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[23/04/2025]
Operative Images
These are not images produced for TV viewers; they are low resolution, partial, and do not capture attention. They are primarily made for technicians. Soldiers that monitor the operation are part of the feedback mechanism of intelligent weapons, but they do not always have decision-making power. As television viewers, we do not know the real military function of these images; they show a view from above at such a distance that human figures cannot be distinguished, we barely recognise the outline of streets and buildings.
According to Farocki, such images are an “ad for intelligent machines” (Eye/Machine III), while Baudrillard had spoken of a war of “means”, the purpose of which was advertising future armaments (1995, p. 33). These images are a mere link in the military production pipeline. They do not show war in its entirety; they just allow us to imagine what the machine sees as it turns geography into a theatre of operations (TO).
Norbert Wiener already used the term “operative image” (1964, p. 31) to describe the process by which a machine reproduces itself, i.e., transfers its operative scheme to another machine. It can also transfer an operative scheme from a black box to a white box, so that a human user can see how the operation works. The fact that these images faithfully reproduce an object, as “pictorial images” (ibid.) do, is secondary. What matters is that they correctly perform the function of being transducers that communicate information to a machine. For Wiener, the operative image is used to explain how machines communicate with each other and how, at times, one machine shows us the functioning of another machine we cannot know.
In Eye/Machine, Farocki adopts the notion of operational images to describe images embedded in procedures of computation, surveillance and military control. Examples shown by Farocki include surveillance videos depicting crowded streets; videos mounted on missile warheads or recorded by drones; videos used in experiments to build autonomous vehicles; computer graphic simulations; satellite images of airports; surgical images depicting the inside of a patient’s body. “These are images that do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation” (2004, p. 17).
Farocki examines the paradox of an image devoid of transcendence, which must be conceived as a link in a chain of recognition and tracking operations. The adjective “operational” could come from the notion of “operational language” formulated by Roland Barthes in Mythologies. That is, a language “transitively linked to its object” (1957, p. 146). Like the technical images analysed by Vilém Flusser, Farocki’s operative images are endowed with an apparently objective and non-symbolic character (2013, p. 15).
The examples given by Farocki concern both images on which picture processing techniques are used and images produced through digital synthesis, functioning as interfaces to monitor an operation. They produce effects because they are embedded in a network of operation and vision where each image “communicates with other images before communicating to us” (Parisi 2021, p. 1284). Trevor Paglen continued Farocki’s reflection, going so far as to state that one should speak of ‘invisible images’, since they are images whose operations take place regardless of whether they are seen or not. Maybe the fact that they are shown to the user must be thought of as a “gesture of courtesy” (Pantenburg 2016, p. 49), from the machine to the human being, which sometimes is not required for the operation to be completed.
The analysis of operative images develops from Farocki’s earlier reflection on the use of the image from above in the military context. He had analysed the connection between projection and destruction in Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989). He had identified Meydenbauer’s photogrammetry as the origin of the impingement of photography within military surveillance systems. Photogrammetry consists of the reversal of the technique of perspective to derive the measurements of an object through photography (Parikka 2023). It had been converted into an instrument of territorial control during the Franco-Prussian War by using it in conjunction with a system of photographic observation from above (Cosgrove & Fox 2010; Bousquet 2018; Saint-Amour 2011). The technique of projecting lines onto the image enabled it to gain its “autonomy” (Steyerl 2016) from the observer. Contemporary machine vision relies on a similar technique of dissecting the image surface into discrete elements (Manovich 1996).
The paradigmatic case of operative images remains the aerial images shown by the media-entertainment network during the Gulf War (Virilio 2005; Baudrillard 1995). Farocki argues that Gulf War images allow us to see what a war between machines would be like (Chandler 2020; DeLanda 1991). Operative images show the utopia of a “cleanly led war” (Farocki 2004, p. 21) in which human casualties are outside of the picture. In addition to the paradoxicality of weapons that operate considering the victims they kill as a side effect, we must take into account the paradoxicality of an image produced by one machine for another machine, without anyone seeing it. Both are to be considered extreme cases: “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. For the computer, the image in the computer is enough.” (ibid.).
The operative images that appeared on television in 1991 are the final stage of a history that links military operations, aerial surveying and machine vision. Through computation, automatic procedures indiscriminately scan geography to perfect operational art. Aerial images provide the extractive base through which the infrastructure for the security management of territories is held up. The centrality of remote sensing in contemporary warfare has evolved into a conflict between machines outside the human scale. Operative images are the interface through which to grasp this post-human military-industrial complex.
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