pHOTO VIDEO
- Mechanical reproduction to endless replication
Text originally published in the book PHOTO-VIDEO (Paul Wombell, ed.), Rivers Oram Press and Impressions Gallery of Photography, 1991.
"I'm the transmitter, give information
You're the antenna, catching vibrations."
Kraftwerk c. 1976
Click.
It is said that in certain parts of New York, on the tops of tall buildings belonging to corporations who transmit data between sites by microwave, that roosting birds are sometimes cooked by data. Television signals, computer information, text or graphics. Photographs perhaps. Killed by images.
Click.
We have all watched the television pictures from Bagdhad and pored over the grainy reproductions of video stills in the newspapers. We have seen the evidence that people are killed by 'intelligent bombs'. We have seen the absolute interpenetration of our physical world and the virtual world of digital information. We have watched the bomb fly to its target from the viewpoint of the pilot who launched it. Next time television will no doubt arrange for us to see the process from the point of view of the bomb itself. How will the faces of those victims look as they realise that they are about to be killed by a flying camera ?
Click
Anything can be a camera. In three dimensional modelling programmes for computers, 'objects' are designed in a virtual space. An object has three dimensions, all of which can be viewed by swivelling it around in its simulated environment. However, things do not stop there. The object itself can be a camera and we can explore the simulated world from that object's point of view. We of course remain on the outside, viewing the object's world through the video screen, but we can navigate the 'camera' and use it as a surrogate for our own eyes. When we extend this process further with virtual reality tools like the 'data glove' or 'eyephones' we reach the point where we all but physically enter this simulated space. It is quite imagineable that in the course of exploring a virtual environment we come across any number of images that have lodged themselves there - clones of clones of images that, once digitised, are not in any sense fixed any longer and may thus 'haunt' the interior world of digital memory, waiting to rematerialise somewhere. (And perhaps they pass the time by cooking pigeons.)
Polaroid.
I'm in a room with no windows and 444 tv channels. I have a remote control in my left hand and a remote control in my right hand. The tv is on. The video is on. The computer is on. The fax is on. Press Rec/Play/Pause. Finger on the button. Wait for the moment. That moment. The moment when, out of the fog of data emerges an image of sudden clarity. An image that locks itself in the memory. A (meta) narrative unfolds/enfolds. We live in a vortex of spinning fragments. We're like shards of spinning glass in the giroscopic window of some cosmic kaleidoscope. We converge, diverge, form fabulous patterns that dissolve, decay, dissipate and reform. We're like little ikons shaken loose from our frames and we tumble and spin through a false space of fractal illusions. We live in a space constructed from data, from images, from samples. We are part of the furniture. Someone is watching us but we do not know who or where (or why), but our image is part of someone else's input. It is not so much the case anymore that we will all be famous for fifteen nanoseconds. On the contrary, cameras make us anonymous, permanently. Surveillance is a technology designed to convert people into data. And data is data is data, living or dead.
Scan.
Images held in digital memory are in some sense the living dead - deprived of physical manifestation. Photography was to be the death of painting, which somehow survived, mutated, incorporated its assassin and is now slipping out of its material skin to be reincarnated once again in a digital form. The living death of photography, beyond the digital process, is another stage of evolution. The photographic process is updated yet in some sense remains the same. Before we had a chain of consequent events beginning with a roll of unexposed film and ending with a set of prints. Now we can begin with a blank magnetic disk and end with a visual data base of thousands of images accessed via computer from a video disc player or some other mass storage device. We can of course still have the print too. This way we get to have our cake and eat it, but somehow it seems to be the wrong cake - instead of satisfying it just makes us hungrier.
Photocopies.
Let us consider Images as Traces, the archeology of the Insubstantial, the gaps in the flow of oversignified information. The accidental signs and ciphers that invite other ways of reading the environment. The unintentional graffiti of decayed information - the chance graphics of decay and renewal that can be witnessed in streets, anywhere, anywhere at all. a certain dream that is expressed equally through the passage of time on a journey, when the world slips by untouchable and illusory, and the passage of time in the succession of images that appear to offer a world, a set of worlds packaged for consumption. Is the choice merely to consume or be consumed by ?
Captions.
Language and Slippage and Impossibility......the collision of languages, the slippage of meaning, the impossibility of fixing points on a map whose scale is anyway inexpressable. A map that precedes the terrain it represents. A map which, if folded, would fold in on itself infinitely, like a torus, a fractal, a recurring decimal - folds within folds giving upon a dizzying and vertiginous perspective of endless replication.
Postcards
The Aesthetics of disappearance - virtual images - images on the edge of being there - images at the edges of memory - images with no meaning, no place in the discourse of Information, no exchange value in the Commodity Signifiers market. Used signs, like used cars, used refrigerators; signs abandoned, left to rust, left to subside into, be subsumed into the corrosion of obsolete meaning. Things that can be missed in the blink of an eye, the click of a shutter, or else, things that only appear in the blink of an eye, things that are only, always..........almost there. The ghosts. The traces.
Family albums.
Old black and white photographs when digitised take on a power that is entirely missing from the modern full colour image. Perhaps because they were already ghosts, traces, memories - they already know how to exist in the virtual world and need make no claim on 'objective' 'reality' whereas the colour photograph of today screams out for recognition as a 'real' thing - even as it slips into the swamp of hyperreality. In an introductory interview to his video tape 'Art of Memory', screened in the BBC II series 'White Noise', the American artist Woody Vasulka talks of the necessity to stop looking forward in the late twentieth century, but to look back, to use memory, to recognise what has happened in this technologised century. His mutated black and white images writhe and float through livid red desert landscapes. The double metaphor of desert as a place of remembering and the photographic image as a trigger to memory combine within the simulated space/time of video to create a visual language borne out of memory yet apt to describe the present or to envision the future.
Travel guides.
We have become like tourists in our own towns and cities, our homes and families, our own bodies and memories. We read magazines that tell us what we are while we wait for the bus, the train, the plane that takes us to what, where and who we will be. We gather fragments of stories, fragments of images, fragments of information, of Data....we collect, we archive, we rename and re-use. We adorn ourselves with fragments, our culture becomes a car, a carg, a cargo, a cargo cult a cargo culture......
TV Shopping.
A cargo culture....a commodity culture....a renewable culture. All must be renewed, renewable. Memory will be strictly short term, random access, volatile. As much as Museums (repositories of Memory) we are building endlessTransit sites (engines of forgetting) for the exchange of articles with no past and no future. Articles that lose their value as soon as the packing is removed and lose their meaning when the batteries run flat. Articles that are always less than their own image - of less interest than the packaging they arrived in.
Virtual Archeology.
A paradox. We are archeologists, curators, antiquarians, collectors of relics. But we don't care if we fill our museums with fakes. We don't care because there is no longer a distinction to be made.We don't care because all the real things are fakes - they turn into fakes under our gaze, our gaze is a faker.
Self Portrait.
I catch myself looking at my own reflection, I am audiencing my own performance. In the realm of self reflexivity, Performance is the Act of Being - Being one's own eyes as it were - and each moment is a construct, each gesture a signifier. We speak the language of The Look - our action is that of Framing. The glance is a freeze frame. What I want is affirmation - HARD COPY. But I also want control, the tools to edit. A new image, new features, new skin colour - just like those computer graphic programmes used by certain hairdressing salons to simulate hairstyles on digitised images of their clients.
Virtual pornography.
J.G. Ballard's descriptions of the erotic conjunction of architectural spaces and body parts comes to life through the mediation of the screen and the digitised image. The voyeur reconstructs the object of sublimated desire by editing the image - to create the idealised erotic icon, composed only of those elements that excite the individual's unrealisable desires. The face of a film star, the windows of a supermarket, the ramps of a car park, the various body parts of anonymous models, athletes, politicians, entertainers. The composite image takes on a kind of artificial life. And is it possible that even the data that constitutes this image is imbued with a sexual charge ?
Index.
I'm in a room filled with screens. I am receiving data from each point of the compass. I have a remote control in my hand and with it I command the screens to display a matrix of miniature images - a visual index of all the channels incoming. With a single push of a button I select a channel, search an image and transmit it to your terminal. It appears on your screen and moments later, a colour copy emerges from your printer. With an electronic stylus you mark changes to the image and transmit the data back. The re-edited image appears in my index and the sequence from which it came is automatically updated to accomodate the new image within a believable continuity. History is rewritten from moment to moment. The end of history, the end of memory, an eternal present whose duration is so short that time is virtually abolished.
The gap between transmitter and antenna is closed. They mirror each other's functions. To transmit is to receive is to transmit.
© Jeremy Welsh 2003. This text may be downloaded and printed for personal use, but may not be reproduced in any form without the author's written permission.
© Jeremy Welsh 2003. This text may be downloaded and printed for personal use, but may not be reproduced in any form without the author's written permission.