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Wednesday, August 31. 2005What is Digital Thinking?
If writing is losing importance and visual codes will fill the void we need to look at how these new kinds of images will be produced. In photography the camera in itself, the printed-paper in itself carries an essence of technology of the creating society. The medium, which is attached to the message as a passenger, must be taken into consideration when looking at digital photography. Writing, in the sense of the lining-up of letters and other writing signs, seems to have no future or almost none. In the meantime, there are codes that transmit information better than writing signs. What has been written until now can be better transferred on tapes, records, films, videotapes, picture discs, or diskettes. And much of what could not be written until now can be recorded in these new codes. The information that is coded thus is more convenient to produce, to transport, to receive, and to store than written texts. In the future, with the help of the new codes, we will be better able to correspond, make science, talk about politics, write poetry, and philosophize than we are in the alphabet or in Arab figures (Vilm Flusser, Schrift). Digital photography involving digital thinking will be pieced together from a diffuse chaos as an assemblage just as now words are assembled into a book. The following analysis of digital photography will traverse through the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, Franz Kafka, Vilm Flusser and Marshal McLuhan. The reason there are so many literary references is that modern thinking has been expressed most seriously through words and even the photographic tradition depends on an over-coding of words to pin down a visual surface both difficult and polysemic. Ironically some of the art and literature applying digital thinking has been around for about a century but it is often seen as rehash of something old (painting reference) instead the birth of something different. But most importantly the digital photograph by itself is a technique and it doesnt automatically incorporate digital thinking. Industrial imaging for industrial sitesIf the medium relates to the art then the images made by Bernd and Hilla Becher of old factories during the 1970s could stand in as a closing curtain on the industrial age. This is an oblique reading of these images but it is straightforward that the industries photographed largely depend on chemical processes, such as creating iodine from kelp just the same as silver halide crystals rely on a chemical reaction to develop a latent image left by light. Their images are the epitome of the industrial culture but they are not outdated or irrelevant by any means, in fact they are more pertinent to a time of constant transition. These images make a good jumping off point to read the images of Thomas Ruff, who studied with the Bechers but departed from their strict realist style and he will be introduced later on. The degree of probabilityVilm Flusser believes we must look for changes instead of the changeless stream of the habitual in order to find something meaningful, similar to the way a frog sees only moving objects and the rest fades to black. Marshall McLuhan similarly described the message in his now famous phrase The medium is the message. The medium, for McLuhan is a change in pattern and an effect on culture or society. His message went beyond simply reading the content of the communication. Simply put, the medium was any extension of the human. If we use McLuhans definition of message it becomes clear what Flusser meant when he wrote that the constant change that we have gotten used to: one redundant photo replaces another redundant photo. (Flusser qtd. in Wagner, 84) Flusser is a Czech-born philosopher who believed that we are in a transition period between a linear way of thinking to a multi-layered and algorithmic thought process. He believed the image was suited to the prehistoric period, the word to the historic period and now the numerical code. Despite seeing the historic era as closing he believed both the historic word and the post-historic image would coexist side by side for a long time but the technical elite and the intellectuals would be aware of these changes and produce new forms of art and communications. (Wilson) It could be asked of Flusser whether the elite will come from the educational institutions or from everyday life. This again seems to be leading us into a hierarchy that is supposed to be breaking down; nevertheless there are some people more sensitive to this shift in thinking than others. Lastly he believed the key difference between reality and representation was the degree of probability. (Wilson) The wall of imagesRichard Prince acknowledges the uselessness of making new images with his re-photography of the Marlboro advertisements. It is as if he doesnt see a way of finding meaning in this formless mass of images. In another way he is alienating himself from the so-called original ads and the world he presents to us is mediated through a camera and print leading to the possibility that his world is alienated from him in the same way. Alienation is part of modern living. Franz Kafka is thought of as one of the first writers to express the alienation of modernity. He was an insurance company administrator by day and a writer by night he saw first hand the form of the intestines of the efficient modern corporation. In his short parable Before the Law a simple country man wants to access the law but he is terminally blocked by a single threatening guard who keeps the simple man out with threats of more guards. The guard finally shouts in the simple mans ear This gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it. Is the more current idea of redundancy of images similar to the inaccessibility of the law to the average person? It is easy to think of a gate in terms of a barrier of steel or stone but in Kafkas story the barrier is one of words and wit and the physicality is only for effect. The gate can be of sheer multitude of data, images or legal speech. Just like thick brush in a rainforest will stop travel, so will a dense packing of words or images fog interpretation. It seems that neither Kafka nor Prince see a way past the wall. Bringing together of the communications webTo delve deeper into finding a way past this wall we need to look at modern history as rhizomatic or as a web where points intersect but not necessarily from the same root: non-linear instead of chronological points are interconnected by a web and not like by roads or highways. The new forms of communications today are analogous to this way of seeing. It becomes what Deleuze and Guattari call open space. The internet, search engines, and databases function the same way. It breaks through the wall of redundant images with piercing specificity. The ennui with the redundancy of images becomes an illusion. Diffuse roots of digitalLooking at photographic history in a rhizomatic way can show how varied the beginnings of photography are but a chronological view proposes that the digital form of photography is an offshoot of the traditional and truer version of the photographic arts. True, digital cameras were made from existing chemical process cameras with the addition of a CCD in place of the film and digital camera technology came after photographys sesquicentennial giving it a root or paternal status over digital photography. The first complication involved in this view of photographic history is the diffuse roots of digital technologies ranging from military cryptology to astronomical photography to news transmission . Digital technology was not meant to function as a way of manipulating photographs, it was meant to speed up certain repetitive functions to the point of making it seem almost mythical in processing powers. Now we are in a good location to take another look at digital photography, one that involves digital thinking. Imagine a three-sided shape, sort of a triangle. At one end is the mass of data waiting to be interpreted as information, in an open space and undefined. At the other end is the digital search tool. In between but slightly removed is the viewer. What joins these three elements is intent. The way a digital space is navigated is very close to that of the nomadic space. There are no fixed routes and the route taken is on a matter of joining the viewer to a specific piece of data. Location is not important except that it exists somewhere within access. What makes a computerized database like Google different from an alphabetical index, for example, is the possibility to search in a non-linear way and  Fig. a This gives a finite and predefined way of finding specific information. It is suitable for a small amount of data since unrelated data can be skipped over by a human researcher and in this case it is considered more comprehensive by a researcher. In contrast the search engine is an open space within its own boundaries. In reality it is possible to calculate the number of connections possible in a search engine at any one time but over the period of its life, incorporating updates and additions the amount of connections will increase exponentially. What makes it even more noteworthy is that these connections are not predefined like an alphabetical index is. The connections are still limited to the words and phrases contained in the database but the words in the database are not predefined. The pattern created by using this database is the same as the illustration in Fig. A. The digital image is by itself, printed on paper or stored in a DVD-ROM as a negative or master image, is not much different than a black and white negative made by the Bechers. Both types of images have a print and a higher quality master, both have a two-dimensional surface of tones created from reflected light (in general it doesnt make much of a difference if the image is purely digital, since we are talking specifically about photography). Both types of image have similar uses as art, advertising, illustrative or memory aids. In this sense digital photography can make only superficial and practical changes to the current state of photography. This is the typical way of seeing digital photography, as a practical successor to the analogue process brought on by the availability of cheap computers and high-end digital cameras. It is possible to look deeper into the chronological history and the technological play-by-play of photography in the last fifty years but it would also create a distraction from the main point; digital photography opens the closed square or round photographic frame into an unlimited space. A traditional photograph such as the photograph of the rabbit in Thomas Wagner's "Where the Rabbit Warms Its Belly" each element stands in for its real counterpart, the language of the photograph is closed and finite. We assume there are things beyond the frame but we deal with only what is included and what is left out. The elements in the image stand in as a kind of evidence, the vicarious experience, like the kind of experience categorized as real experience in minimalist sculpture. We can be sure, especially when we know how photography works, what the pictured elements represent in this photograph. Now taking a digital photograph, still as Wagner describes it, the image loses its reference to the real, the space is open and the language is no longer tied to what is contained within the image. If we compare Thomas Ruffs anderes Portrts and Nancy Bursons Composites we see similar images but one is made using a computer and another is made using mirrors. In these two sets of images it appear as if the analogue image begins to breakdown the striated space of the traditional image. The mirrors used are from an outdated German police machine used for making criminal composite images for identification. The machine takes pieces of four separate images to create one final image. The metaphor of the mirror is one of illusion, unreality from Marxs mirror distorting the way we see labor to the hall of mirrors silly effects on its visitors, but in the police images it was clearly an illusion trying to remind people of someone real, someone so fleeting his/her image could not be made using traditional means. These alleged criminals were outside of the delimited space of our society so a method of imaging was needed to reach beyond the same threshold. Later Ruff used the machine, when it was already long outdated to create his composite portraits drawing on the unreality of the machine, bringing the idea of truthful images into question. Nancy Burson has since the 1980s been working with computers to montage or morph images of faces creating homogenized portraits of groups of people for example the whole human race, based on racial distribution. These images look very similar to those of Ruff but there seem to be some differences not immediately visible in the images. Burson states in her artist statement on her website, referring to a project called He/She that My goal is emphasize the commonality of people rather than their differences or separateness. In He/She Burson used both masculine and feminine facial features and combined them into one face. Her images try to homogenize groups, create a commonality but at the same time they create a delimited space with specific ways of seeing it, specific routes to follow. Her homogenized space becomes closed. It is interesting that she is also using digital photography in the traditional way revealing truth, or as evidence. This direction goes with the closed defined space because we need a set of standards or predefined limits to understand the truth. Moving in an altogether different realm of understanding are Ruffs photographs. They defy a truthful interpretation, even the hyper-real straight portraits, since we look at the photograph in a way we would never look at a real face; we do not usually stare at people without becoming threatening to them. But Ruffs anderes Portrts are more digital in the sense of dissolving a homogenized space and defying an illustrative reading ie: they look like a composite image. Ruff continued to reference the open space, the digital space when he acquired a night-vision system shortly after the Gulf War of 1991-92. He photographed his urban surroundings with it leaving the circular green image rough as it came from the machine. Night vision is not necessarily digital, although new machines could be, the older ones were electronic cameras fitted with amplifiers for light and a television tube to display the greenish image. He was fascinated by the way the night-vision saw the world in a clear, paranoid manner, like a hunted animal, the user of such a system can evade detection and neutralize a threat like a deer running for its life the hunted acquires the tools of the hunter. The tool and the images refer to war and restructuring of a defined space, of defined borders. It is the destructive dark side of digital thinking. Ruffs first big digital projects using digital images began by taking low resolution pornographic images from the internet and blurring them to diffuse the pixilation before printing them. He continued processing the images he found on the internet until they became abstract images which he called Substrats. Thomas Wagner made a connection between traditional photography and its connection to a real event, whether staged or witnessed as a bystander. Wagner uses a rabbit as the fragile real-reality. In analogue photography this rabbit is captured and the image produced is analogous to the event, in fact there was a rabbit in front of the camera. How it is interpreted depends on our reading, polysemic or unfixed according to Roland Barthes but the image fixed into the photographic emulsion is stable hopefully immutable. Minimalist sculpture functions in a similar way it is the experience of something that creates the art. Wagner quotes Tony Smith, a proto-minimalist You cant stick it in a frame, you have to experience it. In this sense the traditional photograph is a window into the raw event: evidence, witness, document, surrogate. Minimalism still counts in digital photography but instead of the photographic print standing in for an experience it is the experience. Regardless of the authenticity of an image we receive images in iconic fragments, our mood is affected by tone and colour, scale changes the way we relate to the piece on a corporal level and with this accumulation of aspects we experience the photograph as if we were experiencing a sculpture. Nothing has changed since the traditional photograph but our understanding of our tools has changed and we can never look back to see photographs with the same innocence as the pioneers of this new medium. Digital images lend themselves to collage and montage such as the vast surface of the earth, made up of small segments photographed by a satellite and then pieced together in software, the image can be easily updated each day. It creates a moving space in constant flux. Even though this kind of image is used in an indexical fashion it is because we trust the image-makers, not the camera or the software to bring us something true. In the same way a large image database can be edited into a series of meanings and all of these series supplied with only one copy of the images. In the analogue world, generally once an order was decided on, publishing the series would be the final universal order, like a book. With a digital catalogue of images the author is free to reuse the same image without appearing redundant. The author can also leave the order of the images up to the viewer, who is able use the collection as open space. This artist working with these methods begins to work using digital thinking. Epilogue: A short description of a struggleIn the past the museum or gallery was separate from the artist and the art. Art worked within the framework of the gallery space. Conservators in museums and galleries are struggling with this shift in mediums but take for example the librarian, equivalent to the museum in its preservation of cultural and scholarly artifacts. Deanna Marcum suggests the preservation of the work must become part of the work. The separation of history and work begin to blend for many reasons, many of them practical. For example the rights to obtain license to a website like CNN.com (a large news agency) can be difficult because the site changes daily and it covers so many areas beyond what a traditional issue of a magazine or newspaper would include. This opens up to a larger issue: much of the work seen on websites, on television, in magazines and heard on the radio is not owned. This is not a new development but it becomes problematic with the loss of original and duplicate status of digital media. A greater need for licensing arises. The Whitney Museum in New York is presenting media on its website that needs to be downloaded to be experienced. In other words, the artwork ends up on the viewers computer and not behind a security fence or fastened to a wall. It is up to the artists to preserve their own work with the quality of the code and reliance on strong standards being their only archival assets. CitationsFederman, Mark. Flusser, Vilm. Die Kafka, Franz. Marcum, Deanna. When Wilson, Elizabeth & Strhl, Andreas. On the Philosopher Vilm Flusser. http://www.altx.com/ebr/w(ebr)/essays/flusser.html. Vancouver. April 2, 2005. Olmstead, David. Frog Story, Derrick. Wagner, Thomas. Wilson, Elizabeth Add Comment
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