Operative Creativity: Art at the Intersection of Simulation and Realization

This essay proposes operative creativity as a conceptual and artistic response to the shifting roles of images in the age of algorithmic perception. Departing from Harun Farocki’s seminal artwork Eye/Machine, which first introduced the operative image as functioning not to represent but to activate within machinic processes, it traces the transformation of images from representational devices to machinic agents embedded in systems of simulation and realization. Although operative images were initially engineered for strictly technological functions, they have, from their inception, been subject to repurposing for human perception and interpretation. Drawing on literature theorizing the redirection of operative images within military, computational, and epistemic domains, the essay does not attempt a comprehensive survey. Instead, it opens a conceptual aperture within the framework, expanding it to illuminate the secondary redeployment of operative images in contemporary visual culture. Concluding with the artwork Terms and Conditions, co-created by Ruti Sela and the author, it examines how artistic gestures might neutralize the weaponized gaze, offering a mode of operative creativity that troubles machinic vision and reclaims a space for human opacity.