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The Operative Image - An Approximation

The document discusses Harun Farocki's concept of "operative images" - images that are part of an operation rather than just representing an object. It explores how digital images operate machines and humans through feedback loops and data processing. Several researchers examine operative images in fields like medical imaging, surveillance, and computer vision to understand how images are no longer just for human viewing but can operate autonomously.

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67 views

The Operative Image - An Approximation

The document discusses Harun Farocki's concept of "operative images" - images that are part of an operation rather than just representing an object. It explores how digital images operate machines and humans through feedback loops and data processing. Several researchers examine operative images in fields like medical imaging, surveillance, and computer vision to understand how images are no longer just for human viewing but can operate autonomously.

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bruno_vianna_1
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Operative Image - an

Approximation
operative image, digital warfare, locative media,
computer vision, medical imaging, interface
criticism, digital image theory
Contributed by Ingrid Hoelzl Assistant Professor at School of Creative
Media, CityU Hong Kong
February 03, 2014

Part of the Cluster:


THE OPERATIVE IMAGE
1 of 6

On our computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones, the image as the


termination (fixation) of meaning has given way to the image as a network
terminal (screen). Images are no longer limited to a political and iconic
representation; they are not only an interface, but play an active role in
synchronic data exchanges. They become what media artist and theorist
Harun Farocki has called “operative images”: “images that do not
represent and object, but rather are part of an operation” (2004: 17).[1]

Farocki’s concept of the operative image, coined in the context of his


discussion of automated warheads, where the image functions as a
guiding tool for target tracking and the real-time adjustment of a missile’s
trajectory, proves to be very operative, too, when placed within the field of
locative media and digital surveillance. “Location services” such as
Google Street View, enabled by real-time data processing and continuous
exchanges between user location, GPS sensor, software, network and
database, are based on the principle of the users’ trajectories feeding
back into the database. The result is what we could call, with reference to
Paul Virilio (1989), a ‛reverse operativity’ which proves to be the more
problematic side of locative media applications: It is not only that we are
operating the world through Google’s images, it is also and primarily that
Google’s images are operating us (Hoelzl/Marie forthcoming 2014).
The digital image is an object difficult to apprehend, not only because its
status is somewhat unclear, constantly oscillating between visual entity
and digital data, but also because it seems infinitely malleable and to
stand in a somewhat arbitrary (or generic) relationship to its object. What
is more, with the advancement of image-based software applications, the
function of the image has changed; it is not only showing things, but doing
things. For this The New Everyday cluster I asked five researchers/artists
from different fields (cyber forensics, critical software studies, new media
art, critical theory, and medical image studies) to cross-examine the
“operative image”, three of five choosing to work in
interdisciplinary teams.

Aud Sissel Hoel and Frank Lindseth, in their essay entitled “Differential
Interventions: Images as Operative Tools,” use the term to describe the
role of imaging methods in medical operations, while at the same time
extending it in what they call a “differential approach.” Operational
approaches, they argue, allow us to understand the image in terms of
“doings and happenings,” “open-ended processes of becomings,” and in
terms of distributed agency, “as humans, apparatuses, and tissues form
an integrated system.”

David Gruber and Daniel Howe explain their current research project and
installation Gesture::Language::Mirror, a critical exploration of the mirror
neuron hypothesis and its use in psychotherapy, via what they call “mirror
algorithms.” Their definition of the mirror neuron as an “automatic,
unconscious flickering of the brain,” a “collective movement of electricity,
glia, light, and fatty surfaces,” brings them to understand the image
(contrary to the Western tradition of representationalism) as “the bursting
of simultaneous activity” and as a “collective event,” linking Farocki’s
proposition of images being part of a process, to the philosophical project
of Gilles Deleuze, who considers things not as stable and self-contained
but as “a continuous variation of matter” (1988/1993: 19).

George Legrady describes the functioning and aims of his installation


Swarm Vision (developed with Danny Bazo and Marco Pinter), which
consists of three camera-robots that collectively explore the installation
area and whose output is displayed on two screens. While the first screen
contains three separate views, the second places all three picture
sequences in a 3D reconstruction of the installation area. Legrady explains
that “imaging systems function to capture presence, to record change, to
see beyond human range, to create evidence, to stimulate action.” The
image produced in this particular imaging system is part of a feedback-
loop; it is both the output of camera movement and an input to image
processing that calculates further camera movement.

The feed-back loop is also at the heart of Christian Andersen and Søren
Pold’s “Manifesto for a Post-Digital Interface Criticism.” The interface,
they argue, is a “multimedia that integrates sound, images, text and
interaction in feedback-loops,” where the registering (or generating) and
representing (or visualizing) of data occurs simultaneously. The interface is
not merely a tool for human-computer interaction, as it is often
understood, by users and designers alike, but “constitutes the sensible
(even beyond the human),” i.e., “the way we sense, what we sense, and
how we act upon this.”

Richard Overill’s contribution, finally, shows the “layered” nature of the


operative image. While to the human eye, a digital photograph may
function as a simple holiday photograph (or porn video), on a sub-
representational level it is executing the complex operations of image
compression and decompression (Hoelzl/Marie 2013). Overill’s point is
that digital images can also be used, in a method called digital
steganography, as covert, “subliminal” channels where information is
embedded into the “least-significant bits” of each Red, Green and Blue
channel (or 8-bit sequence) for the purpose of secret transmission (where
the receiver of the cover image will then decode the hidden message), or
for the purpose of infiltrating malware into organisations (in order to
secretly exfiltrate information, for instance). To the human eye, the
changes in the image are barely noticeable; only statistical software is
able to detect a potential steganogram.

That also means that “operative images” are not necessarily made for the
human eye. Is their aim “to see beyond human range” (Legrady) and to
“expand the human action range” (Hoel/Lindseth)? If humans operate
machines and machines operate humans through images, it is evident that
images, as image-programs, operate machines as well as humans. But
machines also operate machines, as in the case of automated sensing
systems where the measuring and processing of light, heat, or sound data
is no longer dependent on its output in visual form for human
interpretation and action. In this process, where human eyes (and
operators) are no longer needed, the question of what is an image (if not
seen) is extremely difficult to answer (but philosophically necessary).

Farocki’s stance on this issue is somewhat ambivalent: In his 2004 essay


entitled “Phantom Images,” where he coined the term of the operative
image, he relates that his interest in images, “taken in order to monitor a
process that, as a rule, cannot be observed by the human eye,” lies in
their non-intentionality,[2] the US military’s tactical warhead pictures
approaching what he calls the “unconscious visible” (2004: 18). But he
also argues that such images, even if not made by man, are made for man,
since “[…]there are no pictures that do not aim at the human eye. A
computer can process pictures, but it needs no pictures to verify or falsify
what it reads in the images it processes” (21).

Ten years later, the development of computer vision techniques seems to


indicate a turn towards what we could call ‛post-human operativity’: while
the imminent task at hand is to perfectly simulate how humans see and
make sense of the world, the ultimate goal are fully autonomous systems
of image creation, analysis and action, capable of substituting human
observers and operators altogether. But then we will need a radically new
definition of the image (or have no more need for it).

[1] Farocki refers here to an earlier work of his, Eye/Machine (2001) where
he had first coined the term for images that are “made neither to entertain
nor to inform” (17). The film analyzes images of the Gulf War, where the US
Army used missiles that philosopher Klaus Theweleit has called “filming
bombs”. In Eye/Machine III (2003) Farocki further explores his concept of
the operative image (renamed operational image), tracing it back to the
1980s cruise missiles whose software could compare stored photos of a
landscape with actual photos taken during the flight.

[2] An aspect explored in his contribution to the 2001 ZKM exhibition CTRL
[Space] curated by Thomas Y. Levin. The “Phantom Image” article
published in 2004 is based on a talk Farocki gave at ZKM in the context of
this exhibition.

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References

Deleuze, Gilles 1988/1993 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom
Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnessota Press

Farocki, Harun 2004 “Phantom Images,” PUBLIC 29: 12-22

Hoelzl, Ingrid and Remi Marie (forthcoming 2014) “Google Street View:
Navigating the Operative Image,” Visual Studies 29:3

Hoelzl, Ingrid and Remi Marie 2013 “CODEC: On Thomas Ruff’s JPEGs,”
Digital Creativity, 19 September 2013,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.817434

Virilio, Paul 1989 War and Cinema: The Logistics of


Perception. London: Verso

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