There is an old truism that became the mantra of post-modernist decorative theory which was ‘what you see depends on where you stand’. In the current image environment, we might now also add that it also depends what you look through, be that unaided human eye (clinically calibrated by the optometrist’s tools) or some kind of instrument that depends on who ground the lens, who chose the glass and who validated the image, etc. These are rudimentary examples of ‘operations’ that the veracity of the images depend on. Jussi Parikka’s Operational Images begins by thinking this process, first in relation to looking at something that has been seen by an apparatus and appears to fall within the bounds of corporeal sight such as a photograph, and then raising the stakes by considering what might be called ‘technological renderings’ when the apparatus producing the image has no connection with either human vison or the thing that it is ‘looking at’. An everyday example is an X-ray taken by a radiographer but requiring the operations of a radiologist to give the image meaning. This is a question that might appear to be a consequence of the conceptual challenge to ‘matter as reality’ that frequently emerges from the black lagoon of electronic digital media criticism. But the discussion is much older. Edgar Wind remarked in Art and Anarchy (1963) that the reduced palette in contemporary painting might be traced back to new techniques in colour postcard printing. Parikka, however, cut his teeth in film studies and cultural history where a similar correlation is famously observed between Max Factors’ excessive theatrical make up, designed to respond to technicolour film stock on the set, which then became a popular cosmetic so that the appearance of the stars could be emulated in the street.

There are also structural crossovers with film studies in Operational Images, and Parikka takes the concept of mise-en-abyme, which was derived from heraldry and art history and then incorporated into film theory, to unravel the infinite regression of reference as unavoidable in the process of making filmstrips make meaning. So, in the case of the radiologist their job according to their college website is ‘to examine the anatomy, pathology and clinical history of a patient as well as their previous images to select the most appropriate technique for diagnosis while minimising a patient’s exposure to radiation.’ One quickly loses count of the number operations at work in this necessary adjunct to the x-ray image before it can be data - to say nothing of the prior operations of the radiographer. The question that Parikka presents is that if the model of operations is potentially an infinitely large Russian nested doll with an infinitely small central core what does this mean if we want to talk about the image without reducing it to decoration?

As he has done in much of his previous work, Parikka uses the ideas in Operational Images to challenge the construction of apparently autonomous media forms in teleological histories. Pulling them apart in depth, so to speak, as he does with his work in media archaeology, opens a pathway (among other things) for history to have a voice in the understanding of the present. This is important if we are to  allow the political dimension of media form to avoid the fatal attractor of the deep structural determinism that dominated this discussion for much of the 20thcentury. Given this is the project it is not for nothing that the filmmaker Harun Farocki (from whom he takes the title of the book) and film historian and theorist, Thomas Elsaesser, make early appearances in the Preface. In their different ways they both avoided simple solutions in an attempt to give the image its own place in media form.

Parikka’s concept of operational images is laid out clearly in a brief overview of late nineteenth century astronomical photography. Stars have a material form that we can only experience as points of light. Their size and spatial distribution in three dimensions is understood by the observer through a comparison of the range of intensities and these are given value diagrammatically in scientific discourse which then legitimates imaginary graphic visualisations which owe more to the realm of fantasy than is readily admitted. A photograph of the sky, however, imitates vision and provides data that can be verified through further photography. Measurement and prediction are subsequently confirmed by more photography. None of this basic premise changes with later fly-by planetary photography in the 20th/21st century which is enhanced by imaginative colour to give credibility to imaginary graphic visualisations. In this sense the astronomical photograph is an example of a simple operational image in which there is a circular regression of reference data ultimately codified in mathematical tables of relative brightness which can be confirmed by photographs.

The move from this arrangement of operations to warfare based on synthetic perception produced by operational images is gracefully achieved through reference to Farocki’s writing and film work. So far this is fascinating but not an entirely unfamiliar territory that is also well known in other complex organisations where there is much at stake such as air traffic control and, most recently, topflight sport where data is trumps. Parikka’s archaeological vision, however, is to see in the deep nesting of operational images the reflexive work in shaping the world that produces them. X-rays increase the population in effecting clinical interventions for the people who require more X-rays as they age. In this way operational images impact on the role of history in human perception, and in response to the increasing density of the operations that disavow their detachment  and involvement  in producing the image data, he sees a contagion of a  paradox that increasingly  underpins any assumed truth. Microscopic images are only regarded as reliable when other microscopes confirm the  image. From this process of machine-to-machine validation we now have a convincing image of a coherent world beyond the threshold of human vision that we can never visit and only the most deluded conspiracy theorist can deny. Obviously not far away in this discussion is the spectre of the validation of machine learning which is only continuous with human intelligence as a consequence of a complex array of operations that are wilfully elided in pursuit of the control of how data is connected and used.

What the heightened attention to the mis-en- abyme of operations does for cultural theory is to offer relief from the academic routines that do not take images as active forms but inductively interpret them at face value as texts adopting one of a few dominant narratives that contribute to a fashionable publishing trend. In its place Parikka argues for some agency in the image (that is the act of becoming or possibly always in the state of becoming) through the work of a network of interrelated forces of varying strengths. What this affords is an understanding of any image not only as a retinal/optical/sensory experience but also as an aggregate of images distributed in space and over time and connected by a concomitant set of operations. This is in contrast to something that we encounter today in any image search engine in which procedural hierarchy is repressed in the design of the interface: Observation as a prerequisite of representation has become so last century and has been subverted by the presentation of the world as continuously undifferentiated data in a meta-struggle for institutional power to determines operational supremacy in the economic and political battle for consciousness.

What follows the Introduction to Parikka’s model is an exposition of operational images in several chapters designed as a manual; a diagrammatic excursion into what such an approach or method might change in our thinking about the correlation between and experience and its representation, and how this affects the basis of evidential fact used to shape personal, political, social, or economic action. It is in this attention to action that Parikka offers a pathway out of a number of theoretical dead ends that have dominated and stifled visual culture and cultural studies in recent times. However, perhaps most refreshingly, he offers an important  framework for recovery for  creative artists and innovative designers unimpressed by their cynical incorporation into the chimera of the ‘cultural industries’ as economic functionaries.

Operational Images is a book capturing an intellectual work in progress that needs to be read by everyone who, like Elsasser, Farocki, and Parikka care about images and the work that they can do – perhaps even should be allowed to do  – to the world that they produce. Its great virtue is that in unravelling a conceptual challenge to the routines that are currently used to colonise images into the fashionable narratives that dominate the media (and parts of academia). Parikka uses art and reflections on his own operations to keep the argument sharp and the reader engaged. The writing is clear and jargon free, the examples quotidian and compelling. The style is conversational, optimistic, and expressive of his own discovery in action which makes the ideas accessible to anyone who wants to think seriously about how images are operationalised. It is refreshing to have a substantial work on the image that avoids the dominant cliches and replaces them with original thinking. Operational Images is an important intervention in the study of how images of the past and those of the present have become the kind of  data  that  have been used to convincingly empower the social, political and economic institutions that shape possibilities. Its great virtue is that the alternative it proposes  offers a pathway to resistance.