Professor Jussi Parikka is currently heading a project at Prague’s FAMU entitled “Operational Images and Visual Culture: Media Archaeological Investigations,” and we asked him what exactly is an ‘operational image’, and how they might define the future of work and automation in a post-pandemic world. We also discussed geo-centered design and what they’re nowadays cooking up at Strelka. 

You are currently heading a project at Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts focused on “operational images“ – a term which was coined in 2000 by Czech-born filmmaker Harun Farocki and which has since become an important concept for media theorists and artists like Trevor Paglen, Benjamin Bratton, Charlotte Klonk, Mohammad Salemy, and others. Can you explain what exactly is meant by it?

Our project emerges from a longer collaboration we had with Tomáš Dvořák which included various exchanges on media archaeology and theory of images. Operational images seemed to be a great fit for a larger project – and luckily we got funded – as it had been hovering around many art and theory discussions since early 2000s, but at least to our knowledge, there was no one major project that would focus on operational images.

The term refers to images that are not primarily representational but operational. They are images that are all around but not necessarily for human perception, aesthetics, or enjoyment but for automated analysis and function of different kinds of technical systems nested in different kinds of institutions, from policing to environmental analysis, finance to remote sensing. Machine vision systems such as facial recognition, semi-automated military systems, and many kinds of advanced imaging (observation and analysis) systems can be seen as part of this regime of imaging. What’s interesting is that the image as such is less interesting than where it connects; robotic systems or for example large-scale institutional arrangements, such as the imagery used in contemporary sciences, whether advanced physics or environmental data institutes.

Gazprom Neft’s The Industrial Automation Technopark, Omsk, Russia. ‚Making of Earths’, film still, Geocinema (2020)

For us in the project, the concept is interesting as it ties in with a lot of contemporary technological systems but also art – including photographic art – made from or in such systems. Earlier, Allan Sekula had referred to instrumental images that emerge in contexts such as military aerial reconnaissance and the vast regime of anonymous images that later get recircuited for example into artistic use and aestheticized, but also thus brought into a circuit of financial value – the art market. 

What’s interesting is also how the concept of the operational image enables discussions across disciplines – art, photography, and for example architecture – which had traditionally been dealing with very different images. The technical image becomes thus an interesting connection between variety of practices, which was another reason why this particular approach seemed suitable; it builds a broader research project that can expand into an interesting exchange of concepts, thoughts, and discourses in contemporary theory, photography, and art.

In his 2003 essay “Phantom Images,” Harun Farocki speaks of his term “operative image” within the context of the Gulf War, and he asserts that the operational images which were recorded during the aerial strikes showed a type of “phantom perspective of war,” meaning a perspective where the human is not, and indeed can never be, ‘in the loop’ – a sort of autonomous visual trace of the war machine, or what he calls a “war-subjectivity.” To pick up on Foucault’s observation that the technologies of war subsequently return to become domesticated for their use in social settings, I am wondering just how operational images have become integrated into the processes and logistics of capital production, accumulation and distribution on the ‘home front’ of industrial production.

The past years have seen vast amount of work on surveillance and drones, probably two examples which would seem most likely candidates as an answer to your question. This is not to say they are not interesting. Surveillance imaging has become integrated into the broader data analytics industry, and the older realisation about the significance of the military-industrial-education (university) complex holds true here as well. While a large amount of images of racialised violence in the US spreads on global platforms of communication, it’s also the other sort of images – less publicly seen – that produce the mass media of the racial capitalism as evidence in the US, UK, Europe, Australia, and across the world: visual and data-driven surveillance from the ground and the air. Having said that, we have to keep in mind what theorists such as Benjamin Bratton have pointed out: “It is a mistake to reflexively interpret all forms of sensing and modeling as ‘surveillance’ and all forms of active governance as ‘social control.’ We need a different and more nuanced vocabulary.“¹ This is not to say surveillance –operationalised in relation to the massive racial apparatus of, for example, the police – does not exist, but that in other registers of urban and non-urban sensing we also need a more defined understanding of what’s at stake, for example in contexts of health and the environment.

Control room at telecommunication station, Sri Racha, Thailand. ‚Making of Earths’, film still, Geocinema (2020)

This leads to one of the points I am interested in: operational images emerge from such analyses and contexts of the military, but I want to point out it works in many other registers too. A good example is environmental imaging and data, whether in specialist uses of seafloor imaging and modeling (also with relations through to various forms of problematic extraction practices like seabed mining) or for different contexts of photogrammetry – understanding them more specifically than just bluntly about war, targeting, and control. Last year I was in closer dialogue with the Geocinema artist duo about their film and artistic research project Framing Territories that focused on the Chinese Digital Belt and Road infrastructure and its relation to environmental data. It stands as a great example of contemporary art mobilizing cinematic methods to deal with contemporary infrastructure of geopolitics. It’s also a way for me to think of the span and uses of operational images – both in the technical sense and in how artistic practice might frame them.

How might artistic practice frame the operational image differently than by merely commenting on its active implementation in war-like, terraforming and geopolitical projects or, to put it another way, how might art take up the operational image as a medium and a format in and of itself? It seems that the potential for operational images (such as QR codes or markers) in the public space has largely been limited to marketing or promotional purposes. Do you find that there is a still unexpressed potential for its use by artists, makers, or activists to intervene in public space?

I am constantly wondering if the case is less about a particular kind of an image – even though those examples you mention are spot on, such as QR codes and many other kinds of “actionable images” that are also interfaces. I believe there’s something significant in understanding that the image is a passage and an interface, a point of connection that itself might become so aesthetically insignificant as QR codes but still operational when in connection to the broader infrastructure whether of data or of something else. And artists are constantly making interventions in these areas, whether by fashion or makeup that avoids facial recognition, or some other hack of public space. These are interesting as such, but of course, not really a sustainable politics that would change much on a societal level – for that, a different level of activity is needed. We have great gestures of resistance and activism, but the true challenge is to rethink something on a larger scale.

In many ways the point about these grey images that Sekula and Farocki and others pointed at was less about them as medium but as a body of sources, an archive that helps to understand modes of visuality, territory, targeting, and institutional assemblages of power. Perhaps then the artistic work should be really about producing methods that help us to understand the relation of public space and its visual culture (even if increasingly avisual) to the broader infrastructures of data and power; and to facilitate scalar-hopping connections and interesting alternative material plans.

 The ubiquitous drive towards ever more automation in the extractive and productive processes of contemporary capital beg questions about the continued relevance of retaining the human in the loop. The looming threat of an increase of surplus labor has become a topic for numerous works on the future of employment, like Martin Ford’s The Rise of the Robots (2015), or Darrell M. West’s The Future of Work: Robots, AI, and Automation (2018), and logistics giants such as Amazon are racing to outphase the human from certain productive pipelines as soon as technologies of computer vision and mechanical dexterity allow it. To what degree can operational images, as they are used in industry, be a vector and a harbinger of production methods in which the human operator is no longer necessary? To what degree can we move from Farocki’s framing of the ‘phantom image’ and speak of a ‘phantom capital’ or, to use Primož Krašovec’s term, “alien capital”?²

This is probably a question more about the economic base than the images, even if I see how the two might be connected in how economic models are – quite literally too – modelled, graphed, enacted through projections and diagrams of various sorts. Those could be seen as the visual cultural techniques of the economic way of governing societies, and they resonate with the recent notes on operations of capitalism as Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson put forth it in their book.³

Miyun satellite ground station, Beijing, China. ‚Making of Earths’, film still, Geocinema (2020)

But we are out of the loop anyway, but that has less to do with automation than the broader economic and political conditions of automation. Again, we need to be more specific in what we understand by automation and thus also relate it to a variety of possibilities of this type of technological agency that is not necessarily ‘against’ humans in the traditional sense. I would embrace many forms of automation and removing humans from the loop, but also at the same time embracing intensively democratic and socialist forms of social organization. So the question is not really ‘automation or not,’ or ‘in the loop or not,’ but rather what forms of complex feedback mechanisms, modes of intervention and action, and collective large-scale forms of governance can be implemented so as to be in the right position to connect questions of labor, value, and ecology in a manner that is satisfactory. I am part of the faculty at Strelka’s The Terraforming program led by Bratton, and some of these questions pop up also in that context.

You have mentioned the project Geocinema which came out of The New Normal program held at Strelka during 2017–2019. The same program yielded the project Altai which speculatively situated operational images within an ecological and naturalist context, and other projects from the same program directly and indirectly conceptualized it. In what manner do you think Strelka’s The Terraforming will pick up and develop on this already broken ground?

The two programs have ideas and elements that overlap but they are likely to also depart to different directions. The New Normal produced some great projects like the ones you just mentioned, and I am curious to see what other kinds of methods and modes of expression emerge in The Terraforming. My own brief with The Terraforming researchers focused on a speculative idea of a “synthetic” discipline – a Natural History of Logistics. This was meant as a pitch that is not naturalising logistics as it is rolled out in terms of techniques and infrastructures of optimization, for example, but rather develops ways of reading the frictions across material landscapes and territories in logistical terms. The researchers produced really amazing projects already during that week of intensive inquiry, and I also tried to write a brief on-the-go response that summarised this idea of thinking of speculative design as creating a mode of inquiry. Here’s a bit from that response during my Strelka week to give a flavor of the ideas:

What we are embarking on is speculative design and inquiry that invents a discipline that is sufficiently complex, multiscalar, and polytemporal for the feedback loops between contemporary timelines that are often proposed to address the contemporary now  – whether the Anthropocene, or the history of plantations, the work of economic systems (large-scale terraforming through abstractions like “capitalism” and their operations across computational and logistical modes), and the forms of geopolitical organisation that are formed in and through those territorial spaces and times.

In other words, we are after methods to look for points of connection where we read landscapes and materials as forms of automation, flow, complex causalities, self-organisation, even optimisation. And logistics, infrastructure, and media are premised on those sites that are always historical too. Matter has multiple histories and at points it already prescribes many of the energies that become formative for the operations of logistical media in the technological sense. If roughly around 1870s-1900s a multitude of international organisations was established to standardise many of the still central backbones of planetary-scale logistical media – from time zones to telegraphic connectivity and more – the necessity to engage with material repercussions of logistical inventions for planetary investigations circa 2020 seems a useful enterprise to embark on, reflecting contemporary concerns of material worlds, and the current situation somewhat different from the (Western) Euro-centric late 19th century.

In your 2007 book Digital Contagions you write that “Diseases tell a story of society. Diseases are symptomatic of the ways cultures interact. […] Diseases expose.⁴“ The recent Covid-19 pandemic has denuded some of the social elements we have taken for granted and has exposed some of the strained infrastructures (logistical, medical, economic…) which have been shoring up our societies. The reverberating shock has fostered a mutated choreography for social interaction and communication, one which is much more explicitly telematic and depersonalized, and I am wondering how to define this new normal which has begun to set in on the level of communication. How do you read the contours of the infrastructural scaffolding which the pandemic has exposed, and what might such a reading indicate about the future lock-ins, lock-downs and effects on our logistical networks?

The different quarantine and lock-down measures work differently in different countries but also in different institutions. Educational institutions had to scramble quickly together all sorts of ways of dealing with this situation. Like arts and curatorial institutions, the challenge is to not reproduce the rhetoric and practices of the binary: online or offline. As forms of post-digital interaction, these are always much more mixed and mingled situations that call for different models for social and other activity. And it of course reveals the extent to which corporate networks are the big winners of this situation in terms of revenue and power; data platforms and services that are able to cater to the new situation, exposing the necessity of automation and also the need to think logistics through such extreme situations as a relatively sudden pandemic. While it came as a surprise, it also did not; in other words, we can also look at the shortcomings of the particular economic models that left many (or most) countries underprepared due to the lack of investment in healthcare services. I still find the current dire situation of deaths and illness less shocking than how it piggybacks and builds on years of lack of attention to services that should have been a priority. Whether you call it neoliberalism or some other name, it still points to a much larger-scale violence than that of Covid-19.

LANDSAT footage. ‚Making of Earths’, film still, Geocinema (2020)

As this disease and accident also revealed, too many of our institutions are premised on precarity and already difficult conditions of work; many of our patterns of life are already unsustainable and questions of ill health did not start with Covid-19 but relate to the mass of issues of air pollution and other environmental toxins.

Your project “Operational Images and Visual Culture: Media Archaeological Investigations” which you pursue at Prague’s FAMU has been running for the past year – what have been some of the outcomes so far, and what are some of the topics you and your colleagues are currently navigating?

We finished the book Photography Off the Scale, edited by me and Tomáš Dvořák; this collection deals with questions of scale and quantity in contemporary visual culture and comes out in early 2021 with Edinburgh University Press. Some of the project’s work continues to map links between contemporary visual culture and theory, such as Tereza Stejskalová’s work on images of childbirth in art and photography. Others focus on multiple angles to photographic practice – Michal Šimůnek’s projects are a good example of this – but also broader questions of aesthetics as well as alternative lineage of images such as diagrams, like Josef Ledvina is doing at the moment. I myself should write a short book on operational images while also continuing a collaborative project with Abelardo Gil-Fournier on questions of light and a scientific history of plants. There’s a connection to questions of imaging and sensors, and how this experimental topic can broaden what we understand as images.

But our general aim is to establish an active culture of exchange that facilitates new ways of looking at photography and the post-photographic visual culture – the changing practices where questions of the posthuman, critical theories of gender and embodiment, new materialism, media archaeology, and history of sciences can help us to identify some blind spots in existing ways of talking about images. 

Apart from the project, my book A Geology of Media just came out in Czech and next year, also the Czech translation of What is Media Archaeology? is forthcoming, and we hope to organise some events around some of these topics.

Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and Docent of Digital Culture Theory at the University of Turku. Parikka’s books have addressed a wide range of topics contributing to a critical understanding of network culture, aesthetics and media archaeology of contemporary society. The books include the media ecology-trilogy Digital Contagions (2007), the award-winning Insect Media (2010) and A Geology of Media (2015), which addresses the environmental contexts of technical media culture. This topic was continued in the short booklet A Slow, Contemporary Violence: Damaged Environments of Technological Culture (2016) and in the short co-authored book Remain (2019). He is also the co-editor of Across and Beyond: – A transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions (Sternberg Press, 2016). His book Geology of Media was published in its Czech translation as Geologie médií (Karolinum, 2020). In autumn this year, NAMU publishing house will publish the Czech translation of his book What is Media Archeology and Martin Charvát’s monograph:  Jussi Parikka: Od archeologie ke geologii médií.

The interview was conducted by Vít Bohal. 

PIC Geocinema

COVER PHOTO Egor Kraft

^{1.Benjamin Bratton, “18 Lessons of Quarantine Urbanism”, Strelka Mag, 4 March 2020<https://strelkamag.com/en/article/18-lessons-from-quarantine-urbanism>. ↩ 2. Primož Krašovec, “Alien Capital,” ŠUM #7 (2017). ↩ 3. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).↩ 4. Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archeology of Computer Viruses (Peter Lang, 2007).↩}