Late Night: operative image - on the Main Stage of Deutsche Oper

We are surrounded by views. Drone footage, dashcam feeds, the infinite scroll images that work, that process, that convert the living world into legible, trainable material. Harun Farocki called these operational images: pictures made not to be seen but to execute, to sort, to act upon the world without passing through human perception at all. In a moment of polycrisis, when the image-system and the crisis-system have become indistinguishable, we have learned to read ourselves the same way. A coordinate. A data point. A body rendered from arm's length. The operational image doesn't represent reality so much as perform a labour upon it. And we have become fluent in this: the outward gaze, the thousand angles, the self understood as a coordinate inside a vast and humming system.

Expect a lineup. Expect a stage. What you will find is something less announced and more contagious: conspiratorial messages, prompts, contingencies, a live game unfolding across the evening with no single point of entry and no guaranteed path through. OMSK Social Club's nodes move through the crowd, carrying scores that fork, that replicate, that mutate. You may find the thread and follow it. You may lose it entirely and surface inside a different fiction. Both are the work.

by OMSK Social Club, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Landon Wilson, Raulito Wolf and Deutsche Oper Unlimited