Initially situated within the context of post-war media critique and documentary counter-practices, Operational Images & the Visuality of Systems names a pivotal epistemic reorientation of the image—from representation to execution. Rather than illustrating the world, these images enact processes, automate perception, and constitute machine-readable space, operating as infrastructural agents within military, industrial, and computational assemblages. This conceptual node displaces the cinematic image from its aesthetic and narrative confines, positioning it instead within the logics of surveillance, logistics, and training—where visibility no longer addresses a human subject but optimises a system. As a political-symbolic technology, the operational image unmasks the recursive entanglement between vision and governance, exposing how control is both materialised and naturalised through machinic visual regimes. Farocki’s analytic function thus delineates an epistemic architecture wherein cinema interrogates its own obsolescence while simultaneously tracking the migration of visuality into zones of abstraction, automation, and code. This node does not simply “represent” the world; it conditions the conditions under which the world is seen, sensed, and acted upon. Farocki's construct stabilises as a canonical element by rendering the image an agent of infrastructural cognition—not a passive trace but a diagrammatic force embedded within the operational matrices of contemporary life.