Abstract

In 2014, the filmmaker Harun Farocki and the photographer and self-proclaimed experimental geographer Trevor Paglen collaborated on a joint exhibition called Visibility Machines. In spite of the show’s title, the theme that most potently aligns their respective arcs of artistic research is a persistent concern with invisibility, ranging from the clandestine infrastructure of military and intelligence programs to the invisible operations conducted by automated image systems. Refracting a miscellany of works by Farocki and Paglen through the heuristic prisms of two interrelated concepts, the operational image and the off-screen, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of the various ways in which the production of images, whether the ‘invisible images’ that facilitate machine-to-machine vision or those crafted by the artists themselves, intersects with the production of space.