left agitation—and the film within it—must be produced by a collective of left scientists: by sociologists, linguists, psychologists, cyberneticians, mathematicians. by engaging in agitation, they must dissolve their role as specialized individual scientists.

For the young Farocki, the actual “work” of film went beyond information and entertainment. Though it could be found in the early history of film’s scientific applications, Farocki saw a need for it to be updated and mobilized for agitational purposes in a potentially revolutionary present following 1968. This preference for images at work was to remain an integral part of Farocki's approach to filmmaking and his critical engagement with visual culture.

Although Farocki’s projects—to an extent—fall into two groups, with some focusing primarily on labor and others on warfare, they foreground a dialectical connection between the two, which one of his later texts describes as the “connection between a productive force and a destructive force.” Operative film became for Farocki a tool of leftist agitation aimed at revealing and disrupting the vicious economy of the “production of destruction.”

It was in Kommayak—to which he would repeatedly return over the next two years—where Tretyakov transformed his earlier program of “factography” into “operativism,” which aimed not to document but to create reality: “To put it simply: inventing something important is belletristic novelism; discovering something important is reportage; constructing something important is operativism.”

Gastev’s work as a publicist and poet, carried out under nearly two dozen pseudonyms during the 1900s and 1910s, later shaped the unique language of the Central Institute of Labor. This language oscillated between avant-garde poetry, futurism, scientific journalism, instructional manuals, and training cards. Gastev made extensive use of metaphors, combined with terminology borrowed from other fields, including biology, economics, social psychology, and engineering. Together they formed a vivid and experimental lexicon understandable to people with very different backgrounds.

Gastev proposed new polytechnical pedagogies to educate the new class subject. To be sure, after the Civil War it seemed that everyone was championing polytechnical education, but in most cases this was just a tactical exigency in response to demands for a flexible workforce that could be deployed in diverse industrial sectors. Gastev had something else in mind. He envisioned a generation of workers who grasped intuitively language’s dual function as both a medium of communication and an instrument of control.

Building on Benjamin’s observation that the political project of fascist aesthetics is to organize subjects into a mass audience of users, we assert that AI AURA (Aesthetic, Ubiquitous, Regimented Automation) is designed to capture human intimacy through the affective and emotional engagement of embodied response. Thus, AURA serves to name the production of AI output in the complete absence of an original, even as this production is dependent on an extraction of style.