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Sarah-Jane Field512666

Digital Image & Culture Assignment 3 – Updated March 2019

The Democratisation of Form

Sarah-Jane FieldDigital Image & Culture Assignment 3

“….there is to be a new order. The old system is overturned. The old centuries are done. Just as Jesus told the people of Israel that God’s desires had changed, the time of the Gospels is over and there must be a new doctrine.”

Allie’s voice to herself in The Power, Naomi Alderman, 2016

“Within a Newtonian worldview, the famed Cartier-Bresson photograph of a man jumping a puddle leaves the reader confident he will land on the other side; in a subatomic quantum universe it remains a matter of probabilities.”

Fred Ritchin, A Quantum Leap from After Photography, 2009

www.sjfdiculture.wordpress.com 1



Digital Image & Culture Assignment 3

Contents

1. Introduction 22. A new paradigm 53. Malleability of form, ideas, and facts

84. Conclusion 135. Bibliography 166. Appendix 187. Reflection 19

Images

1. A still from Charlotte Prodger’s, Bridgit 3Photograph: Charlotte Prodger/Tate/PA(Downloaded from The Guardian, 2018)

2. Photograph: Rachel Maclean6

A still from Rachel Maclean’s, Make Me Up (Downloaded from MakeMeUpFilm.com)

Essay word count minus quotations, footnotes and captions – approx. 2750




Introduction

In 2018 the Turner prize was awarded to Charlotte Prodger whose work included a film shot entirely on her digital phone camera. As well as imagery, the project was accompanied by a newsprint handout which contained a significant amount of text. Competing artists also used up-to-date technology or else interrogated aspects of digitization and how it operated in the world.

Illustration 1. A still from Charlotte Prodger’s film Bridgit, her work in this year’s Turner prize. Photograph: Charlotte Prodger/Tate/PA (Downloaded from The Guardian, 2018) “Prodger was commended for two videos, Bridgit (2016) and Stoneymollan Trail (2015): the former was filmed on her iPhone and includes the artist reading passages from her diary. Bridgit, which Prodger has described as being about fluidity of identity from a queer perspective, includes footage of Neolithic standing stones in rural Aberdeenshire, shots from inside her Glasgow flat and sequences from a ferry crossing. Prodger has described the iPhone as functioning as prosthesis, with the smartphone becoming an extension of her own body.” (Frieze, 2018)

Michael Gondry, (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)), made a poetic and whimsical short film, also shot entirely on a phone. Gondry’s work, according to an Internet review, “captures a playfulness akin to works by Jacques Tati, Wes Anderson, and even Tim Burton in the early part of his career.” (Horton, 2017)

In February 2019 Behrouz Boochani won the prestigious Victorian prize for literature in Australia for his documentation of life on the notorious remote Manus Island where the country imprisons its refugees. He used his phone to write a book, one text at a time, and also make a film. He said of the work, “I could keep my identity and keep my humanity […] This system is designed to take our identity, designed to reduce us to numbers […] I can say I survived through my artworks, through my journalism work.” (Davidson, 2018)




Despite the aforementioned success stories, all of which were made on phones using digital technology, according to some artists, and exemplified in Tacita Dean’s comments, digital photography “… does not have the means to create poetry; it neither breathes nor wobbles, but tidies up our society, correcting it, and then leaves no trace” (Eakin, 2011) Throughout photography, there are individuals and groups who promote analogue and condemn digital processes, and echo Dean’s notion that film being replaced by digital means an “irredeemable loss for art” (ibid).

Digitisation has led to many more people having access to photography. But in 2018 Wim Wenders wrote it off altogether, claiming photography was dead and the iPhone had killed it. (Hagan, 2018) On the other hand, it seems we are bombarded with images and there are more of them than ever before, thanks in a part to our phones.

This essay aims to discover some of what lies beneath the hyperbole and between the polarised statements about the death of photography and the proliferation of it, between those who believe film will always be superior and those who are making work with digital processes; and to interrogate certain aspects (but not all due to the overwhelming number of implications related to digitisation) related to the structural nature of today’s widely accessed representations.




2. A new paradigm

PHOTOGRAPHY

CHANGESEVERYTHING

- appears on the cover of the 2018 Brighton Photo Fringe Festival guide. A photograph of someone pointing to her eye is positioned beneath the headline, emphasising the idea that imagery and sight dominate discourse1.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) stated that our society has been dominated by sight. He suggests this came about following the invention of writing which we looked at in order to decipher its meaning2 (2017). Guy Debord (1931-1994) declared imagery was the medium, which “concentrates all gazing and all consciousness” (1977, loc. 441).

McLuhan, however, also argued modern technology was ushering in a new era, which may be aural rather than visual (2017). And when we consider how we interact with media online today, it is evident sound plays an important part. Audio arrived in cinemas several decades ago as Talkies but today its presence is taken for granted and is nearly always integral and can be highly evocative. Anthropomorphosised in name, and referenced in Rachel McLean’s Make Me Up (2018), devices such as Alexa and Siri listen to us and respond. Additionally, even when we don’t personally hear the information, audio data can inform visual representation, as in the case of sonograms. Our devices watch and hear us, our modes of movement are tracked and recorded through vibrations, along with heart rates, sleep patterns, and data which is neither heard nor seen but nevertheless stored. We might imagine technology looks at us with its eyes – there are plenty of references to mechanical watching in art and popular culture. But this is merely our own way of thinking about how all this data gets packaged up and archived.

1 Note, in the example, text, image and even negative space are all used to convey the message2 Compare our visual system to knot tying which is how the Incas stored narrative and which required tactile reading.




Illustration 1. ‘The apparatus’ attempts to capture the character Siri's personal data but Siri causes a glitch in the programme. From Rachel Maclean’s Make Me Up (2018)

It may also be true that for now, virtual reality games (wherever they are used, i.e. therapeutic settings, as opposed people’s front rooms/bedrooms) require users to have a headset through which they see things taking place, giving their bodies/minds3 the impression of events really happening. (It can be argued they are ‘really happening’). However, sound is usually crucial too and in time, developers will find ways to trigger further sense reactions such as smell and touch. The most modern cinemas have rather clunky but developing techniques for activating senses other than sight and hearing, with moving chairs, wind machines which blow on the back of your neck, and further tactile triggers. There are enthusiastic gamers who predict that ‘full immersion Virtual Reality’ won’t remain in the realm of science fiction for long, although more pragmatic voices suggest this is just wishful thinking. Even if full immersion technology were possible now, the ethical conundrums related to testing are fraught. Such technology might require plugins to our nervous system. (Prinke, 2017) Amazon’s recently released Russian Doll (2019) features a gaming-coder who keeps dying and coming back to life, just like Pac Man or Sonic might do. The fact the character is a coder suggests the Amazon production is exploring questions surrounding our ever-increasing ability to make more and more realistic representations, or simulations of reality. It’s difficult to imagine finding willing participants to test such full dive gaming events.

Lori Wike in an essay titled, Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida (2000), explains Roland Barthes

3 The next section looks at the collapse of Cartesian separation between concepts, we well as between objects, and saliently, regarding mind/body duality; and explores how our use of computers may have contributed to this way of thinking, along with the pros and cons of doing so.




insisted photography was somehow different and more impactful than other forms of media, and that its meaning is situated in absence. But she also suggests that while it may seem Barthes and Derrida, whose topic leaned towards text, argued in opposition, they were both talking about the same thing, regardless of the form – how humans record information by any and many means; and in the process, attempt to deny the limitations of time and space, and ultimately death. (Derrida also warned us writing “was limited in time and space, and limits itself even as it is in the process of imposing its law upon the only cultural areas that so far escaped it” (2016, pg11) – which he does with his typical refusal to oversimplify; but his awareness of these limitations mean we shouldn’t be tempted to assume images will usurp writing beyond our own time simply because people are so enamoured by the novelty of their abundance today).

We might argue that the entire history of exteriorisation, from ancient mark-making to futuristic gaming, regardless of form, is predicated on the need to create new and other worlds, or transfer inner ones outside of ourselves, which can be referenced or integrated in some way with the one we understand as ‘real’. Regardless of which form we choose to use or champion, or what equipment we favour, all relate to a fundamental human and evolutionary-determined ‘othering of self’, which has been part of who we are for a very long time.

For several centuries sight may have dominated this process, but throughout the last and in this one, first film and then digital representation means more, if not all, of our senses are exploited when we experience semiotic texts.




3. Malleability of form, ideas, and facts

In this new paradigm, text, image and sound are all informed by code. Friedrich Kittler (1942-2011) describes the lack of differentiation between forms at the beginning of his book, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, (1999) “Sound and image, voice and text have become mere effects on the surface, or, to put it better, the interface for the consumer […] In computers everything becomes number: imageless, soundless, and wordless quantity.” (p102)

Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Post Human – Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics refers to “image[s] drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water.” (1999, p26) And she says. “The computer restores and heightens the sense of the word as an image.” (ibid) While Derrida and Barthes argue over the significance of absence and presence (Wike, 1977), Hayles tells us that these binary positions have lately become immaterial. She suggests that code and technologies of virtual reality “foreground pattern and randomness and make presence and absence seem irrelevant”. (loc 698) 0s and 1s represent pattern (recognisable form) and randomness (unrecognisable form but still a form of sorts); diminishing differences between media, which once seemed so important.

There is an available spectrum between pattern and randomness, which doesn’t appear to exist between absence and presence. And so the new language-material, code, used for making images or text, or sound seems more malleable than ever before. Interacting with this malleable digital language-material may, in part, be contributing to expectations of what is possible beyond our screens. This threatens an old world order, Hayles suggests, as we begin to internalise relatively newfound behaviours. “I instantiate within my body the habitual patterns of movement that make pattern and randomness more real, more relevant, more powerful than absence and presence.” (loc 698) In other words, we click on a link and expect to see new information appear, or we watch text become moving image, or open up new windows as frames become embedded within frames. Signs flicker and are always filled with endless possibility like quantum units. Changes to our expectations seem even more real with touchscreen technology. How many of us have been frustrated by an old-fashioned book’s refusal to respond to a thumb and finger spread as we try to zoom in on a small image, for instance?

This evolutionary behaviour potentially has profound consequences. Critical theorist Ariella Azoulay harnesses progressive social expectations, and our increasing acceptance of a less fixed reality, when she probes conventional narratives. In her book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, not yet published but due out this year, she interrogates photographic history and deconstructs its supposed beginnings as she requests it should be “studied in the context of the history of images and devices that generate images”. (2018) She asks us to abandon Cartesian separation between objects, and history, as well as linear time, embedded within imperialist framing. In a post, one of five released in September 2018, titled Unlearning the Origins of




Photography, she begins, “Imagine that the origins of photography go back to 1492”, as opposed to 1839 which is the accepted, received historical date.

In personal email correspondence, she explains how she would urge us to:“…relate to photography as a technology that partake[s] in the naturalization of other imperial technologies and rights. These technologies emerged in 1492, with Columbus expeditions to the Americas, known as a “discovery” of “The New World”, that facilitated the still ongoing extraction of people and objects from different places, and with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain, and Atlantic slavery that was put in motion” (2018)

In her blog posts, she asks readers to query the validity of the words ‘invented’, ‘New World’ and ‘Discover’. She requests they reposition themselves to consider history differently: “To take this excursion to 1492 as the origin of photography—exploring this with and through photography—requires one to abandon the imperial linear temporality and the way it separates tenses: past, present, and future. One has to engage with the imperial world from a non-imperial perspective and be committed to the idea of revoking rather than ignoring or denying imperial rights manufactured and distributed as part of the destruction of diverse worlds.” (ibid)

Azoulay is suggesting we think about photography in the context of everything else we see it linked to, in other words, within its networked reality, or holistically. Just as the coding symbols behind our screen are nothing, meaningless, outside of context, so too are objects and facts. Context not only changes meaning. It fundamentally informs it.

Her request requires a sophisticated shift. However, as lecturer and writer Daniel C. Blight points out in a recent review of a photography and poetry book called White Gaze by Michelle Dizon & Việt Lê, we are “less comfortable in our whiteness (and for an increasing number of us, our new-found ‘wokeness’)” and have begun “to meaningfully resist our own white subjectivity” (2018) What has prompted society to reach a stage of readiness for dismantling and deconstructing history and social constructs in this way? And does this shift mean deeply embedded structural features are more visible than before, making issues such as patriarchy or imperialism impossible to ignore?

Both Azoulay and Blight express society’s fledgling willingness (within limited quarters) to unravel fixed histories and social structures, as we begin to re-evaluate and re-configure with a more flexible mindset. They are tapping into the notion of Cartesian boundaries around form, objects, facts, time and the various senses becoming less fixed; and according to Hayles, this may very well be due to the way we use malleable language material; the code we interact with daily.

Azoulay’s posts do highlight how photography continues to be inherently linked to imperialism and the sense of an Hegelian right to ‘take’ (photographs of) the Other which the West has been engaged in with alacrity since 1492. (ibid) Perhaps the statement “Photography Changes Everything”




does in fact carry some truth – but not in the way it was meant nor, one might imagine, quite how the authors would prefer it to be marketed. Whatever the case, photography cannot be understood or interrogated in isolation. Nor should it be thought of as more valuable or powerful than other forms – because although it is a tool of imperialism, it is the imperialistic habit that makes the value judgments in the first place. And it is used alongside many other tools – even today when the habit to elevate one thing over another, or in other words to make one a master and one a slave, is still so prevalent in our cultural understanding of how things ought to be. What if the urge to elevate one form or medium over another mirrors the urge to elevate certain groups of people over others? That urge, as ‘natural’ as it may seem, is surely morally suspicious.

Even so, we should also consider the conundrums which spring from Azoulay’s thesis and the whole exercise of reframing history and reality, which is, that as we begin to dissolve boundaries around concepts traditionally accepted as ‘truths’, there is a knock-on effect. The risk is, by dismantling deeply embedded linguistic lines, we could be left with a completely fluid world, just as coding which Hayles describes as “changeable as water.” (ibid)

Perhaps one of the most infamous expressions redolent of today’s paradigm and malleability around meaning was Kelly-Anne Conway’s phrase referring to statements made by the current US president, when she said “alternative facts” (2017). Although she apologised and said she should have chosen her words more wisely, she did in fact hit upon a perfect phrase to sum up the way we relate to information in the 21st century. We can, if we sit in one camp, see that her alternative facts were falsehoods, or in more down to earth terms, plain old lies. However, one might be able to imagine people sitting in another camp looking at Azoulay’s proposition and thinking much the same. Facts and figures can always be framed to suit an argument.

Whatever the answer, no longer thinking in terms of a familiar and linear historical discourse is going to be immensely challenging for most of us. But it does chime with Marshall McLuhan’s ideas, which suggest the introduction of the phonetic alphabet led to a linear construction of narrative and therefore of reality (2017), which he tells us is being abandoned and Azoulay asks us dispense with. It also chimes with systems theory and quantum mechanics and reconfigured notions about time, space, relationships, energy and power; which posits that the old linear world order is dying, as all systems eventually do. And a new world-order, which is networked, non-linear and more flexible, is replacing it. (Capra et al, 2019) (Rovelli, 2016) (Heimans et al, 2017) And that reality should be viewed within the same parameters; in other words, reliant on context which is always evolving.

If digital technology has indeed disrupted a linear mental construction of the world and instigated a grid like and flexible model, we may be more able or ready to consider Azoulay’s suggestion, and act upon it. This might allow us potentially to move beyond Hegelian hierarchies. Such a concept may directly challenge fetishisation of Other, which could seem perilous to some




as it can be interpreted as devaluing the violence people have suffered. But Western, or white, or Imperial subjectivity has been based on imaginary boundaries imposed on the world through language to do with ‘race’. And if Western subjectivity has traditionally recognised itself only as a presence in relation to non-Western absence, then pattern and randomness threatens that paradigm, (a positive step in this author’s mind).

Had society not spent the previous two or three decades internalising pattern and randomness as well as a grid-like networked way of interacting with information, Azoulay’s efforts to encourage us to see differently might have been significantly more difficult than, I suspect, it already will be for many. However, fewer people might also now be questioning the veracity of the Holocaust or the shape of the planet. Nevertheless, Paul Mason’s suggestion in his book Post Capitalism, seems valid; we are “networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away,” and therefore “new agents of change in history” (2015). The whole of human horror is also one thumb-swipe away, which is a severe problem.

Of course, one can also argue that the fetishisation of Other is a direct result of the extreme binarism which emerges from a language predicated on 0s and 1s. Structurally, some might argue, it seems that nowadays you are right or wrong, black or white, clever or stupid, evil or heavenly. However there are corners of the Internet where this polarisation isn’t always the default outcome. “By examining Wikipedia’s Talk pages, where editors discuss their thoughts about an article, the team found that the intense disagreement that happens between ideologically polarised editors often led to a more focused debate, with editors on both sides admitting the process had improved the final article” (Swain, 2019, pg10) Regardless, we might view today’s relatively simplistic coding (in relation to where it will eventually go) as an early example of what is to come, which should grow more refined as technology develops and our ability to emulate the coding of nature grows ever more complex. The structure supporting simulations of collective consciousness, i.e. social media, driven by code are clunky in comparison. In the meantime, new social rules will be learned and are certainly needed for discourse to stay pertinent rather than dissolving into verbal violence, or forcing users to retreat into echo chambers (ibid). In addition, if our entire and aged social system is transforming then we are very likely, for now, in a period of inevitable and perhaps desirable chaos. Desirable, because, according to systems theory, it could lead to the birth of a new and healthier system.

Somewhere between those two positions, one might argue, that despite all the shifts underpinning society, the old order is proving remarkably recalcitrant. In The Power, a novel which makes use of an alienation effect by switching around descriptions of masculine and feminine violence, and quoted at the top of the essay, the protagonist Allie tells her inner voice “The world is trying to go back to its former shape. Everything we have done is not enough.” (2016, p294)




4. Conclusion

Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) is critical of the way photographers blindly allow themselves to become co-opted into being part of and working for the “apparatus”4 as they use technology. And he was writing when analogue was still the norm although he foresaw the way things were going. But unlike photographers or artists who turn film and analogue into a commodity fetish, and value it more highly than digital, he doesn’t write off any form of photography. Instead he encourages experimental work which aims to confuse ‘the apparatus’ because he seems to understand that that would be an important part of interrogating the dominant medium.

It seems fitting, and poetic, that a digital device, one which captures its information and then renders it in the language of 0s and 1s, should be used to explore gender fluidity in Prodger’s Bridgit. In relation to Hayles’ suggestions in, How We Became Post Human – Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, it is also interesting to consider Prodger’s reference to her phone as a prosthetic object. We interact with our devices, they interact with us, both interact with the rest of the networked world – information flows between each node (device, person, object).

Behrouz Boochani used his relatively inexpensive digital technology along with its numbered coding language to defy the Australian state’s intention to dehumanise him by rendering him a number. He has survived immense hardship by making important and relevant work, which informs others and also somehow keeps him from succumbing to complete physical, emotional and mental devastation. He used text as well as image, both of which would have been transformed into 0s and 1s, and gave each form as much value as the other.

Max R.C. Schleser writes in The Evolution of the Image “…smartphone filmmaking can be seen as an intervention to repressive and elitist discourses… smartphone filmmakers demonstrate an emerging form of agency that critically interrogates representation and brings images from the periphery to the centre.” (2018, loc 3579)

As the Western world evolves, perhaps inevitably due to humanity’s everyday use of networked technology, away from a linear Cartesian mindset towards a non-linear view of reality, it becomes more and more disingenuous to overvalue photography in favour of text or visa versa, regardless of where it originates from; or to dismiss digital photography, but allow your work to be disseminated on the Internet; or shoot film but enhance it in Photoshop; or to insist on analogue but purchase your equipment on the web: and in doing so but all the while maintaining digital formats are an irredeemable loss for art

4 “Apparatus – a plaything or game that simulates thought [trans. An overarching term for a non-human agency, eg. The camera, the computer and the ‘apparatus’ of the State or of the market]; organization of system that enables something to function” (1983; Kindle 83%)




reveals a lack of awareness about how a photograph is not a discrete object but part of a set of relations in which digital and therefore current culture cannot help but play a valuable part. Photography, it seems, does not change everything, certainly not by itself. The world is, however, changing. Our expectations of what is possible, perhaps due to our use of computers, have changed dramatically. Whether we are aware of it or not, our perception of reality is influenced by the way the language behind our screens makes seemingly fixed objects transformable and that is “instantiated into our bodies” (Hayles, 1999) and way of being. The world remains violent and unjust, despite photography’s presence – we just get to ogle the violence more than ever before, but what we see is often accompanied by sound and text too – and transported by code which makes everything number.

Incidentally, if you think Azoulay’s request to recalibrate your understanding of history was a complex ask, it might interest you to know that quantum scientists, in a controlled experiment using a quantum computer, have recently reversed the arrow of time, or in their terms “experimentally demonstrate[d] a backward time dynamic[s] for an electron scattered on a two-level impurity. (Lesovik, 2019)) Rest assured, we will never again “have the reassuring continuity of a Newtonian universe.” (Ritchin, 2009, pg177)




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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSrEEDQgFc8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9fKhsZuKO4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9fKhsZuKO4

https://frieze.com/article/charlotte-prodger-wins-2018-turner-prize-iphone-film-exploring-queer-identity

https://frieze.com/article/charlotte-prodger-wins-2018-turner-prize-iphone-film-exploring-queer-identity



Appendix1. Email correspondence from Ariella Azoulay, 11/11/2018

Hi Sarah-Jane,Thank you for your email and interest in my essay.Rather than assuming that photography is a technology whose goal is reducible to that of producing images and hence, has to be studied in the context of the history of images and devices that generate images, I propose to relate to photography as a technology that partake in the naturalization of other imperial technologies and rights. These technologies emerged in 1492, with Columbus expeditions to the Americas, known as a “discovery” of “The New World”, that facilitated the still ongoing extraction of people and objects from different places, and with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain, and Atlantic slavery that was put in motion.I hope this helps,bestariella




Reflection Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills Materials, techniques, observational skills, visual awareness, design and compositional skillsN/AQuality of Outcome Content, application of knowledge, presentation of work in a coherent manner, with discernment. Conceptualisation of thoughts, communication of ideas. I have rewritten this essay several times, developed from the previous versiona I submitted, and as I did noticed I had still tried to cram too much in following its earliest iteration. There seemed to be two main topics in the previously submitted version and not enough detail about either. I’ve stripped away one topic, the commodity fetishisation of analogue (related in part, I think, to long-standing insecurity of photography as an art form which I attempted to cram into the very first version too - as well as nostalgic attachment, all of which seem relevant). And focused on the way digital processes are changing the way we see, make work, look at and understand the world. It is a grand statement to say photography changes everything and one that seems a little delusional to me. I hope this latest version is clearer – I’m grateful to peers who have helped me to make it more so by pointing out contradictions and flaws. It continues to seem to me that the commodity fetishisation of analogue is an expression of loss; loss for time passing, for a different way of living and being. But younger generations will in the future find their own sense of nostalgia in the processes of today – they might look back and lament the passing of first generation digital with whatever replaces it. I just find it so odd that artists, some of who seem to promote themselves as more knowing and educated than the masses, can’t see this. Film is expensive, out of reach for many, ecologically dangerous with all the chemicals required, and digital forms absolutely do not prevent anyone from making immensely creative work. Demonstration of CreativityImagination, experimentation, invention, Development of a personal voice.I’m not sure this is relevant but in terms of personal voice, the work continues with themes I have been looking at since UVC. Context Reflection, research (evidenced in learning logs). Critical thinking (evidenced in critical review).See original reflection post as not much as changed in light of this re-edit. All of my blog posts relate to the related developing interest as well as the subject matter in the course folder.


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sjfdiculture.files.wordpress.com€¦ · Web viewIn February 2019 Behrouz Boochani won the prestigious Victorian prize for literature in Australia for his documentation of life on