The Brooklyn Rail

In his latest book, Finnish media theorist and curator Jussi Parikka mobilizes German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s concept of the operational image to interrogate the ubiquitous role science and technology play in contemporary artistic practices. Farocki developed the term in the early 2000s to draw attention to the rise of a new type of image that no longer appears to just represent the world, but acts on reality in meaningful ways, such as drone video feed from the first Gulf War and footage from industrial machinery. In his analysis, Parikka broadens this framework to include digital art, interactive displays, and images produced by advanced surveillance technology. A rich, rewarding book, Operational Images urges readers to reflect alongside some of today’s most insightful artists on the growing ubiquity of technical images in their lives (think OpenAI’s popular Dall-E 2 system). From climate models to the billions of selfies uploaded to the cloud, Parikka’s expanded notion of the operational image presents an understated yet audacious thesis: operational images are no longer the exception, they are the rule, as pictures can now make and unmake the planet at an alarming scale.

Alongside these complex theoretical and political issues, Operational Images presents a sleek collage of images in its own right. Providing examples from the history of cinema and architecture, in addition to drawing on Parikka’s collaborations with artists Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Geocinema (Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess), the book contains a number of arresting illustrations that allow it to read less like an academic monograph and more like a creative and speculative toolkit for grasping how art, politics, and technology collide. Following his previous books, What is Media Archaeology? (2012) and A Geology of Media (2015), this new release seeks to combine the historical acumen of Parikka’s earlier studies with a growing appreciation for the ways artists like Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen deploy advanced tools towards creative and even subversive ends, no doubt informed by Parikka’s involvement in the 2023 Transmediale Festival in Berlin as guest curator.

The book begins with a swift overview sketching the theoretical stakes of investigating operational images today. While influenced by Farocki’s exploration of military and management contexts, Parikka charts a broader course which includes astronomical experiments, navigational tools, and landscape photography. Tracing the development of operational images to the start of the twentieth century, Parikka explores the extent to which the practice of “machine vision” examined by Farocki was already present in the historical avant-garde. “The modern lens is no longer tied to the narrow limits of our eye,” László Moholy-Nagy quipped in the 1920s.

This timely new book promises a powerful toolkit for artists and researchers interested in understanding how images participate in the construction of the worlds they depict and inhabit.

Appealing to media scholars and historians of science in particular, the approach taken by Parikka also allows for non-specialists to appreciate the complex political and aesthetic questions introduced by the prospect of planetary design. Although requiring a bit more effort from the reader than primers such as Benjamin H. Bratton’s The Terraforming, Operational Images presents the very best media theory has to offer: a rare combination of concrete engagement in artistic production, political acumen, and speculative panache. The third chapter, “The Measurement-Image,” for example, presents a historical prelude to the ways artists like Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl use surveillance and measuring tools in their work. While advanced computing systems have allowed for the collection and representation of massive amounts of data about the Earth and our environment, artistic engagement with these planetary systems asks viewers to think more critically about the images produced by these systems. The fourth chapter, “Operational Aesthetic: Cinema for Territorial Management,” turns to Geocinema’s 2020 Making of Earths, a breathtaking documentary about the Digital Belt and Road Initiative accompanying the Chinese government’s New Silk Road program across Eurasia. Produced in collaboration with Parikka as part of Geocinema’s “Digital Earths” residency, Making of Earths presents a compelling illustration of the ways in which satellite images, soil samples, and geological predictions of all sorts coalesce to create pictures of the Earth that can be used towards different political and institutional ends.

While the third and fourth chapters call attention to the artistic engagement with advanced technology, the fifth and final chapter turns more explicitly to artistic possibilities for resistance to the ways in which technology can be used to govern contemporary life. The underlying tension between visibility/ optimization and invisibility/subversion goes on to inform the book’s brief conclusion, suggesting that this web of political, aesthetic, and technological issues will shape artistic and scientific enquiry for years to come. When art and science become nothing less than modes of terraforming, it is the future of the planet that is at stake in the creation and interrogation of operational images. Rich yet understated, Jussi Parikka’s Operational Images encourages reflection on the history and politics of technical image-making more broadly.