This commentary situates the idea of ‘counter-practice’ within a history of art and documentary cinema to ask what it means to witness in an age of big data and ubiquitous sensing? And how might art practices and data studies inform each other? To do so, this essay focuses on the work of Harun Farocki and the concept of the operational image to question whether politics can be separated from aesthetics and to re-introduce problems of human subjectivity and history into the discourse of subversion and praxeology.