Panel discussion: “The Operational Image Before the Law,” with Katja Müller-Helle and Noam Elcott, Oct. 31, 2.30 pm, University of Zurich

As part of the conference “As We May See: Tracking and Tracing the Image after Farocki” (30.10. – 1.11.2024), Tom Holert, Doreen Mende and Clio Nicastro (HaFI) will moderate the panel “The Operational Image Before the Law,” which is dedicated to the contradictory entanglement of “operational images” in the “legal form” of the present.

Speakers Katja Müller-Helle and Noam Elcott will discuss the status of “operational images” under the techno-institutional conditions of machine learning and platform capitalism.

The panel in English will take place on October 31 from 2:30–5 p.m. at the University of Zurich.

The program of the conference, organized by the Farocki Forum and the Center for Arts and Culture Theory at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), can be found here.

Abstract of the conference:

In 1945, Vannevar Bush published his landmark essay AS WE MAY THINK. In the age of computing, he argued, traditional forms of organizing, addressing, and processing information by “indexing” will be replaced by a much more flexible and associative machine-driven method he called memex. “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”
In 1986, Harun Farocki finished his film AS YOU SEE, a mesh of associative trails in which the Jacquard loom, the invention of the machine gun, and manifold alternative histories of technology are woven into a complex pattern of thoughts. What do Bush, Farocki, and other thinkers and practitioners of the image have to tell us today, when digital platforms, ubiquitous computing, and so called “generative artificial intelligence” are the norm?