Sentience in the Context of Operative Images
Symposium:
Presentation Title:
- Sentience in the Context of Operative Images
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
As a follow-up to the operating image concept defined by Harun Farocki in 2004, this round table will address a series of aesthetic and critical approaches that endeavour to probe the global visioning system that today conditions the perception of our physical, social, and political environment.
Since the end of the twentieth century, cameras no longer capture images for human vision only. Some of them are now exclusively dedicated to the operation of autonomous devices. It is no longer a matter of simply conceiving vision machines, but a vision for machines. Today, one can say that the images we see are now supplemented by images that see. Filmmaker and essayist Harun Farocki in fact called them “operative images,” stressing the fact that they are more participants in automated operations than objects for contemplation in themselves. The operations involved are performed in opaque systems, at such a speed and such a complexity that they elude not just human sight, but human attention altogether. These images have now permeated our lives and can inform the critical examination of other visualization technologies, encompassing digital imagery, contextual data sampling, and computer processing algorithms.
Operations related to geolocation, automated image indexing, photogrammetry, or biometric quantification are thus fuelling a new infrastructure for visualization that is progressively organizing our environment. It is then no longer a matter of simply examining how technology endows machines with sight, but especially of seeing how these machines may also suggest to humans new ways of looking at the world and, more generally, experiencing it. At a time when our conception of the world is influenced by an operative intensification of sensory experience, this round table will address a series of aesthetic and critical approaches that endeavor to probe the global visioning system that today conditions the perception of our physical, social, and political environment.
