Operativism

The notion of ‘operativism’ had a notable career in the twentieth century, articulating the relation between Marxist theory and technological modernization, the working body and its optimization, machine vision and cinematic montage. This workshop proposes, on the one hand, to unearth a genealogy of operativism by engaging with archival research on Soviet film and media theory, and, on the other, to discuss its legacy in the context of materialist analyses of AI as an instrument of labour automation. Formulated in the late 1920s by Soviet Constructivist writer, playwright, and poet Sergei Tretyakov (1892–1937), during his time as a standing member of a commune on a collective farm (kolkhoz) in the northern Caucasus, operativism called for the deprofessionalization of the conventional writer and emphasized their organizational role within the farm’s day-to-day operations: ‘I call participation in the life of the material itself an operative relation’ (Tretyakov). In this way, operational aesthetics participated in the extractivist dynamic of collectivization — in accordance with its ruthless economy of scale — which imposed a synchronized temporality on bodies and their production processes. At the same time, it proposed an experimental and participatory repurposing of authorship and mediation, influencing critical approaches ranging from Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) to Harun Farocki’s observational films and his concept of ‘operational images’. Operativism became a key notion for an interventionist and materialist transformation of the relation between singular and collective authorship and aesthetic and literary work as production, in relation to changing technologies and conditions of labour. The workshop seeks to analyse the various facets of operativism in the twentieth century by engaging with Soviet materialist visions and their lasting impacts. Building on this foundation, it also aims to interrogate automation, machine vision, and the shift from representation to action-oriented imaging, not merely as technological developments but as social phenomena. How can one think of AI not as the imitation of biological intelligence, but as the intelligence of labour and social relations? What is the role of social intelligence amid the extractive and exploitative logic of AI? How can artistic and social interventions question, subvert, and repurpose the ubiquitous idea of full machine autonomy?

Devin Fore is professor at Princeton University and an editor of the journals October and New German Critique. Fore is the author of Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature and Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism. He has published articles in New German Critique, October, Configurations, and Grey Room, and has also translated many texts from German and Russian.

Michael Kunichika teaches at Amherst College, where he is professor and chair of Russian. He also directs the College’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry. His current research focus is a comparative study of prehistory and late socialism.

Bettina Malcomess is a writer and artist based in Johannesburg, where they teach interdisciplinary studio practice at Wits School of Arts. Recent exhibitions include Sentimental Agents at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin (2022), and Wits Art Museum (2024), an installation of digital and analogue films engaging the archives and memorials of the South African War. They are co-author of Mapping the Sensible: Distribution, Inscription, Cinematic Thinking (De Gruyter, 2023), and co-editor of Not No Place: Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times (Jacana, 2013). Malcomess runs a platform for experimentation called joining room.

Doreen Mende is a curator, theorist, and, since November 2021, head of the cross-collection department ‘Research’ at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and associate professor at HEAD Genève, Switzerland. Mende is a founding member of the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin and the European Forum for Advanced Practices.

Matteo Pasquinelli is associate professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where he is coordinating the five-year ERC project ‘AIMODELS’. He most recently wrote the monograph The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso Books, 2023), which has been translated into numerous languages. Among others, he has published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, Qui Parle, Radical Philosophy, Les Mondes du Travail, South Atlantic Quarterly, Parrhesia, Theory, Culture & Society, Multitudes, and e-flux Journal.

Alla Vronskaya is professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Kassel. Her book Architecture of Life: Soviet Modernism and the Human Sciences (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) explores the intersections between architecture, labour management, and the human sciences in interwar Russia. Her current work investigates the ways in which the environment was mediated and analysed in Soviet architecture. This research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) and the Volkswagen Foundation.

Devin Fore
Marietta Kesting
Michael Kunichika
Bettina Malcomess
Doreen Mende
Matteo Pasquinelli
Elena Vogman
Alla Vronskaya

Marietta Kesting and Elena Vogman

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Image credit: Still from Eye / Machine I (Harun Farocki, 2003), Harun Farocki GbR