Operative images are visual representations designed not merely to depict but to perform a function or influence actions, often automatically. They go beyond traditional imagery by actively engaging with processes, guiding decisions, or triggering responses. Often used in fields like surveillance, military operations, and data analysis, operative images serve as tools, embedding functionality within their visual framework. Operative images beyond the distinction between a self and an outer world, encapsulated by the notion of representation, and thus indicate an independent mode of existence.
Image Capital.
Notre-Dame de Paris Scientific Action, Paris, France, 2023
Media: One-channel video installation HD 4K, color, sound. 4:47 min
Estelle Blaschke and Armin Linke
Estelle Blaschke is a historian of photography working in the intersection between art and media history, the history of science and cultural history. She is a professor in media studies at the University of Basel and teaches photography history and theory at ECAL Lausanne. Her research focuses on the history of photography and digital imaging, visual economy and politics of metadata, and concepts of photography as information technology, among others. She held research positions at the University of Lausanne, the University of Geneva, the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Visual Studies Research Institute at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the book Banking on Images: The Bettmann Archive and Corbis and a member of the editorial board of the scientific journal Transbordeur. Photographie, Histoire, Société.
Armin Linke (b. 1966, Milan) is an artist working with photography and film by setting up processes that question the medium, its technologies, narrative structures, and complicities within wider socio-political structures. Linke’s work observes how human beings (re-)design and use space and time as social forms: it constructs questions / propositions on planning the future, on the hidden entanglements and inter-dependences within collective design practices, and on the shifting of sites of responsibility. Linke’s exhibiting practice sets up performative scripts in which different voices and methods come together. The oeuvre functions as a collection of tools for demystifying different design strategies and languages. Working with his own collection, Linke challenges the conventions of photographic practice and demonstrates that photography is not the end point. In a collective approach with other artists, as well as curators, designers, architects, historians, philosophers and scientists, the narratives, questions, and propositions put forth by Linke’s works and practice expand into the multiple implicated registers, centring the questions of installation and display.