10.54103/2036-461X/22504
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2036-461X
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Jussi Parikka, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Unvisual, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023, pp. 296
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2024-04-05
2024-02-10
2024-04-05
2024-04-05
189-191
Cinéma & Cie
Barbara Grespi
2023
10.54103/2036-461X/22504
189
University of Milan
2036-461X
41
en
191
Jussi Parikka, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Unvisual, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023, pp. 296
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/22504/20366
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                                                                                       Jussi Parikka
                                                                                       Operational Images:
                                                                                       From the Visual to the Invisual
                                                                                       Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023, pp. 296
                                                                                       DOI https://doi.org/10.54103/2036-461X/22504




                                                                                         Once upon a time, there was the operational           This need is met by Jussi Parikka’s new
                                                                                       image. We all remember Harun Farocki’s epochal        volume, which stems from the project
                                                                                       essay and video essay (2003) on the filming of        “Operational Images and Visual Culture”, hosted
                                                                                       the bombing of Baghdad from the warheads              by the Department of Photography at FAMU
                                                                                       of Cruise missiles during the first Gulf War.         at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
                                                                                       According to Farocki, that was the moment when        Operational Images: From the Visual to the
                                                                                       the history of technical images swerved sharply,      Invisual is an extraordinary map of the present
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       taking a path that seemed completely new at the       that revolves around the status of algorithmic
                                                                                       time: from being tools for representing the world,    images, their philosophical potential, and their
                                                                                       digital images enhanced by algorithms became          economic and political role. This book brings
                                                                                       agents that modified it by intervening on reality,    together many of the key objects of contemporary
                                                                                       in that case with destructive results. In the years   research, uniting them under a single heading,
                                                                                       that followed, much emphasis was placed on this       but above all it has the merit of elaborating the
                                                                                       new condition of the image, starting with two         necessary conceptual tools with which to analyse
                                                                                       landmarks of Farockian studies: the intervention      them. From astronomical images to driverless
                                                                                       of the artist Trevor Paglen, who announced a          cars, from gesture recognition to predictive
                                                                                       future in which images would increasingly be          algorithms, from smart urbanism to Lidar as the
                                                                                       created by machines for other machines, without       basis of a new filmic and photographic imaginary,
                                                                                       passing through the eyes of humans (2014),            from contemporary satellite Earth observation
                                                                                       and the contribution of the leading Farocki           techniques to geolocation: all are part of the
                                                                                       scholar Volker Pantenburg (2017), who, while          current data economy that finds its keystone in
                                                                                       considering the iconic appearance of operational      the operational invisuality.
                                                                                       images to be misleading (simply “a gesture of           Operationality, operativity: Parikka puts this
                                                                                       courtesy extended by the machine” to humans),         important concept to the test in the present,
                                                                                       relaunched what Farocki originally conceived of       making it work and fully demonstrating its
                                                                                       as an archaeology: operational images do not          heuristic value. To operationalise is not to
                                                                                       originate with the digital turn, Pantenburg wrote,    produce or create, one reads, but to mediate,
                                                                                       they have a much longer genealogy that needs to       to connect, to take from one level to another,
                                                                                       be reconstructed.                                     to move, to dislocate, to mobilise, to model: for


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 41 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                              189
example, to connect the symbolic and the real,           intervention on very different signals gathered
the present and the future, the visible and the          by instruments that do not necessarily involve
invisible, the abstract and the concrete. It is          an optic and a lens that simulates human vision.
through these connective acts that images can            And it turns out that this is nothing new, just think
now be recognised as a fundamental link in               of certain 19th-century machines for processing
our political economy, provided they cease to            light, such as the Fraunhofer spectrometer,
be thought of as static, defined objects with a          invented in 1810 and already capable of making
specific existence and a precise spatio-temporal         non-representational “observations”. Within this
location. Images do not have to be seen through          archaeological media path, Parikka introduces
the “embodied perceptual system of the human             a major theme of contemporary visual culture
being”, the author writes, and yet it would also be      studies, namely the current exploitation of the
wrong to reduce them to mere data, to see them           entire electromagnetic spectrum for the purpose
as a stream of numbers that stops for a moment           of image-making. What is the point of this
on some support and then starts flowing again.           broadening of the field of operation, this extensive
The notion of support is no longer valid, and it         capitalisation of invisible light, once of interest
seems that Parikka contrasts it with that of             only to astrophysicists? The fact is that the metric,
platform, the place where data is processed and          or photogrammetric, function of photography—if
formatted (another crucial word in the book).            it is still to be retained as a reference image—
The “platform as a central feature of capitalism,        has finally prevailed. The mathematisation of the
political geography, and digital culture”, a place       image goes back to perspective, writes Parikka,
where we create access to the world, establish           “a system for compressing data on a flat surface”,
ways of knowing it by creating diagrams of               but when Meydenbauer’s photogrammetry is
meaning (i.e. abstract skeletons of the visible/         grafted onto this Renaissance technique, the
knowable), maps by which we orient ourselves,            relationship between data and the senses is
separate things, create orders of importance.            clearly revealed, as already explained in 1988 by
  What one learns from the book, then, is that the       Farocki in his masterpiece (Images of the World
iconic (in a generic sense) aspect (if any) of today’s   and the Inscription of War).
technical images is certainly less important                The resumption of this very important point of
than the scaffolding that supports them, the             Farocki’s reflection—which we fully understand
infrastructures that bring them up to date, those        more than thirty years after Farocki’s first
platforms on which old photographic or video             insight—also becomes for the reader an exercise
recordings crumble apart and reassemble,                 in looking. One finally accepts that also a classical
rewrite and reorganise themselves, eventually            photograph, full of evidence, can be seen simply
returning to resemble what they were but after           in its lines of force, which we can perceive as the
an irreversible leap in degree and quality.              machine does, as a “tableau of information”, a
  Parikka succeeds in looking at the phenomena           surface of measures, a drawing of recognisable
he describes from above, and from this angle he          relations. With this exercise of the gaze, the
unifies a subject that appears very heterogeneous        metric question, central to studies of science and
and fragmented at close range. But despite this          photography (such as those by Kelley Wilder),
meta-reflexive character, the book draws you             becomes much more than a theory. In fact, this
in with its lucid traversals, animated more by           exercise has a political potential, since it is an
great political and philosophical questions than         operation carried out on the symbolic, but all
by the need for specific in-depth study. The             outstretched towards the real. By translating the
reader reflects on the idea of algorithmic image         world into numerical ratios, the image becomes
making as an act of the second degree, as an             a force that bends the field of perception and



190                                                      Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual
ultimately of power in a certain direction. By
transforming seeing into counting, into grasping
the statistical distribution of the properties of
objects in order to fix it and circulate them, one
influences the real world, and also formats the
environment, as Parikka writes. Humans today
are immersed in environments created by this
endless series of “centres of calculation” that
disseminate patterns and instructions, and it
is their deeper logic that we urgently need to
confront.
                                Barbara Grespi
                           [University of Milan]




Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 41 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X    191
