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Working images: Harun Farocki and the operational image

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Abstract

This chapter traces the origins and implications of the ‘operational image’, as it has come to be explored in Harun Farocki’s texts and installations since 2000. Defined in Eye/Machine I (2000) as ‘Images without a social goal, not for edification, not for reflection,’ operational images pervade both the military and non-military realm of today’s life. To contextualise this type of image, three concepts are revisited that have explicitly informed Farocki’s understanding: Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘operational language’, Vilém Flusser’s ‘technical image’, and the project of a computer aided ‘Bildwissenschaft’ based on algorithmic image retrieval. After a closer analysis of some of the counter-operational strategies Farocki employs, the article suggests to distinguish three levels of operationality and to understand Farocki’s project as a film maker, video artist and thinker as a continuous examination of the operational potential of images.

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... While most of these images require people to sit in front of them and perform the work of monitoring, it is not their primary purpose to make them stay seated. As "working images," to use Pantenburg's (2017) variation of Harun Farocki's term 'operational images,' they are part of work operations or even perform work themselves (cf. Pantenburg 2017). ...
... As "working images," to use Pantenburg's (2017) variation of Harun Farocki's term 'operational images,' they are part of work operations or even perform work themselves (cf. Pantenburg 2017). An image of a baggage belt being stuck, for instance, will tend to make the spectator/worker get up and see for him/herself what's wrong with it. ...
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Article
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... 8 This novel type of image is wholly identical with its technological deployment, it nearly always remains invisible, and, in the words of one intertitle in Eye/Machine, it is "without a social goal, not for edification, not for reflection." 9 Moreover, Farocki's purely observational films-starting with An Image (1983), which patiently documents a Playboy photo shoot without any voice-over commentary-also echo Barthes's book: on the one hand, because they patiently document ritualized, "mythical" modes of negotiation and role play (e.g., job application training, financial negotiations); on the other hand, because they abstain from metalinguistic voice-overs and try to get as close as possible to the operational level of these processes. ...
Chapter
This chapter examines the use of computer-generated imagery in the late cinematic essays of Harun Farocki within the context of scholarly debates surrounding the waning of the index and heightened possibilities for visual manipulation in the era of digital media. Focusing on the essay projects Serious Games I–IV and Parallel I–IV, this chapter investigates how Farocki extends his long-standing practice of self-reflexively unpacking the technical, formal, and ideological dimensions of operational images into the realm of advanced computer-generated imagery. I explore Farocki’s methods of repurposing footage from a diverse range of sources—including commercial video games, military training programmes, and architectural models—to probe the aesthetic constitution and ontological properties of digitally constructed ex nihilo images. With reference to Serious Games I–IV, I argue that Farocki’s critical engagement with these images not only critiques the role of simulation in contemporary warfare, but also redefines classical notions of cinematic ‘truth’ by unlocking the epistemological potential of images devoid of indexical ties to pro-filmic reality.
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Harun Farocki’s last completed installation film, Parallel I-IV, opens with a collection of video game landscapes grouped together by elements of earth, fire, water, and air, engaging a non-vococentric film essay style to reflect upon material transformations that occur through digital images. Farocki develops a unique curatorial approach to express both the power and the limits of digital image construction and the creative process, and emphasizes sharp historical perspectives. By challenging the dyad of realism and simulation and their associated narrative conventions, whether through film, video games, or art exhibits, Farocki’s brand of essay film provides critical insights into the affective and sociotechnical dimensions of the imaged world.
Article
“Frases de impacto, imagens de impacto: uma conversa com Vilém Flusser” (1986), vídeo de autoria de Harun Farocki, é o ponto de partida para pensar os textos e as imagens nos diversos suportes de comunicação, como o jornal e o cinema. A obra é um documentário de curta-metragem que grava a conversa entre o diretor e o filósofo a respeito da análise conjunta da capa do jornal alemão Bild. Este artigo apresenta a influência dos livros do filosofo tcheco, que abrem o filme, - “Filosofia da caixa preta - Ensaios para uma futura filosofia da fotografia” e “O universo das imagens técnicas: o elogio da superficialidade” - no pensamento do cineasta e como o conceito de “imagens técnicas” de Flusser, o levou a cunhar o termo “imagens operacionais”.
Article
Harun Farocki's films make use of a category of images the director calls “operational”, a term describing images, either photographic or computer-generated, that perform or participate in tasks, usually in military or industrial settings. Treatments of Farocki's films have frequently used the notion of the operational image uncritically, and without comparing Farocki's definition of these images with existing semiotic categories. This article seeks to situate Farocki's operational imagery within a theory of visual communication, and to explore the implications of automated and instrumental imagery for theories of communication in general. Abandoning the focus in much Farocki scholarship on the representative properties of operational imagery, this article focuses on the world-shaping abilities of images that are integral to war and labour. Drawing primarily on Farocki's Eye / Machine I–III series ( Auge / Maschine, 2000–2003) the article then elaborates on the ways in which the world-shaping capacity of operational images conditions human perception and action. In particular, the limitations imposed by operational images upon human actors who interact with them, or live in environments orchestrated by them, reduce the essential role played by indeterminacy and interpretation in communication.
Article
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Dans l’iconosphère que nous habitons, est-ce que les catégories d’image artistique et d’image scientifique sont toujours actuelles ? Il faudrait peut-être les penser comme des catégories opérationnelles, plus qu’ontologiques, finalisées à une différenciation des formes de la pensée, des méthodes d’interprétation ou des procédures d’abstraction. À la suite d’une telle différenciation, on pourra découvrir jusqu’à quel point ces formes sont historiquement croisées et comment aujourd’hui le dialogue interdisciplinaire devient une nécessité méthodologique.
Article
The following essay explores the work of art as a site of encounter with human perceptual labor that plays a role in technical operations. It tackles the way such labor is deemed obsolete, soon to be replaced, and therefore surrogate even if it actually animates and reproduces automated vision systems. It explores how art goes about representing the ways in which such labor is undervalued and unrecognized. The text argues for reading in between the lines and images of Harun Farocki’s films, installations, and writings where the obsolescence of human labor emerges more as an ideological screen than a fact. It focuses on moments in his oeuvre which indicate that human labor, including cognition as automation’s last frontier, is not automated away but persists, changes site, undergoes restructuring, and becomes more hidden. More recent works by the eeefff collective and Elisa Giardina Papa explore the intertwined roles of human affection and vision labor in the necessarily failed attempts to teach machines to see and feel, to “clean” the algorithmic vision and affection from opacity and the queerness of real life. Both artists leave behind Farocki’s self-reflexive, detached spectator to involve the audience in more situated and embodied experiences of perception labor and the particular ways in which such labor has become outsourced and dispersed in semi-peripheries such as Sicily or Belarus. They try to express the price that people pay with their emotions and bodies for such work. Yet, in principle, they follow Farocki’s take on labor’s in/visibility in that they challenge the ruling ideologies that blind human vision to the realities of labor. The essay also pays attention to the ways in which both artistic and technical vision today are pre-determined by the logic of the gig economy.
Article
Peter Gentzel, Jeffrey Wimmer and Ruben Schlagowski focus on the app Google Maps. In structural terms, Google Maps is committed to the production logic of platform or surveillance capitalism, insofar as the collected user data are utilised both to maintain Google Maps as a »cartographic infrastructure« (Plantin 2018) and to predict and manipulate behaviour (Zubo! 2019). On the other hand, Google Maps presents an »image of the world« that, as a product of platform capitalism, also conveys specific notions that we depict by using the concepts of »networked images« or »operational images« (Rubinstein & Sluis 2008; Farocki 2004). First, we traced the development of Google Maps and classified it using cartographic principles and criteria. Building on that, we performed two empirical studies. In a first step, we highlight findings on the everyday usage practices of Google Maps. In a second step, we characterise city maps produced by residents of a medium-sized city in Germany using an app developed by us. The project thus sheds light on the appropriation aspect of Google Maps and, by exploring the microlevel of individual usage practices, knowledge, and skills, provides an empirical contribution that is comparatively rare in the context of platform studies. Developing a map application furthermore enables us to show that the selection of knowledge and its spatial anchoring - the »image of the world«- follows a di!erent logic when certain individuals create a map for specific locations (e.g., multimodal routes to »hidden culture«).
Thesis
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This thesis argues that as photography’s technological basis has become more complex and increasingly detached from human vision, a thicker account of photographic practice that moves away from humanist discourse and single authorship can assist in demonstrating a continuity between film and new technological photographic practices. It revisits key concepts in documentary photography such as the ‘decisive moment’ through the filter of particular historical, technological and philosophical ideas that have informed the critical engagement with photography as a media of representation. It reconsiders some orthodox assumptions about photography including the idea that photography is fundamentally a human-centred practice and that photographic technology has a singular determining agency that is most often subordinated to the image. From this, the thesis attempts to factor in the material, cognitive and technical aspects that shape the photographic decision-making process as they can be observed in the relational network of elements that contribute to the final image. It then introduces new materialist theories that address non-human agencies and that have begun to force an awareness of the distribution of cognition and human action to the fore. Through a series of case studies and diffractive readings of contact sheets from professional photographic practice and production plans from a television broadcast, the collaborative relationship between the photographer, apparatus and world that co-produces the final image is made clear. This constructs a framework to understand photographic practice as a relational ecology that reveals the varying play of agencies in the collaborative meshwork between the photographer, the photographic apparatus and world during the photographic event. By emphasizing the mobility of the decision-making process in a way that helps towards an understanding of the dynamics of a collaboration it opens the way for a continuity between digital and analogue practices that do not bracket the cognitive processes of the photographer in favour of the non-human agents.
Article
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Engaging with Harun Farocki’s notion of the soft montage, our visual essay builds on our recent Seed, Image, Ground video project (2020). Commissioned by the Fotomuseum Winterthur, the mov-ing image piece addresses the surfaces of vegetal growth in relation to the surfaces of media such as screens and images. While the video is a central reference point for this visual essay, our aim is not so much to theorize our own moving images and their juxtapositions and rhythms. Instead, in this article, we present a series of surfaces and scales that appear in and through the images. Images build upon images and this constitutes the practice-led approach in the temporal unfolding of the video. In other words, the video works as a temporal articulation of image surfaces across and upon living surfaces. Hence the central motif of the video essay and this accompanying text is to ask “what do images of growth look like?” We also employ Celia Lury’s notion of “problem space” to consider the methodo-logical potential in the split screen practice and its relation to Farocki’s soft montage.
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In her reading of the philosophy-physics of Niels Bohr, Karen Barad has proposed a new ontology based on the post-representational concepts of diffractions and material-discursive practices. In my paper I trace these concepts in the INTRA SPACE project from the perspective of reading the experimental system as a apparatus for the production of real-time technical images. I will do so by comparing it to recent developments in computational photography and contextualizing the project within post-photographic artistic practices. A central question herein is whether photography can be understood as a non-distancing technique.
Chapter
Post-cinema designates a new way of making films. It is time to ask whether this novelty is complete or relative and to evaluate to what extent it represents a unitary or diversified current. The book proposes to integrate the post-cinema question within the post-art question in order to study the new ways of making filmic images. The issue will be considered at three levels: the impression of post-art on "regular" films; the "relocation" (Casetti) of the same films that can be seen using devices of all kinds in conditions more or less removed from the dispositif of the theater; the integration of cinema into contemporary art in all kinds of forms of creation and exhibition, parallel to the integration of contemporary art in "regular" cinema.
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This article investigates the concept of the ground truth as both an epistemic and technical figure of knowledge that is central to discussions of machine vision and media techniques of visuality. While ground truth refers to a set of remote sensing practices, it has a longer history in operational photography, such as aerial reconnaissance. Building on a discussion of this history, this article argues that ground truth has shifted from a reference to the physical, geographical ground to the surface of the images echoing earlier points raised by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy that there is a ground of the image that is central to the task of analysis beyond representational practices. Furthermore, building on the practices of pattern recognition, composite imaging, and different interpretational techniques, we discuss contemporary practices of machine learning that mobilizes geographical earth observation datasets for experimental purposes, including tests such as “fake geography” as well as artistic practices, to show how ground truth is operationalized in such contexts of AI and visual arts.
Article
This article develops the concept of «operational media» to think through the deployment of utility/useful cinema in the context of cybernetically informed educational policy. The paper argues that cybernetic concepts of communication, feedback loops and homeostasis were central to the pragmatic installation of media at the center of postwar mass education. Links are made to the dominance of cybernetic ideas in postwar social science, including social psychology, sociobiology and behaviourism. A consideration of the UN’s operational media allows for a reconsideration of the agency’s communicative mandate as biopolitical and governmental. Educational policies influenced by the UN were doubly concerned with technologized classrooms: cybernetic ideas presented themselves as politically neutral, while offering efficiencies in the delivery of content. Cold war citizenship was thus conceived as a form of training that would pragmatically lead to the rebalancing of a volatile international situation. Carrefour de la vie (1949), made by Belgian filmmaker Henri Storck for the United Nations, is presented as an example of the centrality of mental health for citizenship training in postwar biopolitical regimes. In particular, the tension between the film’s humanist and cybernetic strands are considered. Au Carrefour de la vie is considered as a transitional text, presenting a humanist story of childhood in postwar life that simultaneously prefigures the operation of a controlled society.
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Harun Farocki's last film, Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (2013), is studied by comparing it to other works by the director and analyzing its scenes. The article elaborates what is the position of this office regarding architecture as a producer of images, and then verifies what is its underlying spatiality. As a result, one can see how the aesthetic projects of Harun Farocki and the Sauerbruch Hutton office are aligned.
Chapter
Unter dem Begriff virtuelle Chirurgie werden im aktuellen Fachdiskurs Praktiken gefasst, die in Diagnostik, Planung und Intervention maßgeblich auf dem Einsatz von Bildgebungsverfahren, Softwareanwendungen und Augmented Reality Technologien beruhen. Der Beitrag untersucht an Fallstudien wie das Verhältnis von digitalen Daten, symbolischen Operationen und Patientenkörpern virtuell gestaltet und in materielle Interventionen transformiert wird. Zudem werden bild- und medientheoretische Fragestellungen sowie handlungsbezogene Herausforderungen benannt.
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