Operational Images

Vermehrt halten "operative Bilder" (Farocki) Einzug in das Feld zeitgenössischer Kunst. Trotz einer affirmativen Ästhetik wird ihrer künstlerischen Appropriation häufig ein kritischer Impetus zugesprochen. Doch was unterscheidet den subversiven vom repressiven Bildgebrauch? Dem Text liegt die Frage nach einer spezifischen Ästhetik der Kritik zugrunde. Wie verhalten sich Form und Inhalt zueinander-gelangen sie durcheinander zum Ausdruck? Anhand einer Analyse digitaler Montagetechniken bei Hito Steyerl und Forensic Architecture fragt der Aufsatz danach, ob deren bildliche Kritik reziprok einem emanzipatorischen Projekt der Bildkritik verpflichtet ist. Er formuliert die These, dass eine gegenwärtige Emphase des Kunstfelds zur Kritik einem Kritikalitäts-imperativ unterworfen ist, der häufig weniger kritische Distanzierung von Wahrheitsdiskursen denn ihre direkte Affirmation produziert.

The status of technical images has always been determined by the delicate balance of control and autonomy between human and nonhuman agents. Although one has never been able to control the technical image entirely, the human intentions, craftsmanship and ability to intervene have always been to some extent involved in image processes and operations. However, recent accounts of automation and robotisation emphatically point to the gradual replacement of human agency and labour by machine skills and intelligence. Image devices operated by sensors, algorithmic processing of camera footage, and apparatuses autonomously controlling image operations, are claimed to obliterate human operators. Activities of humans, it is argued in contemporary post-photography discourses, are irrelevant to images; images have become mindless [Tagg 2009], operational [Farocki 2004, Paglen 2016, Elsaesser 2018, Hoel 2018], furious [Fontcuberta 2018], soft [Hoelztl, Marie 2015], programmatic [Toister 2019], and nonhuman [Zylinska 2017].

To commemorate the two centennials closely related to Prague-the 1920 birth of Vilém Flusser, and Čapek brothers' invention of the word robot-our conference aims to address and complicate the idea of apparatuses and images that have taken on a life of their own. Both Čapek and Flusser significantly contributed to the critical consideration of automation and robotisation, while they keep exploring possibilities to preserve human concerns within the area of automated apparatuses. Čapek, ending his R.U.R. play with the extinction of both humans and robots, found the hope for humanity in the birth of a new post-human species, robots endowed with human emotions. Flusser urged to play against the totality of apparatuses and their automatic programming as the only possible way to reestablish human dignity and regain control of our machines and apparatuses.

Taking as a frame of reference the idea of images out of or even beyond human control, our conference calls for papers that trace and explore the gradual transformation of the forms of human labour and agency towards various techniques of observing, monitoring, controlling, regulating, and interacting with screens and interfaces within complex socio-technical arrangements. What are the old and new forms of interaction between human and nonhuman agents and how these shape the status of a technical image, a camera, an image-maker, a viewer and an image user? Can we somehow get a hold over unintentional and uncontrollable functionality of apparatuses? Whose interests are behind automated apparatuses and autonomous images? What image operations and practices remain under the control of humans? What sort of mechanisms of control operates when images are shared and disseminated, tagged, sorted and archived, looked at, overlooked or never-looked-at, searched, used, abandoned and erased, edited, appropriated and remade? How can we, as everyday users, critics or artists, play against autonomous apparatuses and their image operations? How to get beyond images that seem to get beyond control?

The conference is held under the project Operational Images and Visual Culture: Media Archaeological Investigations (Czech Science Foundation project 19-26865X, FAMU, Academy of Performing Arts, Prague; https://tinyurl.com/operationalimages).

Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In this book, Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image—and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily, situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology. Reframing existing narratives of biomedical innovation, she emphasizes the important but often overlooked roles played by aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice in medical visualization.

Combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art–science, Casini retrieves the multiple presences and agencies of bodies in data visualization, mapping the traces of scientists' body work and embodied imagination. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen's biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of the FFC-MRI. Going beyond her original focus on MRI, she analyzes a selection of neuroscience- or biomedicine-inspired interventions by artists in media ranging from sculpture to virtual reality. Finally, she presents a methodology for designing and carrying out small-scale art–science projects, describing a collaboration that she herself arranged, highlighting the relational and aesthetic-laden character of data that are the product of craftsmanship and affective labor at the laboratory bench.