When I was reading this article, I found the Clips project to be especially interesting in terms of operator and user for it places the operator as the initial programmer and the program itself. However, the user has decided where to place the camera and has left it there to “record,” so in that sense it is very similar to if someone strategically placed their video camera and left it to record for a prolonged period of time. Therefore, in this sense, this still places authorship and operator to the individual who initially placed the camera.
What drew my attention the most however was how image processing algorithms can use real images to “manufacture” reality by either manipulating the image itself into an ideal or creating data in places where it was lost or not received. This places concepts of reality and how we perceive reality into the programmer’s hands. For when choosing and making algorithms for image processing programs they are deciding what is natural and what is real and projecting these assumptions onto us. This can be extremely harmful for, I personally believe, that we are an extremely dependent on visual information and will almost always define truth to be seeing.