May 5, 2026, 4:30–6pm
Venice 30123
Italy
Join us at Aula Mario Baratto, Ca’ Foscari University in Venice on Tuesday, May 5, 2026 at 4:30pm for the launch of e-flux journal issue #162, followed by a reception.
The program will feature: Matteo Pasquinelli, Ca’ Foscari University, ERC project AIMODELS; Elena Vogman, Bauhaus Weimar University, e-flux journal; Olexii Kuchanskyi, eikones, University of Basel; Peter Sit, curator of the Czech and Slovak Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, e-flux journal; and Carles Guerra, curator of the Spain Pavillion of the Venice Biennale.
Organised by e-flux journal, ERC project AIMODELS and Freigeist-Fellowship VolkswagenStiftung “Madness, Media, Milieus.”
Responding to the intensification of contemporary “military operations”, from Ukraine to Gaza to Iran, this special issue of e-flux journal returns to a materialist genealogy of operativism. Spanning the twentieth century (from Soviet avant-gardes and scientific management to cybernetics to the multiple interpretations of Harun Farocki’s “operational images”) the concept of “operations” has often been framed primarily in technological terms, as a question of systems, control, and power.
This issue proposes a shift in perspective. Rather than focusing on technical infrastructures alone, it foregrounds the “social machine” and the organization of labor that underwrite operations. Drawing on Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s notion of the “operations of capital,” operativism emerges here as a critical concept for thinking the entanglement of labor, automation, and contemporary forms of extraction—and for reclaiming operativism as a site of of collective intelligence, struggle, and intervention.
The issue also revisits a key historical moment: in the late 1960s, amid the Vietnam War, Harun Farocki redefined operativism as a mode of political agitation. In dialogue with Sergei Tretyakov and Walter Benjamin, Farocki called for a repurposing of media technologies to intervene in the circuits of production sustaining both war and capital. At the same time, this genealogy invites a critical reassessment: the operative aesthetics of the Soviet avant-garde were themselves entangled with the extractive and coercive dynamics of collectivization.
Bringing together contributions by Harun Farocki, Elena Vogman, Matteo Pasquinelli, Tom Holert, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Alla Vronskaya, Devin Fore, Aleksei Gastev, Evgenii Petrov, Aleksandra Selivanova, Kalindi Vora, and Neda Atanasoski, the issue asks: how can operativism be rethought today—not as a technical paradigm of control, but as a materialist and critical practice of agitation, organisation, and social intelligence?
