The following is an edited excerpt from Jussi Parikka’s forthcoming book, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (University of Minnesota Press, summer 2023). The book takes up Harun Farocki’s well-known concept of “operational images” and, moving across art, design, architecture, and visual cultures, offers a guide to understanding contemporary practices of imaging and data, from visual arts to the invisual operations of AI and machine vision.

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Capturing Light

Around 1889, Harvard College expanded its influence far outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. Having joined the College Observatory (first as a student, later as a professor of astronomy), Solon Irving Bailey was sent much farther south, to Arequipa in Peru, to establish a new field station. This operation was to switch hemispheres and find a spot elevated enough for ideal observation of the light traveling from distant celestial objects. Astronomic photography had a long history already by the 1890s, but this need for a new observatory emphasized the additional demand for what we would now call scientific infrastructure. After New Year’s Day in 1889, a boat trip from San Francisco took Bailey and his family to Arequipa, “attracted by reports of the clear sky and slight rainfall on the high plateau of Peru, where also the whole southern sky is visible.”1 While the rhetorical emphasis on a clean, crisp observation place puts all of the weather conditions easily outside of history and into the physical sphere, important for astronomy as a science of the observation of laws (out there) and not things (here), during the difficult trip to find the perfect spot Bailey observed and (in passing) noted the colonial legacy of the region: “I should place the population of the valley near Chosica in the days of the Incas at six thousand. Today there are perhaps five hundred. This well illustrates how Peru has changed since she fell into the hands of the Spanish conquerors.”2 Such awareness in his thoughts and diary did not, however, prevent the expedition from (re)naming the place they came to in a softer but still imperial manner: Mount Harvard. The eponymous name was entirely in tune with the aims of Edward Pickering, the long-standing and renowned director of the Harvard College Observatory, to establish posts in the north and the south, “so the entire sky would be available for Harvard’s research.”3

Besides a number of adventurous anecdotes from that trip, the relation with a media technological context is especially interesting. Two themes concerning light intersected during the years Bailey spent in Peru, both of which were essential to the scientific work, while producing an aesthetic quality to the geographical placement. The sunlit high-altitude plains—causing occasional mountain sickness for the party looking for a suitable observation spot—provided ideal landscapes, while the photometric (measurement of the brightness of light) and photographic techniques provided technologies for the capture of slowly shifting objects in the night sky. Not that such exact spots of observation were known in advance; some of Bailey’s memoirs from the trip read as a persistent search for those spots where measurements can be made, leading him to echo earlier advice about the exploratory spirit: “Of the clearness and steadiness of the atmosphere in these different places, there is no certain knowledge, and your only way is to investigate it for yourselves.”4 The investigation aimed to take pictures to send back to the college in Cambridge. Besides telescopes, the comparative analysis of photographic evidence became a key technique that needed a reliable data supply. It was, in some ways, a case of what Michelle Henning has called “the unfettered image”: fixed as image, but migratory and journeying as an object.5 Here, what migrated were the comparative observations of the vast space outside the planetary sphere.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.