created 2025-03-04, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025photographyaihumanities
rel: Into The Universe of Technical Images by Flusser Future Camera Process
Why I'm reading
I was listening to this author on a digital humanities podcast and her research overlapped with things that recently have gotten my attention in infinite digression.
Author has a previous book “Nonhuman Photography” that “argued there that the dominant analytical frameworks in photography theory— those coming from art history (where photography was seen as a series of individual artifacts displayed in a white cube), photojournalism (where photography was identified with professional practice), or social theory (where the focus was on everyday photographic practices)— were inadequate for capturing the contemporary photographic landscape. ”
More images are being produced, shared, and seen today than ever in history.
But, the co-chairs of the photography department at Bard college declare “We’ve Stopped Taking Photos.”
Author calls Photography a given cluster of practices and processes - even if they exceed pure “writing with light” if it remembers and resembles photography, and looks like it to the human observer. Photography is a “resemblance concept” whereby “photographs form a familiar group with many overlapping sets of features, but there is no single set of features common to all things which a photograph pertains. A set of media.”
The key problem I thus want to investigate concerns the future of mechanically produced images that come after, resemble, and are still called photographs— and the future of us humans as producers of, and as beings produced by, such photographic and after- photographic images
In Flusser’s Does Writing Have A Future? he answers his question in the negative, foreseeing a time when books become an obsolete medium, replaced with The Technical Image like photographs.
Henri Bergson intimates that “matter is an aggregation (ensemble) of images” with this forming “a universe.” “As I will show through the course of my argument, in its recognition of the formative role of imaging in the constitution of human consciousness as well as machine intelligence, contemporary neuroscience has strong Bergsonian undertones.”
Beyond humans:
...critical posthumanities that it’s not all about us, my analysis is located against the wider context of image uses and actions, many of which bypass us humans. The concept of “the perception machine” offered in the book encapsulates this wider context, while also serving as an answer to the (implicit) question about whether our future will indeed be photographic, and, if so, what it will revolve about, feel like, and look like.
Paul Virilio, “because the technical progress of photography brought daily proof of its advance, it became gradually more and more impossible to avoid the conclusion that, since every object for us is merely the sum of the qualities we attribute to it, the sum of information we derive at any moment, the object world could only exist as what we represent it to be and as more or less enduring mental construct”
The book is driven by an awareness that “the planet” does not care, but also that this lack of care need not— indeed should not— be mutual. Its approach could be described as feminist eco-eco-punk, which is not an aesthetic stand but rather an ethical position on how to live in a media- dirty world.
Photography’s Modern Past
The arrival of photography was met with anxiety from certain sectors of society, while being heralded as a modern triumph of science.
Daguerre’s presentation:
One outraged German newspaper thundered, “To fix fleeting images is not only impossible … it is a sacrilege … God has created man in his image and no human machine can capture the image of God. He would have to betray all his Eternal Principles to allow a Frenchman in Paris to unleash such a diabolical invention upon the world.” Baudelaire described photography as “art’s most mortal enemy” and as “that upstart art form, the natural and pitifully literal medium of expression for a self- congratulatory, materialist bourgeois class.” Other reputed doom-laden predictions were that photography signified “the end of art” (J.M.W. Turner); and that painting would become “dead” (Delaroche) or “obsolete” (Flaubert).
As “an impressioning medium” it was capable of carving time and and fixing it by imprinting it on different surfaces.
Geoffrey Batchen “everyone seems to want to talk about photography’s death” reflects the persistence of death as a trope in debates on the medium.
The question above is a reflection of our human anxiety about the disappearance of our subjectivity, or the disappearing of ourselves and the world, can mobilize photography to enable a different mode of perception and self-knowledge.
Media Existentialism: Flusser Redux
Photographs and other forms of mechanical images have played a role in aiding us in envisaging our demise.
“Nomadic Media Existentialism”- The Technical Image are “mosaics assembled from particles.” Traditional images, such as oil paintings are mimetic, while Technical images function as visualizations i.e. models. Traditional technical images are created without dimensions because they are made from mathematical code.
For Flusser, “images themselves are apocalyptic.”
Barthes looked at the photograph; Flusser, photographing.
The Flusserian apparatus is a perception machine that generates visual outputs in the world in a mechanical way.
After Flusser, the photocriticism of Sontag or Barthes, each of whom mostly ignores the apparatus in favor of the artifact, appears to miss the point entirely. Their achingly beautiful literary readings of the photograph as memento mori or studies in studium and punctum have no place in the Flusserian universe. While Sontag makes pronouncements like, “Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos,” Flusser counters that readings like Sontag’s are simply more fodder for the apparatus: “A number of human beings are struggling against this automatic programming … attempting to create a space for human intention in a world dominated by apparatuses. However, the apparatuses themselves automatically assimilate these attempts at liberation and enrich their programs with them.”
The message of technical images: They surround us, signify models, instructions and ways that society should experience, perceive, evaluate, and behave.
Image Apocalypse
Flusser’s theory allows us to concede that this machinic way of looking is not just a feature of machines, or an eccentric philosopher looking, literally, against the grain. Using his theory, we can perhaps surmise that most humans now look at most images automatically, scanning them for similarity and difference, engaging in quick categorization (on a binary level: like/not like; or a semantic one, via comments and hashtags), and going along with the image flow.
For Flusser writing as the dominant mode of developing and transmitting a linear argument has no future: it has already been replaced, to a large extent, by communication via technical images.
In classic 2008 essay analyzing the state of photography, Daniel Rubenstein and Katrina Sluis look at a research project analyzing the practice of users of the photosharing platform Flickr, many of whom said they had given up blogging because it was “too much work” and who now favored photography as a way of sharing their experiences.
The images of mobile phones have become a visual speech, an immediate intimate form of communication that replaces writing.
Flusser, tongue-in-cheek: ”images… are not repulsive as massive rows of fat books.”
Reading has changed - view children on ipads to be placated, people gaming, scrolling feeds. This has a neurological effect. Reading has given way to skimming, browsing and scanning (many readers adopt an F or Z pattern where they sample lines and word spot the rest of the text.)
Flusser:
The world of instruments (the world around us) seems destined, by its very structure of things already manipulated, to annihilation. The attitude I am describing lies in accepting the instruments as problems. This attitude is the consequence of a moment of choice; it means the existential choice of not accepting the instruments passively. And this resides in the experiential opening toward the world of technology, which means the existential decision to overcome the world of technology. Not by ever increasing consumption, not by angry and bored refusal, but by the manipulation and transformation of technology. Technology, to be overcome, needs to be transformed into something else. In this existential decision, in this choice of attitude, a different movement begins in the world around us.
photography and other media constitute a unified perception machine: they unify perception for us, within us, and between us.
A Philosophy of After-Photography
Photography: is everything and everywhere, like a spirit that’s left its body. It’s not tied to an apparatus (the camera) anymore. It is a fiction.
Trend in Photography
- miniaturization
- the increased role of software in image-making, including at the image generation stage.
rel:Future Camera Process - closer integration between photographic gear, clothing and the photographer’s body - which is another step in “media convergence” where the photographer becomes one with their camera.
- the proliferation of images that are produced not for human, nor by the human.
Something dramatic has happened to the world of images: they have become detached from human eyes. Our machines have learned to see without us.
Foregrounding the impossibility of the human seeing it all, it points to the fact that images now come to us principally in flows to be experienced, rather than as single- frame pictures to be decoded.
The way scientists think is partly framed and limited by technological metaphors (enabling but also constraining). Those metaphors themselves are tightly coupled with the state of technical knowledge, including its discourses and vocabularies. This is not just how “scientists” think, of course, as the dominant modes of thinking about technology and their underpinning metaphors make their way to other spheres of society.
With the discovery that nerves respond to electrical stimulation, in the nineteenth century the brain was seen first as some kind of telegraph network and then, following the identification of neurons and synapses, as a telephone exchange, allowing for a flexible organisation and output… . Since the 1950s our ideas have been dominated by concepts that surged into biology from computing— feedback loops, information, codes and computation.
Photography’s conceptualization of making impressions on a light sensitive surface established a parallel with the way that memory was understood to work: “making imprints on the tissues of the brain.”
This notion of the photograph as a material imprint on a surface became encapsulated in one of the most fundamental concepts of photography theory: the index.
In computational photography, light “is no longer interpreted as a direct impression of electromagnetic energy in the optical spectrum,” but as “the weights and biases of an archive’s afterglow,”
Photography will play a fundamental role in societies of this century, to the extent that in one way photography is over, and in the other sense it has not even started.
Screen Cuts or How Not to Play Video Games
Author starts playing The Last of Us, and photographing in game.
I keep returning because I’m pulled in by the oddity of being so spectacularly bad at something that, at first glance, looks quite simple.
TLoU has in-game photographic function with exposure and transforms the entire screen into a photographic device. Games like Pokemon Go, with the photographic affordance and the gamers’ desire to shape, save and share, lead to the emergence of a new paraphotographic genre.
For many gamers screenshotting has become a practice in its own right.
I was drawn to the game’s edges, spaces half-gratuitously put in by the designers and not really designed for the player to spend too much time in.
Visual perception always involves other senses— and that it is embodied and enacted, and not just passively received. Vision is thus never just visual.
Up until the early nineteenth century the dominant model of vision was premised on the idea that the eye was a passive vehicle of image reception. While up until the early twentieth century it was assumed that we saw reality via an array of still images, our ability to perceive motion was explained by the aforementioned “retinal image,” an optical illusion that involved each singular image supposedly “lingering” on the viewer’s retina.
The disciplines of film and media studies continue to make use of older image- making technologies to explain both physiological and mechanical image production— often with a full awareness of the metaphorical status of those explanations. This is perhaps because, on a subjective level, we still seem to be grappling to find adequate vocabularies to describe how we see the world— and, more importantly for my argument here, how we experience seeing. Image- making technologies seem to provide useful metaphors for articulating this subjective uncertainty.
From Machine Vision to a Nontrivial Perception Machine
The methodological premises for computer vision were laid in the 1950s. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, “Receptive Fields of Single Neurons in the Cat’s Striate Cortex” was based on a series of experiments on felines whose eyes had been immobilized. The cats were being shown various dots and light shapes, or were having shapes projected on their retinas, with the attempt of assessing feline brain activity and thus identifying the cortical correlates of vision. Hubel and Wiesel eventually realized that what the cats’ retinas were reacting to was not any specific shape, such as a dot or a line, but rather change in light intensity at the edge of a slide frame.
This activity ended up calling “simple cells” in what is now known as the primary visual cortex.
This established one of the foundational assumptions, or myths, of CV:
the belief that the process of vision is multi- layered and hierarchical, that it is possible to extricate the essence of vision in various animals (including those of a human variety), that the mechanism of edge perception is what lies at the core of vision, that the process is physiological and content-independent, and that machines can be taught to see “like humans” by mimicking this process of pattern perception at the level of pixels.
Google is now using the term “machine perception” in lieu of “machine vision.”
What tech calls thinking is thus a form of instrumental rationality which has been shaped by the Randian myth of individualism and the logic of capital. It is not only profoundly anti-intellectual but also, contrary to its own self-image, counterrevolutionary.
They also had some rather critical things to say about “neural network computing” as an approach that promised to develop machine vision by modeling it on the operations of the human brain. For them “neural network computing” is a misnomer because the approach that underpins it is premised on a badly conceived analogy between neural networks in the brain and computer networks, and not on the way biology actually understands and works with neural structures. The strictly compu- tational approach, they argued, cannot really tell us much about percep- tion because of its foundational error— namely, the belief that “objects and events, categories and logic are given and that the nature of the task for the brain is to process information about the world with algorithms to arrive at conclusions leading to behavior… . This ‘category problem’ leads directly to the inability of AI systems to cope with the complexity and unpredictability of the real world.”
Shosana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism.” The term describes a novel economic order, one that is characterized by parasitism and attempts at behavior modification, whereby human experience is reduce to raw material for the unprecedented operations of power wielded by tech companies. She defines the development as “a coup from above: an overthrow of people’s sovereignty”
The current vision machine we are living in is thus both a surveillance machine and a data capture device. Yet it is also, we must not forget, a pleasure machine, with photography and other forms of automated image-making shaping the flows of desire of human users who cannot be reduced to mere cultural “dupes.”
Auto-foto-kino: photography after cinema and AI
Any smartphone can shoot photos at the speed of video, and it can shoot video in photo resolution.
The still image doesn’t exist.
The image no longer shocks us because it is no longer outside our perception: it is we who have become images (Bergson)
It would be interesting to probe what audiences are being distracted towards, their orientation rel:Disordered Attention - How We Look at Art and Performance by Claire Bishop
In the digital formats that have followed terrestrial TV, reception as full engagement or even devotion has been replaced by a less focused mode of attention, with distraction becoming “the basic mode of perception” today.
Photography is partly nonhuman because, at the moment of taking a photograph, the photographer is taken over by the apparatus. The very act of taking an image, even if framed by the human subject, is passed on to the machine— and, indeed, it has to be passed on to the machine for a photographic act to occur.
Thought
The camera really must blink to capture, be it a mechanical shutter or e-shutter. It stops seeing to preserve.
Yet it is important to remember that this partial withdrawal of the human from the photographic moment has been a constitutive aspect of photography since its inception. In the early days of the medium the taking of an image was premised on the silencing and blinding of the photographer, who had to remain still, could not see when the shutter came down, and was not allowed to breathe in order to avoid camera shake
As we humans understand as “the world” is itself only a vision. It is also only someone’s vision. To say this is not to deny the existence of a reality outside of human perception, only to assert that the breakdown of this reality into objects is the result of perception, of cuts made by a given species’ or even individual’s corticovisual apparatus.
AI glitches as value
The history of art shows that glitches are often artistically desirable. ML art is no exception to this: while the capabilities of ML models are valued by our respondents, most were particularly interested in their edges: the artistic potential of machine failure.”
Can You Photograph the Future?
Predicting the future by capturing an image of it.
Photography has been associated with the past, outside of absurd futures like Back to the Future.
On some models of smartphone: a photograph is now an extraction of an image from a sequence, coupled with an averaging of that sequence. Or, as developer Vasily Zubarev puts it, “When you tap the ‘take a photo’ button, the photo has actually already been taken.”
Hitting the shutter release signals the mid-point within a 15 frame stream of images sent for processing.
rel:Future Camera Process
the act of seeing is an act that precedes action, a kind of pre-action partly explained by Searle’s studies of “intentionality.” If seeing is in fact foreseeing, no wonder forecasting has recently become an industry in its own right, with the rapid rise of professional simulation and company projections, and ultimately, hypothetically, the advent of “vision machines” designed to see and foresee in our place. These synthetic-perception machines will be capable of replacing us in certain domains, in certain ultra high-speed operations for which our own visual capacities are inadequate, not because of our ocular system’s limited depth of focus, as was the case with the telescope and the microscope, but because of the limited depth of time of our physiological “take.”
Segment on poor images, refactored into “Loser images”. Loser images embrace their machinic heritage, but they also take on board the inevitable failures of human bodies and machinic infrastructures. As part of their weak feminist efficacy, they thus show up the dominant perception machine that we all inhabit as structurally and politically broken.
We need to feel the edges and limits of things.