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This chapter traces the origins and implications of the ‘operational image’, as it has come to be explored in Harun Farocki’s texts and installations since 2000. Defined in Eye/Machine I (2000) as ‘Images without a social goal, not for edification, not for reflection,’ operational images pervade both the military and non-military realm of today’s life. To contextualise this type of image, three concepts are revisited that have explicitly informed Farocki’s understanding: Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘operational language’, Vilém Flusser’s ‘technical image’, and the project of a computer aided ‘Bildwissenschaft’ based on algorithmic image retrieval. After a closer analysis of some of the counter-operational strategies Farocki employs, the article suggests to distinguish three levels of operationality and to understand Farocki’s project as a film maker, video artist and thinker as a continuous examination of the operational potential of images.

The film and video works of Harun Farocki exemplify a critical media practice that pose the questions: What is an Image?, or better, What is a human image? Much of Farocki’s mature work examines in fascinating ways the proliferation of nonhuman perspectives and spaces in the contemporary image environment, and in each case, Farocki asks viewers to reconsider how images provoke both an intelligence and ethics of seeing. Examples are drawn from three of Farocki’s best known works, Inextinguishable Fire, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, and the four-part video installation, Serious Games. The account then turns to the late writing of T. W. Adorno to argue that a deep engagement with the variety of Farocki’s work retroactively gives force and clarity to the style of emancipated cinema that Adorno was trying to imagine in essays like “Transparencies on Film.” The claim here is that Farocki’s work was an ongoing and open-ended experimentation of what a critical writing in images could look like under different media conditions, both historically and formally, especially in relation to his strategies of dissociative and recombinatory montage.

This chapter deals with the role that vision and images play in the conjunction of technics and aesthetics in the twentieth century. Based on an analysis of the fundamental technicity of human visual perception, it discusses the complicated notion of the “image” and that of the “medium” in art. The chapter begins with a detailed analysis of the concept of “operational images,” which pinpoints the tension between images that are produced to be seen by human eyes, and technical vision systems that are independent of human vision and human intervention. The author then presents artworks by artists including Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, and Julien Maire which articulate the complex aesthetics of visual media techniques. A discussion of early computer graphics artists like Vera Molnar, and more recent works by Antoine Schmitt, JODI, and others, exemplifies how issues like seriality, chance, and control have concerned visual artists working with different media supports ever since the 1920s. Finally, an analysis of works by David Rokeby, Wolfgang Staehle, and David Tomas serve to further outline the particular aesthetics of machine images and automated vision systems.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s unthought and Georges Didi-Huberman’s concept of “image-lacunae,” this chapter engages with notions of transit and transition and with the interstice as incommensurable gap that advances thought beyond its positions of deadlock. It shows how two essay films on the Holocaust, Harun Farocki’s Aufschub (Respite, 2007) and Arnaud des Pallières’s Drancy Avenir (1997), mobilize a type of montage that highlights gaps and discontinuities. In these films, pauses and interstices (between images, between sequences, between soundtrack and image track) bring about the transit of Benjaminian “true images” from the past to the present.

This chapter presents an interview with Christian Petzold, which mainly took place in July 2011, with a shorter followup in October 2012, at Petzold's office in Berlin. Topics covered include where Petzold grew up; the first film he can remember seeing in a movie theater; the atmosphere in Berlin when he arrived to study literature; his decision to transfer to the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin; his collaborations Harun Farocki; how he finds Farocki's nonfiction films; the impression left by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990; and the influence of genre films such as Detour on Cuba Libre, Near Dark on The State I Am In, and Driver on Wolfsburg on his own films.

For obvious reasons, the understanding and writing of music history have favoured a linear model founded in causality and chronology. Like many disciplines, however, historiographical studies have been subjected to critiques of various theoretical and imaginative types, particularly, but not exclusively, in recent times. These critiques are outlined here, and three historiographical models critically applied to the understanding of Mahler’s music: historicism, historical materialism (after Walter Benjamin), and a more radical rhizomatic model (after Deleuze). Posited, put into operation and questioned, these models cast multi-perspectival and multi-temporal light on how Mahler’s music continues to participate in contexts of contemporary mass-media and public consciousness.