection becomes the scaffolding for advanced
work in spectral classification and cataloging (Annie Jump Cannon)
and remote sensing (calculation of “chemical composition of stars”19
in Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s work), alongside the Leavitt Law as
an example of operational images, too: “a tool to calculate distance
in space with the use of Cepheid variable fluctuations.”20 Leavitt’s
and others’ contribution thus is not so much on photography as
a particular technology or genre of images but as the basis for an
analysis of data and an extraction of features that become signifi-
Introduction 7
cant for questions of remote sensing. Such work becomes part of

the lineage of operational images that are less interesting as images
on their own but rather as part of a broader infrastructure of skills,
labor, techniques, and technologies, and how institutions21 assemble
images for their particular needs and uses.
Less interesting as pictures, even if armed with a poetic allusion
of deep space, but useful for the trained scientific eye, such pho-
tographs become an infrastructure for analysis. Leavitt’s compara-
tive analysis identifies light and subsequently tables the sources of
light as varieties of data points in the Magellanic Clouds. Besides its
straightforward operational use in astronomy, it leads to interest-
ing considerations concerning the role of the image. Far from the
usual focus of art history, such images are one element in the ex-
tended role played by computation and data. And not digital in the
sense we refer to them as now, but as part of the institutional uses
where photographic images are essential in being able to scale and
inscribe the distant movement into the flat (paper and glass) world
of pictures and observation tables.22 In short, the photographic
functions primarily as detection instead of depiction; subsequently,
detections are also turned into calculations. Photography—or the
photographic—condenses massive scales of measurement of light.23
As such, the intersection of earth, sky, light, shadow, and astronomy,
and images through which to calculate are among the contrasting
currents that define our interest in the actions of images.
Leavitt and her fellow computers are part of astronomy as well
as an alternative genealogy of visual practice that finds a resonat-

ing counterpoint in more recent times: infrastructures of visuality,
images tabulated as data, data that becomes a diagram, and image
models that enable ideas of remote sensing (spectra and periodicity
of light as signals of distance, material composition, movement) to
emerge as a key paradigm of visual—and invisual—culture. Bailey’s
travels to the Southern Hemisphere that ended up in Arequipa to
manage the Harvard field station can be named as a starting point
for this story about the long chain of operations of images ending
up as diagrams, graphs, and tables. This is not to say that diagrams
weren’t already part of the Enlightenment period repertoire of man-
aging data and images: as Bender and Marrinan note, the practices
of diagrams in the modern sense emerged in the pages of Diderot
8 Introduction
and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia of the late eighteenth century, “A

diagram is a proliferation of manifestly selective packets of dis-
similar data correlated in an explicitly process-oriented array that
has some of the attributes of a representation but is situated in the
world like an object.”24 Here, in their words, image-diagrams are
more Pollock than Rembrandt, which in our case could be recon-
figured to: more like the scattered light beams of stars in the night
sky (Pollock) than pictorial, representational images (Rembrandt).
Although, as becomes obvious later in the book, the two are not
always so separated.
Science studies likely have a lot to say about this combination
of assemblages of diagrams and their material contexts, as instru-
ments facilitating the collecting of data but also as the transform-
ing, translating, and rather literally transporting of these episte-
mological observations from the field to the laboratory. Henning’s
notion of the “unfettered image”—a lready mentioned earlier—is
discussed in the analysis of scientific images and data too. Bruno
Latour’s rather influential take on techniques of soil sampling in
the Amazon exemplifies this through the specialist instrument of
the pedocomparator: “The pedocomparator has made the forest-
savanna transition into a laboratory phenomenon almost as two-
dimensional as a diagram, as readily observed as a map, as easily
reshuffled as a pack of cards, as simply transported as a suitcase.”25
This book is not concerned with such instruments but instead
with the variety of objects and techniques that briefly featured in
the ministory of astronomy and photographs. Nonetheless, a soil

scientist’s instrument is a useful parallel for us because the meth-
odological transformation will be recounted in different ways and
alternating variations throughout this book: the photograph is
only one stop in the long chain of routes and operations of images,
and the variety of techniques are interlinked from instruments to
diagrams, and from three-dimensional materials or landscapes to
flattened images, diagrams, and the formalized registers of analy-
sis. One can run images through similar filters as is evident in the
STS type approach offered by Latour. To continue for a short while
with the argument mediating abstractions and objects: “[the pedo-
comparator] is lighter than the forest, yet heavier than the paper;
Introduction 9
it is less corruptible than the vibrant earth, but more corruptible

than geometry; it is more mobile than the savanna, but less mobile
than the diagram that I could send by phone if Boa Vista had a fax
machine.”26 Importantly, diagrams enter the picture, too:
With the diagram, in contrast, the forest-savanna transition

becomes paper, assimilable by every article in the world, and
transportable to every text. The geometric form of the diagram
renders it compatible with all the geometric transformations
that have ever been recorded since centers of calculation have
existed. What we lose in matter through successive reduc-
tions of the soil, we regain a hundredfold in the branching off
to other forms that such reductions—w ritten, calculated, and
archival—make possible.27
The useful takeaway here is that we should look at the operative

transformations of the image as it pertains to the multiple materials
and their abstractions, and abstractions coming back to transform
the materials. What STS does with mapping the route of material
objects of science, we can try to do with images as they work in
institutions. This will be a key part of what this book establishes as
the operational in the operational image.
In our example of the astronomical something shifted when light
was observed, recorded, and sent across a geographical distance—
perhaps a lot of things transformed from the planes of observation
and appreciation of high-altitude air and clear skies to the photo-

graphic exposure and the plates that became one chain along the
way before Leavitt, Cannon, and others interpret and synthesize
(compute) these into the pithy but important results that ensued
(see Figure 2): “A straight line can readily be drawn among each of
the two series of points corresponding to maxima and minima, thus
showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the
variables and their periods. The logarithm of the period increases
by about 0.48 for each increase of one magnitude in brightness.”28
Where is the image here in this description, in such tables, curves,
and diagrams? On the photographic plates or their analysis, the mo-
ments of exposure in the Peruvian landscapes, in the logistics of
10 Introduction
FIGURE 2. Examples (Table 1 and Figures 1 and 2) from Leavitt and Pickering’s
1912 article “Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud.”
transporting those images to Cambridge, in the trained analysis of

composite photographs, or somewhere else along the way of trans-
forming light? Or, perhaps, the notion of operational ties together a
multitude of such material events, sites, and their abstractions and
assembles them into a useful notion of the operational image that,
as a term, itself is invented much later and for a different purpose,
but might itself become useful to speak of infrastructure, logistics,
and images that transform from visual to invisual, from ways of
seeing to ways of calculating.
Introduction 11
The Operational Image

This book opened with the excursion into the Peruvian light that
turned into the Harvard-based astronomy of calculation, compari-
son, analysis, the write-up of scientific papers, and some pictures
that got published. However, most of the thousands and thousands
of technical images were never seen but by few pairs of eyes. But
the book itself, as should be obvious by now, is on operational im-
ages.29 The term by the renowned German filmmaker, artist, and
writer Harun Farocki (1944–2014) appeared in the early 2000s in his
video installation trilogy Eye/Machine I-III (2001–3) that investigates
autonomous weapon systems, machine vision in industrial and other
applications, and the broader move from representations to the pri-
macy of operations. Farocki’s film installation series presents this
switch as a particular kind of an image that emerges in those insti-
tutional practices although also articulating it through the various
histories and spaces that condition both the emergence of such im-
ages and their industrial base: these include military test facilities,
archives, laboratories, and factories.
The institutional line of references is familiar in many of
Farocki’s films that have investigated how contemporary images
are intimately tied with the modern forms of industrial production,
detaching from a history of images only as visual culture, to histo-
ries of chemistry, violence, labor, exploitation, and data. Already in
Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), Farocki mapped
a similar terrain of investigations of how to read landscapes, aerial
imagery, targeting systems, and also other forms of modeling, simu-

lation, and aesthetic techniques as they operate in the world in the
fundamentally material sense. The film will also be featured later
in this book—even if my aim is not to offer an analysis of Farocki or
his works as such.30
Nonetheless, the work with images about images sets a scene and
opens up an artistic, epistemic, and research-focused agenda. Eye/
Machine III (2003) is one such example where operational images
are articulated across a set of cases: factory scenes of data and mea-
surement to infrared aircraft detection systems, laser scanning of
built structures, and engineering to robotic navigation systems that
sense the space around them. Images produced in those situations
12 Introduction
are drawn from machine-v ision systems of perception, embodied

and embedded in autonomous or remote systems, and working
through an artificial environmental relation where the image is a
crucial part of movement and guidance.31 Operational images are,
in Farocki’s words, “pictures that are part of an operation,”32 im-
plying the primacy of action and function instead of a picture to
be seen and interpreted for meanings. Perception is tightly coupled
with action, immediate or delayed. This coupling systematically op-
erationalizes terrains and targets. Hence guidance systems, move-
ment, tracking, measurement, and precision are some of the terms
that take precedence in such images that are often, across a visual
history, bluntly put, “inconsequential.”33 It is also a condensation of
an aesthetic program that relates to what images are seen, which
ones are archived, and which of the multitude of images are merely
used and erased:
Images that appear so inconsequential that they are not

stored—the tapes are erased and are used again. Generally the
images are stored and archived only in exceptional cases, but
exceptional cases one is sure to encounter. Such images chal-
lenge the artist who is interested in a meaning that is not au-
thorial and intentional, an artist interested in a sort of beauty
that is not calculated. The US military command has surpassed
us all in the art of showing something that comes close to the
“unconscious visible.”34
The operational aesthetic returns in chapter 3, but before that, a

word or two about where we are heading: while military contexts
of machine vision have taken most of the space of commentary and
attention when it comes to Farocki’s notion and its articulation in
moving images and photography, it is clear that the breadth of ex-
amples tells a larger story than merely about genealogies of military
vision systems. This is not to dismiss such a key trait. Farocki’s ex-
amples from a 1942 instructional film showing the operations of a
V1 guided missile to the 1990s military systems that became a key
topic for art and media theory from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio
are persistently apt in the context of contemporary drone warfare
and in the media archaeology of military vision.35 Even Farocki him-
Introduction 13
self reads “the US military command” as part of a new aesthetic

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

greater effectiveness of mathematics over time-honored tac-
tics. Systems analysis was unquestionably superior, in his view,
despite the common belief that “experience” has been a better
guide than “theory” in this kind of work.37
Of course, an opposition of theory vs. experience was a bit of a sim-

plification considering how the pioneer of Operational Research
Patrick Blackett (later Baron Blackett, and later also featured in
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow) had defined the pillars of OR

as based on “observation, experiment and reasoning.”38 A broader
understanding of the scientific method had been rolled out and in-
tegrated into how space, strategy, tactics (including the evaluation
of success of tactics), and logistics were to unfold based on data.
Nonetheless, to keep with Kahn’s exaggeration in spirit and style,
perhaps OR did more for “theory” than French 1960s structuralism
and poststructuralism. Perhaps not, and it is definitely not the sort
of theory we usually practice or want to practice in the humanities,
but one point was made clear: experience is secondary, formaliz-
able design and planning are primary. To program the battlefield,
you program people first, while later on you have programmable
machines such as the ones that populate examples of operational
14 Introduction
images as we know them now. Besides naming them as computers,

they are more specifically, for example, platforms, as will be argued
in chapter 2.
To deal with large-scale systems, logistics, and abstractions, one
had to fine-tune a different mindset: “In decisions regarding weap-
ons systems development such as choosing between long-range
bombers with big fuel tanks or short-range bombers with refueling
capacities, ‘no one can . . . answer by instinct, by feeling his pulse,
by drawing on experience,’” as RAND economist Charlie Hitch put
it.39 In short, the centrality of complex calculations (e.g., logistics),
the massive amount of data to be processed, decisions to be taken,
and the multiple scales of abstraction were not commensurable with
the cognitive capacities of humans in the traditional sense of even
trained officers. The necessity to be able to rationalize, theorize,
model, and potentially automate decision-making in the context of
complexity persisted from the war to the postwar period—for ex-
ample, in management theory, making it a part of systems thinking
where any decision was part of a meshwork of other decisions, by
other actors, in a recursive loop.40 Cultural techniques of quantifica-
tion connected to modelling was one particular route offered in this
history of what “operations” came to mean on and off the battlefield.
Numbers count landscapes and what moves through them; they
count routes and their optimal relations; they count possibilities
and potentials; and numbers are the backbone for both images and
industrialization. Data is not infallible and simply “objective,” as
critical data studies have shown over and again,41 but it can be effec-
tive whether it is correct or not. Rolling out data-driven decisions,
systems, and operations is also an intervention in landscapes, so-
cial relations, values (financial and other), and more. While leaving
a longer discussion of logistics and operational images for later, it
shows already much of the relevant context that elaborates the im-
plicit conditions of emergence of what Farocki coins in his terms
and in his audiovisual work by way of the “soft montage”42 of archive
and inconsequential images. One peculiar context of such images
would then be the over 70-year history of military-driven operations
research and subsequent management theory and some 150-year
history of photographic-driven data analysis. In some ways, this all
condenses into “an industrialisation of vision”43—or even “indus-
Introduction 15
trialisation of thought,”44 as Farocki himself coined his interest in

cinema and perception, directly echoing Virilio’s work on the “veri-
table market in synthetic perception.”45 The contemporary versions
of that coinage relate to questions of artificial intelligence, machine
vision, but also the genealogy of the concept of operations as it per-
tains to images, institutions, spaces, and nonhuman visuality. AI
will be featured particularly in chapter 2.
The industrialization of vision has been often coined as part of
the industrialization of destruction, a theme that connects Farocki
to the 1980s (and later) theorization of war and visuality.46 Technical
processes of abstraction, images that are primarily for targeting and
destruction feature as part of a genealogy of rationalized violence
that human bodies are subjected to. As such, Farocki’s scene for op-
erational images could be seen as a crystallization of much criti-
cal theory, thematically visible in the focus on the Holocaust, the
Vietnam War (napalm in Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire, 1969), the
Gulf War, and the prison-surveillance-capitalist complex that fea-
tures in many of his works.47 But this book argues that there needs to
be nuance in how this concept of the operational image is read and
used, avoiding the temptation of packing all sorts of abstractions—
and abstract images of technical and calculational use—into one
camp of a kind of Enlightenment gone awry, a stream of violence
and extraction that is merely about military power in the restricted
sense of warfare. This is not to ignore the operational violence
of capitalism (chapter 1 and throughout) or the colonial uses and
functions of measurement and their neocolonial forms (chapters 3

and 4); but to take a position against abstraction on principle would
be a mistake, leading us to insufficiently nuanced readings about
technical images. We have plenty of those already, and in the con-
text of environmental imaging, remote sensing, AI and platform
culture, and many other crucial topics, we cannot anymore afford
to miss the more detailed high-res insights.
In other words, one additional step proposed in this book in-
cludes a shift from military operations to the other, closely aligned
use of force that defines the current landscape of operations: “Op-
erations Other Than War.” This is not a nonmilitary form of power,
but one that builds on particular logistical capacities and systemic,
technological potentials of power primed for the contemporary
16 Introduction
planetary situation, from environmental issues to humanitarian as-

sistance to enforcement of exclusion zones to handling pandemics.
In some ways it relates to the twentieth-century lineage of opera-
tions research, but it also becomes a way to tap into the contempo-
rary moment of logistical wiring of bodies and territories. In Rosi
Braidotti and Matthew Fuller’s words, the “conflict is played out,
triggered, and modulated through means that include finance, smug-
gling, culture, drugs, media and fabrication, technologies, resources, psy-
chological operations, networks, international law, ecologies, economic
aid, and urban terror. War becomes postdisciplinary, multiscalar,
creative, and highly mediatic and technological, deploying special-
ized multiskilled teams and techniques.”48 In other words, war and
conflict become part of the extended repertoire of media techniques
of confusion, doubt, and misinformation, often paired with the de-
ployment of “ruses, proxies, ambiguous agency, hyperbole, the op-
erationalization of ‘mistakes’ and unattributable forces.”49 Hence,
we can ask, What format of operational images speak to this state
of war and violence?
We might not (always) be at war, but we are (always) mobilized
and operationalized. This could also be referred to as the perceptual
and operational fine-tuning of the “nonbattle,” a term first intro-
duced by Virilio and developed by Brian Massumi. Operations and
actions are embedded in a broader field of intensities and poten-
tials, possibilities, and the modeling of futures. “In the nonbattle,
the relation between action and waiting has been inverted. Waiting
no longer stretches between actions. Action breaks into waiting.”50

The operational is nested here in the significance of knowing how
soft power can work effectively. Massumi continues: “Soft power is
how you act militarily in waiting, when you are not yet tangibly act-
ing. . . . In the condition of nonbattle, when you have nothing on
which to act tangibly, there is still one thing you can do: act on that
condition. Act to change the conditions in which you wait.”51
Operations that act on the conditions of existence and conditions
of further operations sound like a version of Virilio that Massumi
restages and like a proposal that could come from the direction of
Foucault’s analysis of architectures and diagrams. Diagrams fea-
ture in this book as one reference; one could also consider images
as tableaux of information52 (in reference to Gilles Deleuze’s terms)
Introduction 17
that cut across traditional scales of experience, space, and mean-

ing, and rearrange those like the abstract images rearrange the cur-
rent technological cities (see chapter 5 for a discussion of the urban
technologies of light and data). Indeed, the Farocki in question here
is somewhat less the critic of Enlightenment reason (in the lineage
of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) than a media archaeolo-
gist mapping what is visible, what is sayable, and importantly, what
is countable. This line of arguments pulls Farocki from a thematic
analysis of modern rational images to a method of mapping archae-
ologies and genealogies of images as they become working material
for critical thought. This material, though, is thoroughly condi-
tioned by a recursive loop between industrial production and im-
ages in and out of war. Raymond Bellour calls this, rather aptly with
a Foucault-inspired undertone, the photo-diagram—another phras-
ing of the methodological positions at play in operational images.
Bellour’s note on Farocki’s material is fruitful for our purposes:
“The photographs as well as the actual film recordings are equally
ordered pieces of evidence of a reasoned assessment of the nature
of the visible as defined on the basis of the very invisibilities that
form it, leading to so many machinic and asubjective regulations,
normativities and constraints.”53
Operational images have been discussed in cinema studies by, for
example, Volker Pantenburg, Thomas Elsaesser, Pasi Väliaho, and
Erika Balsom, and in contemporary art discourse by Trevor Paglen,
Hito Steyerl, and Lawrence Lek, among others. The Harun Farocki
Institute in Berlin navigates among cinema, art, and discursive work

as a “platform for researching [Farocki’s] visual and discursive prac-
tice and supporting new projects that engage with the past, present,
and the future of image cultures.”54 Farocki’s name stands at the
intersection of multiple genealogies, practices, and concepts that are
not reducible to a story of an auteur. I do not claim that previous
writing about him has done this either; indeed, already Elsaesser
identified many of Farocki’s works as “contributions to media ar-
chaeology, as well as an essential part of the prehistory of digital
images”55 where questions of interface, simulation, and, indeed,
operation become central hinges for an appreciation of particular
kinds of genealogies of which the digital is only one technical term.
As Elsaesser puts it, “These changes we tend to associate with the
18 Introduction
digital turn, but operational images just remind us that moving

as well as still images have many histories, not all of which pass
through the cinema or belong to art history. Digital images may
merely have made these parallel histories more palpably present, but
operational images, as Farocki clearly saw, have always been part of
the visual culture that surrounds us.”56 Two intersecting, closely re-
lated points sum up this argument: On the one hand, it can be seen
as a term that speaks to techniques of measurement, analysis, and
synthesis through techniques of images but in particular institu-
tional situations and uses. Operational images organize the world,
but they also organize our sense and skills in terms of how we are
trained to approach such images, from the photogrammetric map-
ping of landscapes to pattern recognition, astronomy datasets to
Mars Rover imaging practices.57 On the other hand, the term relates
to practices (and labor) of testing, administering, and planning also
reflected in the sites of filming (in addition to what was mentioned
above) where Farocki himself worked. These range from schools to
offices to management training centers, and army field exercises, to
paraphrase Elsaesser. To also quote his summary: “To operational
images correspond operating instructions for life.”58 As instructions
of life, the term implies the broader use of the term “algorithmic” as
the training of bodies, setting institutional routines, and rehearsing
automation in ways that tie machines to laboring human bodies.
Imaging practices become operational in how they tie bodies into
collective routines.59
What characterizes Farocki’s films as an “education image” (to

refer to Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun) is exactly this particu-
lar quality to attend to such material spaces and signs and images
that define learning (“work desks, typewriters, books, diagrams, and
equations that constitute the scenographies of learning”) as well as
“scenes that dramatize narratives of learning.”60 But after learning
becomes about machine learning and training refers to the training
set, we also have to adjust the scope of these cultural techniques.
The work of labeling images in practices of supervised machine
learning is one scene of the training of both neural networks and
the people involved in sustaining those networks.61 The discourse
of the photographic, but also “education” and work, become thus
restaged in ways that are not merely the factory or the earlier use
Introduction 19
of the industrial scene but globally distributed across platforms of

logistics such as Amazon Mechanical Turk.62 Not that one image
replaces the other, but the educational image, navigational image,
instructive image, and operational image take place at moments
and sites of transition, exchange, and transformation. The elec-
tronic switch—a nd its relation to the circuit and circuit board,
the techniques of control and optimization—defines the way both
twentieth-and twenty-first-century operations and (technical) im-
ages63 become the historical site of connection even if not all I say in
this book is reducible to such technological ur-scenes.
In other words, societal operations are part of the broader frame-
work of discussion of this particular aspect of visual culture, even
if it at first seems in exact contrast to Farocki’s own somewhat
fragmented words about operational images: “Images without a
social goal, not for edification, not for reflection.”64 Indeed, while
Pantenburg picks up this phrase from Farocki, it is not meant that
the topic is devoid of politics in relation to a variety of societal insti-
tutions. While the images are not interesting to look at as images,
they have multiple chains of operations through which they are
linked to a long line of institutional, epistemological, and other uses
that trigger a different aesthetics that speaks to questions of what is
now, perhaps, called the nonhuman image65 and the nonrepresen-
tational image as they circulate across institutional sites and uses,
from education to training and technicians to algorithmics of the
everyday. As such, this book toes a fine line between an emphasis
on the notion of operationality—while not wanting to ignore that

it is the image, here, that ties the discussion to being a contribution
to visual and screen studies, photography, and moving image—and
the transformation of those in relation to questions of data and even
artificial intelligence (machine learning).
Before outlining some key terms, let me offer this interim sum-
mary of the claims and arguments of this book: First, operations and
operationality are key concepts for contemporary visual and media
theory while moving beyond the visual, the visible, and the lens-based.
The term “invisual” (introduced below) will become a significant ad-
dition in this context. Second, the operational image is irreducible to
being merely about digital images, big data, or artificial intelligence
(machine/deep learning). Those recent developments are not ignored
20 Introduction
but placed into a historical dialogue with questions of data, sensing,

and spatial uses of images. Third, the term is “transdisciplinary,”
and as such, it links discussions in media theory, art studies, digital
aesthetics, architecture, and critical infrastructure with visual cul-
ture studies. In this book, I am also interested in the context of how
concepts bind together different disciplines. Concepts, too, operate.
The Media Theory of Invisuality

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

thinking images for at least three reasons: first, they offer
dynamic approaches that analyze phenomena into doings and
happenings rather than into things and static entities; second,
they offer relational approaches that conceive identity in terms
of open-ended processes of becoming; and third, by so doing,
they allow us to ascribe agency to images, and crucially, to con-
ceive agency as distributed across interconnected assemblages
of people, practices, and mediating artifacts.67
The above is a useful, underlying methodological guideline that

should be kept in mind throughout this book. Furthermore, it fea-
Introduction 21
tures the various projects and examples included in these pages.

This dynamic notion of the image that speaks of them as temporal,
relational, and agential is particularly visible in recent audiovisual
and written work that picks up a similar approach.
Trevor Paglen’s homage to Farocki and operational images re-
lated it to an informational, even data-driven framing. As a version
of the image as information-tableau, Paglen’s artistic-practice-
informed writing identifies invisible images and machine vision as
the regime of operations that define the transformation of visual
culture—images that are “made by machines for other machines”
but also such “invisible images [that] are actively watching us, poking
and prodding, guiding our movements, inflicting pain and inducing
pleasure.”68 Images have agency, but that agency is distributed across
vast operational spheres, which are also geographically dispersed.
While we could argue that all images, including the visible ones, are
known to do exactly that—cause bodily reactions and affects from
pain to pleasure and much more—it is the odd but necessary view
to a data-driven understanding of images that suggests this meth-
odological angle as to how the operations bring such instructions
of life into existence. As “doings and happenings,” operational im-
ages could actually turn out to be less about images than about situ-
ational awareness and (automated) decision-making that concerns
many of the contemporary data situations, such as dashboards.69
Operational images are in Paglen’s narrative both logistically
crucial (automated vision and sorting systems that read car plates,
shipping containers, faces, etc.) and quantitively plenty: billions and

billions of images not merely taken but uploaded and processed on
platforms such as Facebook. “DeepMask,” TensorFlow (Google), and
other platform-integrated forms of operationalizing digital images
as they “identify people, places, objects, locations, emotions, ges-
tures, faces, genders, economic statuses, relationships” are included
in Paglen’s useful entry list of ways of seeing as an intervention in
the world. AI systems are part of the scene that help to realize the
essential shift: “The machine-machine landscape is not one of rep-
resentations so much as activations and operations.”70 Following on
from this pithy summary, I aim to discuss in more detail how this
landscape—which sometimes is literally a landscape as a territorial
formation in urban and nonurban situations—operates through
22 Introduction
different layers of abstractions that are essential to how the logis-

tics of the image and logistics of planetary space coalesce.71 Indeed,
it is thus no surprise that one of the key topics to focus on is the
logistical image as it facilitates the global flows of goods and people
and how it turns things across the scale into a massive AI training
set.72
Picking up on the link among operational images, data, and
platforms, a key term (and featured in this book’s subtitle) is the
invisual. Throughout the book, I refer to the pairing of the visual-
invisual to draw this continuum as a territory of transformations
that concerns images and their role as aesthetic–epistemic agents.
Focusing on how contemporary visual culture is operationalized in
the automated procedures of digital platforms, Adrian Mackenzie
and Anna Munster have proposed the concept of the invisual to help
to shift the focus from the mere quantity of images to how they are
being aggregated. This collective of images, their ensemble, is to be
considered as material and generative forces, even if they take shape
as image datasets. Mackenzie and Munster argue that they orga-
nize “all kinds of platform cultural actions and forms.”73 While this
theme could be addressed as the gradual shift in complex systems
on the coupling of perception and action—and thus corresponds to
a particular reading of cybernetics, image, and design74—it is here
also useful as a way to focus on how data and visuality are entangled
in contemporary digital infrastructures of platforms.
Invisual culture suggests that while the image persists in con-
temporary platform culture, it does not feature as a visual image in

the optical or experiential sense. Mackenzie and Munster’s argu-
ment about invisual perception captures this transformation, which
is furthermore the underpinning focus of this book too:
Such a mode suggests that while visual techniques and prac-

tices continue to proliferate—from data visualization through
to LIDAR technologies for capturing nonoptical images—the
visual itself as a paradigm for how to see and observe is being
evacuated, and that space is now occupied by a different kind
of perception. This is not simply “machine vision,” we argue,
but a making operative of the visual by platforms themselves.75
Introduction 23
What Mackenzie and Munster elaborate as the invisual—that is, as

“a new mode of nonrepresentational observation”76—is in this book
mapped through past and current modes of operationality. The ten-
sion between old and new is not returned to any ideas of natural vs.
technical, analog vs. digital, but assumes perceptual techniques of
sense and image guide and misguide, include and exclude, educate
and miseducate. These images are organized in relation to a set of
technological contexts or infrastructures, apparatuses, and instru-
ments defined by operative ontologies of cultural techniques (see
chapter 1). Thus the shift for the subject is not merely from “human
to machine” (whether platform, AI, machine vision, or something
else) but in relation to institutional sets of affordances that define
what images as operative techniques are. The institutions can be
military but can also be scientific organizations and discourses,
colonial expeditions, corporate AI, massive scale national remote
sensing and data platforms, and environmental sensing services, as
well as different kinds of art and design practices.
Contemporary digital platforms format and operationalize im-
ages as part of their invisual perception and aggregation. Mackenzie
and Munster’s work will be one of the reference points for the de-
velopment of the ins and outs of operationality, but I also want to
emphasize that this book is not solely about (digital) data, AI, and
platforms, even if it is my contention that writing any book on opera-
tional images after the emergence of “platform seeing” (Mackenzie
and Munster’s term) cannot stay the same as it would have before
such an ensemble of image techniques. This is why I stay focused

not only on an exegesis of the concept of operational images as it has
been specifically used by Farocki, Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and others,
but how it becomes operational in a manner that is highly recur-
sive:77 To investigate the turn to operational images, one reads contem-
porary forms of operationality through historical sources and cases that
also inform the contemporary reading.
The recursive operation of back and forth cross-reading of dif-
ferent cases helps to detach from a linear assumption that would
assign “the digital” a role (it often enjoys) as a totalizing historical
shift or that would suppose “data” is a recent invention of big data
infrastructures. Operational images, as a concept and an area of
24 Introduction
methodological questions regarding images, thus itself becomes

operationalized: as per the above definition of one of the key aims
of this book, it helps to understand how data and visuality, space
(urban and nonurban) and image define each other, and how this
image is temporally dynamic.78
A Manual
I want to add a word on the methodological approach that tries to
build some elements from the theme (of operations) into a guide-
line. The book is a sort of a manual that can take you to places but
doesn’t give a full map of every detail. Instead of a historical analysis
that would offer one holistic genealogy of the term “operations”—
for example, how it emerges in Farocki’s work, or how it ties mili-
tary imaging into a twentieth-century story about machine vision,
or how it fits with media archaeology of measurement and photo-
grammetry—I work with the concept as a force of its own.
What does that mean? First, the term “operation” is not merely
employed to point to historical instances; it does not become a tool
that, like a spotlight, moves across historical practices and technolo-
gies. Instead, the term itself is set to motion, too; the spotlight turns
on itself. Second, this implies the already mentioned recursive task
of how historical and contemporary examples and theoretical ar-
guments are set to influence each other.79 “Operational images” is
a heuristic term that helps to excavate media archaeological traits
of past image practices in relation to contemporary data cultures,

and in the process, it also changes pace and becomes respecified,
retrained, reoperationalized. Third, picking up speed from Massumi
again, we can refer to “conceptual persuasion,” which is not about a
concept that is operationalized for particular tactical uses (such as to
persuade) but rather carries its own force in the abstract so as to rec-
ognize the potential “strangely effective force immanently inflecting
events, abstractly energizing their verging onto self-completion.”80
Aptly, for Massumi, the note on persuasion speaks to his interest
in “operative logics” such as preemption as a force of contemporary
soft power of the military–security complex as it spans across the
field of social institutions. The idea that, for example, preemption is
Introduction 25
then a “force of attraction around which the field of power is bend-

ing” is intriguing.81 What would this mean for operational images?
Not merely images placed in the social use of institutions, but as
forces of attraction that bend fields of power, vision, sensing, subjec-
tivity, information, data, and so on, differently? It is almost like the
operational carves its own space as much as it acts upon someone
else’s (institutional) orders: a vexing thought to follow throughout
the book, as it introduces friction to the otherwise direct functional
use of operation for specific institutionally defined purposes.
Surrounded by such questions that set the mood of this book,
the text is also a chance to explore how some of the theoretical propo-
sitions and arguments emerge from collaborative work and what I
recognize as part of the methodological setup, as part of the “ways
in which” and the “how” of the text’s procedure.82 Explication and
speculation; historical examples and archival work; contemporary
articulations such as those in the field of visual arts. This book sets
in motion a “conceptual persuasion” that connects such instances
into an argument that is added to, chapter by chapter.
Many of my collaborations informing this book have been with
artists and designers. To prioritize any of these collaborations is
not to suggest that artistic knowledge is in some way superior over
many other fields that work with images and define what an image
can do but to recognize the role artist-scholars have already played
in defining this field and how it can be further articulated across
historical and contemporary practices. Farocki himself is the key
example, but we can name others, too, whose work discusses a simi-
lar territory of ideas in cinema, photography, and other practices of
visual culture. Allan Sekula and the notion of instrumental image
would be a good sparring partner in this discussion; it is another
concept that has escaped beyond the field of photographic discourse
and has been subsequently linked to investigations of contemporary
logistics and critical forensic methods.83 Paglen and Steyerl have al-
ready made an appearance and will do so again. Both are examples
of artist methods articulated in projects for galleries and texts that
are not entirely academic but are influentially rearticulating the
field of theoretical discourse of visual arts beyond the gallery and
media art festivals or museums.
26 Introduction
In this book, besides referring to established work by such es-

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

gestions circulate in and through such interactions.
I thus find it methodologically important to underline the broader
network in which the conceptual work is situated. Such a network
often becomes the invisible scaffolding for published work, but any-
one engaged in institutional and extrainstitutional work knows
about the force of such infrastructure. The concept of operational
images becomes a discussion drawn from written and audiovisual
archives of examples and encounters in contemporary situations
of practice-based making, including not just (fine) art but also de-
sign and architecture. For example, working as part of the Strelka
Institute’s Terraforming program has become a part of composing
this book through a specific shared space of concerns, concepts, and
Introduction 27
methods. Indeed, developing this concept not merely as a designa-

tion of a territory—“this is an operational image, this is not”—but as
an articulation of relations of visuality and invisuality, agency, and
labor becomes a way to reflect on the dynamics of concepts also in
practice-driven work.
The operational image, as a concept, has a persuasive force that
becomes involved in different studio, theoretical, field, and other
practices across disciplines. Such a stance also expresses the idea
that concepts are not merely stable positions that populate a ge-
neric map of “theory” but instead already traveling dynamic entities
that transform material and semiotic situations—while also being
affected by such situations. Concepts are practiced in institutional
situations (archival research or empirical studies, for example) and
nonacademic artistic situations (experimental work with machine
learning datasets, for example). Both examples already incorporate
multiple kinds of competencies and techniques.84
Seeing concepts as a dynamic part of methodological work echoes
some of the thoughts by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the
centrality of concepts for scholarly activity that shifts focus away
from contemplating or reflecting. Against the shop window of ready-
made and off-the-shelf concepts and methods, I am more invested in
this constructive sense of concepts as operative in their own right as
they mark a singularity:
You will know nothing through concepts unless you have first
created them—that is, constructed them in an intuition spe-

cific to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not
be confused with them but that shelters their seeds and the
personae who cultivate them. Constructivism requires every
creation to be a construction on a plane that gives it an au-
tonomous existence. To create concepts is, at the very least, to
make something.85
While Deleuze and Guattari offer a more detailed insight into how
concepts are bordered by affects, functions, and percepts, we can
follow this short lead to arrive at some methodologically useful map
instruments (if a method is about a path and a road, we do not re-
ally want to know where we will end up, but rather what happens
28 Introduction
during those trips and travels). I do not claim the operational image
is a concept for philosophy proper, but it is a situation of artistic
practice and writing that produced a concept that shifts across dis-
ciplines; thus, the territory in question is, in this case, an aesthetic-
epistemic-conceptual one that then marks a specific entry into the
trajectory of movement of the visual-invisual.
A similar trait is also clearly expressed by Mieke Bal’s develop-
ment of conceptual work as its own methodologically significant
form of inquiry.86 Bal’s language echoes the idea of boundary objects
(as used in science studies and the history of science)87 but specifi-
cally in relation to concepts and their role in mediating between dif-
ferent disciplinary perspectives and creative practices. Indeed, the
notion of a traveling concept is thus one that speaks to the dynamic
multiplicity of the concept’s work—never just an ordinary word but
a delineation of a matter of forces and their territories, of situations
and their expansive repercussions. Giuliana Bruno has built a whole
methodological–territorial complex around this idea of motion/
emotion in Atlas of Emotion: topographies of affect, concepts, film,
and architecture are codetermining instances that are teased out
by way of writing but that also emerge out of historically situated
bodies.88
Incorporating the idea of traveling into a discussion of media and
its materials, as well as of concepts such as the operational image as
it moves across different disciplines, we can quote Bal: “But, after
returning from your travels, the object constructed turns out to no
longer be the ‘thing’ that so fascinated you when you chose it. It has
become a living creature, embedded in all the questions and consid-
erations that the mud of your travel spattered onto it, and that sur-
round it like a ‘field.’”89 As noted earlier, also concepts change as they
travel (not only between countries or disciplines but, for example, to
and from archival sources); a concept can be a sticky enough surface
that grabs hold of its encounters, leaving a smudge, a scar, a trace.
Those encounters are part of its reformulation: it carries a history
that impacts how it operates as an intervention into the contempo-
rary field.
In such a field of traveling concepts and dynamic, collaborative
investigations, this book sets out to investigate the web of concepts
and their living contexts of visual and invisual cultures. In this
Introduction 29
book, the operational image becomes a tool to investigate layers

of practice; it establishes bridges across institutions and leaps into
different discussions where this theme is present and where this
concept is explicitly or implicitly being used: media studies, art and
architecture, infrastructure and visual culture studies.
While this book emerges from the Operational Images and Visual
Culture project and is situated in the Department of Photography at
FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, it has multiple
institutional contexts. As a persuasive force, the term has a con-
ceptual intensity that transforms what photography is or how it is
being understood (and has a link to much of the discussions in post-
photography and current networked and digital practices of photog-
raphy),90 and this also leads to us asking questions about the “oth-
ers” of photography in a manner familiar from media archaeological
methodologies: Beyond visible spectra of light, what other practices
of light are part of the histories of the present? Which practices and
institutional epistemologies are implied in these situations?
The chapters of this book respond to such questions. I have al-
ready noted some of the themes in this introduction, and a sum-
mary of what follows will suffice. After this introductory chapter, I
turn to chapter 1, “Operations of Operations.” This chapter outlines
some of the recent uses of the notion of “operation” in theory, with a
special focus on operative ontologies. The chapter already starts to
move toward some of the thematic directions of the book, includ-
ing operations of capitalism and links between visuality and data
(grids). But chapter 2, “What Is Not an Image? On AI, Data, and

Invisuality,” especially dives into the topic. Here, the starting point
is Trevor Paglen and others’ interest in the invisibility of technical
images, especially in the context of artificial intelligence, which is
laid out in my text through three different sites where image op-
erations have been identified as a crucial part of politics of data:
the platform, the dataset, and the model. The chapter also goes
deeper into Mackenzie and Munster’s concept of invisuality, which
becomes a useful reference point for those techniques where visibil-
ity, invisibility, and data also meet with questions of, for example,
property and capitalism. If operational images are often considered
as part of advanced military technologies, then how does the hy-
pothesis that primitive accumulation and colonization across an
30 Introduction
intersectional sphere of force (land, class, race, sex) are part of what
to consider as war add to our analysis and methods?91
Operational images as nonrepresentational forces of produc-
tion are central to how the argument develops. Chapter 3, “The
Measurement-Image: From Photogrammetry to Planetary Surface,”
investigates the so-called measurement image from Farocki’s work
to a short historical investigation of photogrammetry. Also, the
planetary image as one of measurement is addressed by way of a
quirky historical case of the two 1730s geodesic expeditions that
measured the earth surface to draw maps to navigate. Questions of
infrastructure and logistics feature across the chapters. Chapter 4,
“Operational Aesthetic: Cinema for Territorial Management,” deals
with some of these issues through operational aesthetics, not just
as aesthetics in art but as preparation of capacities of sense and per-
ception. As outlined in chapter 1, much of the recursive nature of
operative ontologies and operational images is how they are images
about images, and here artistic work, such as Geocinema’s, dem-
onstrates the operations of large-scale remote sensing and data as
part of the operational images of geopolitics. Chapter 5, “The Post-
lenticular City: Light into Data,” focuses on invisuality and exam-
ines transformations of urban sensing and images through a case
study of lidar. Beyond being a single technology of laser scanning
of the urban and nonurban environment—used, for example, in
autonomous vehicles—it also links to an alternative genealogy of
light: What forms of light off the visible spectrum but present as
intensive pulses are nested in techniques of images and invisuality?

How are the platforms of sensing and observation reformatting the
city, such as those investigated through aesthetic and design meth-
ods such as Scanlab’s?
The book ends with a conclusion, “A Soft Montage of Operations,”
that returns to the night sky and beyond through Event Horizon,
the black hole imaging project, while drawing together some final
points about the centrality of operational images as a hinge that
opens up cross-disciplinary investigations. What the conclusion of-
fers is also this, a line that I want to emphasize from the beginning:
this book maps the histories and afterlives of the notion of opera-
tional images and, hopefully, offers insights on methods too.

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INTRODUCTION

Between Light and Data

sky is visible.”1 While the rhetorical emphasis on the clean, crisp

Pickering, the long-­standing and renowned director of the Harvard

observations of the vast space outside the planetary sphere.

astronomy, including Annie Jump Cannon and her work on star

transit plates of 1874 and institutionalized work such as Carte de

spring of 1904, a comparison of two photographs of the Small

nologies (photography and spectral analysis) and the possibilities

FIGURE 1. A flyspanker and a photographic plate likely used and annotated

ing astronomical plates of stars with different values of visible brightness.

remote sensing and images that become operationalized for data

cant for questions of remote sensing. Such work becomes part of

as an alternative genealogy of visual practice that finds a resonat-

and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia of the late eighteenth ­century, “A

the ministory of astronomy and photographs. Nonetheless, a soil

it is less corruptible than the vibrant earth, but more corruptible

With the diagram, in contrast, the forest-­savanna transition

The useful takeaway here is that we should look at the operative

and appreciation of high-altitude air and clear skies to the photo-

transporting those images to Cambridge, in the trained analysis of

The Operational Image

imagery, targeting systems, and also other forms of modeling, simu-

are drawn from machine-­v ision systems of perception, embodied

Images that appear so inconsequential that they are not

The operational aesthetic returns in chapter 3, but before that, a

self reads “the US military command” as part of a new aesthetic

the successes of operations research in World War II proved the

Of course, an opposition of theory vs. experience was a bit of a sim-

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow) had defined the pillars of OR

images as we know them now. Besides naming them as computers,

trialisation of thought,”44 as Farocki himself coined his interest in

functions of measurement and their neocolonial forms (chapters 3

planetary situation, from environmental issues to humanitarian as-

no longer stretches between actions. Action breaks into waiting.”50

that cut across traditional scales of experience, space, and mean-

Institute in Berlin navigates among cinema, art, and discursive work

digital turn, but operational images just remind us that moving

What characterizes Farocki’s films as an “education image” (to

of the industrial scene but globally distributed across platforms of

on the notion of operationality—­while not wanting to ignore that

but placed into a historical dialogue with questions of data, sensing,

The Media Theory of Invisuality

Operational approaches provide promising possibilities for re-

The above is a useful, underlying methodological guideline that

tures the various projects and examples included in these pages.

shipping containers, faces, etc.) and quantitively plenty: billions and

different layers of abstractions that are essential to how the logis-

temporary platform culture, it does not feature as a visual image in

Such a mode suggests that while visual techniques and prac-

What Mackenzie and Munster elaborate as the invisual—­that is, as

such an ensemble of image techniques. This is why I stay focused

methodological questions regarding images, thus itself becomes

of past image practices in relation to contemporary data cultures,

then a “force of attraction around which the field of power is bend-

In this book, besides referring to established work by such es-

stuck in my mind as many other leads, thoughts, problems, and sug-

methods. Indeed, developing this concept not merely as a designa-

created them—­that is, constructed them in an intuition spe-

book, the operational image becomes a tool to investigate layers

(grids). But chapter 2, “What Is Not an Image? On AI, Data, and

intensive pulses are nested in techniques of images and invisuality?

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Pickering, the long-standing and renowned director of the Harvard

and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia of the late eighteenth century, “A

With the diagram, in contrast, the forest-savanna transition

are drawn from machine-v ision systems of perception, embodied

on the notion of operationality—while not wanting to ignore that

What Mackenzie and Munster elaborate as the invisual—that is, as

created them—that is, constructed them in an intuition spe-