Research: The techno-aesthetics of operational images. Machines, imagination, environment
The research revisits the relationship between imagination and operation in the French tradition of philosophy of technology in order to develop the concept of the operational image.
With the growing interest in “machine visual culture”, i.e. images produced by machines for machines, the notion of the operational image has become the focus of a debate involving aesthetics, visual culture, media archaeology and the visual arts. Operational images show an operation as it is being performed, as in the case of images produced by drones, surveillance cameras or environmental sensors used in urban, medical and military contexts. These images reformulate the traditional relationship between representation and operation, human vision and machine vision, observation and control.
This debate, which is still developing, would benefit from a broader philosophical framework that draws on traditions that have questioned the relationship between image and technology, developing proposals that are still relevant today. The aim of the research is to broaden this notion to argue that the operational image constitutes the intermediary of a relationship that is both technical and reflective between organism and environment.
European aesthetics has repeatedly returned to the relationship between aesthetic object and technical object, which has been decisive in defining conceptual pairs such as means-end, interest-disinterest, use-contemplation. Gilbert Simondon represents the culmination of a questioning of these distinctions through his proposal of a techno-aesthetics, which he develops in dialogue with a tradition of authors such as Alfred Espinas, Henri Bergson, André Leroi-Gourhan, Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Ruyer. In this tradition, reflection on technology is framed by questions such as: the difference between living beings and machines; invention as a process that involves both instinct and intelligence; the relationship between technology and spatial concepts such as environment, territory, world, and cosmos.
The research will show that Simondon developed a theory of the image in close relation to a theory of technical operation. It will be highlighted how the concepts of “image cycle”, “operational scheme”, “associated environment”, “transduction” and “territory” provide the basis through which he rethought the image as an operation by which living beings interact with their environment through technical invention.
The first part of the thesis will show that Simondon radicalises the Bergsonian perspective on the relationship between imagination and technique, addressing the three issues of operation, environment and image cycle.
The second part will propose a media archaeology of the operational image, reconstructing the roots of the debate on images involved in technical operations. It will show how the artistic experiments of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen allow us to reflect critically on these images.
Keywords:
Aesthetics; Philosophy of technology; Visual culture; Media archaeology; Henri Bergson; Gilbert Simondon