Philosophy of Photography - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012

In his text, ‘Information strategies’, written at the cusp of the emergence of digital photography in 1985, German artist and photography critic Andreas Müller-Pohle predicted that soon ‘it will be possible to generate and regenerate literally every conceivable – or inconceivable – picture through a computer terminal’. This realization coincided with Müller-Pohle’s critique of conventional photography, which he dubbed ‘photographism’ drawing on the philosopher Vilém Flusser’s work. For Flusser, photographers are functionaries of an apparatus based on automation, programmed to produce of pictures that correspond to certain general conventions and reconstructing the world as technical information. According to Flusser, the bulk of photography is ‘redundant’, exhausting itself stylistically and enslaved to apparatuses and programs. This paper revisits the ideas of Flusser and Müller-Pohle in light of developments in digital photography that throw new light on the idea of image saturation and redundant photography. In particular, I address cultures of online photo sharing in light of the actions enabled by the metadata contained within common digital file formats. I propose that the very excess of digital photographic images coincides with the reinvention of the embattled authorial image into an evolving collaboration between the photographer and the database.

This article investigates artificial life image-making in relation to and as constituent of the moving image, specifically artificial life visualized in three-dimensional computer-generated space (3D space). Of particular interest in this examination is the view or ‘window’, from the virtual camera, into the artificial life computational model or ‘world’ (which is better described by Flusser’s expression technical image), and how it organizes a dense field of expectations. Analogous to looking through a telescope or microscope, the view into the artificial life world is monocular and often fixed in the world; in this regime we look ‘at’ computer models, which are often referred to as agents, ‘creatures’, ‘organisms’ or ‘cyberbeasts’. This tactic of looking through the instrumentality of science, the arts of reality, is parallel to looking through André Bazin’s ‘long take’ in cinema and documentary film-making in which we look ‘at’ an unmediated view of reality; in other words, in looking ‘at’ an image of artificial life we look ‘through’ a non-intrinsic regime of seeing. This investigation into the interpretative regime provides only a partial account of the intercultural traffic between artificial life and the moving image. I further this discussion by arguing that artificial life screen-based works are a contemporary extension and reworking of the nature film in that they provide accounts of the ‘natural’ world that are familiar and similar to those of their filmic and cinematic predecessors. I contend that artificial life visualizations and the stories that often accompany the images are the latest manifestation of this photographic and filmic tradition. To illustrate my point I discuss the scientific project Daisyworld, the associated narrative that frames the research, and the researchers’ attempt to mathematically model an ‘imaginary planet [with] a very simple biosphere’. This sets the scene to explore artificial life in relation to Disney wilderness and nature films.

Ana-materialism & the Pineal Eye provides a landmark interpretation of materialism, representation and the image using the Cartesian conceit of a pineal gland and its voracious sexually embedded appetites. Developing the argument via Bataille’s re-invention of the pineal gland as an all-seeing, all- devouring, (pineal) eye, Golding borrows this move to envision a different analytic approach to digital forms of ‘matter’ and artificial forms of ‘life’. From her critical engagement with Bataille, Deleuze and Butler, Golding shows why the tools provided by these modern, contemporary and postmodern approaches to philosophy, image, the body, indeed representation cannot fully explore, let alone develop these new forms of reality/ies except by retreating into traditional binary divides between male and female, good and evil, mother/child and so forth. Ana-materialism and the Pineal Eye introduces a much needed understanding to oddly cathected sensualities, multiversal realities, digital imaginaries with no weight, no volume, no spatiality, but ‘somehow’ making sense, and with it, creating matter, ethics, art.

This article examines a strain of contemporary art photography marked by its resemblance to earlier scientific motion studies as indicative of a wider ‘scientific turn’ in recent photographic art. Focusing on Sarah Pickering’s series Explosions (2008), Denis Darzacq’s The Fall (2006), Ori Gersht’s Blow Up (2007) and Martin Klimas’ Flower Vases (2008), it addresses the conditions that have allowed for forms and methodologies associable with earlier scientific imagery to be reshaped as contemporary art, particularly the large-scale of recent ‘museum photography’ and its self-conscious indeterminacy of meaning. Adopting a schematic approach based on the identification of similarity, I examine the implications of ambiguity and scale as inherent qualities of the work, along with the interpretations that the projects examined share. Noting a potential formalism in artists’ repeated isolation of frozen motion, I anchor this interest in the medium-specific qualities of photography in two changes associated with digitization. Where digital post-production has placed pressure on traditional ontological understandings of the medium, the projects are shown to offer a nostalgic return to ‘purer’ forms of photographic production. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s 2003 essay, ‘The end of temporality’, I conclude by considering how the photographs may be implicated in wider transformations to the construction and experience of time under late-capitalism.

The contemporary architectural rendering, digitally engineered and published in advance of construction, has come to resemble an image of an existing building so closely that it is hard to tell future from past. In constructing an appearance of an existing lived reality, which previously arose from the camera’s re-presentation of the trace of past circumstances, has it now become possible to speak of the trace of future events? With regard to property as commodity, the more believable these projected forms, the more capital may be invested, and the more likely it is that the depicted building will be constructed. Notwithstanding the possibly deceptive intentions of the image-maker, excess of signification becomes directly linked to the eventual existence of the building in that the more realistic it appears, the more likely it is to become reality.

First exhibited in 1999, Jean-Luc Moulène’s 24 Objets de Grève is a photographic archive printed in a range of different formats, portraying a variety of products made by French workers on strike between the 1970s and the 1990s. These comprise of scarves, T-shirts, dolls, geographical maps, cigarettes, facsimile banknotes, perfume bottles and other items. The objects were aimed at financially supporting the strikers and attracting the solidarity of the general public. Often destroyed after their use, they were not created with the intention of being collected and exhibited as works of art. 24 Objets de Grève lends itself to multiple and seemingly contradictory readings: it can be read as a Rancerian celebration of the creativity of the working class or as its undue appropriation; as a commemoration of the history of the workers movement or as an act of forgetting and reification. This article explores the ambivalences, hiatuses and limitations of Moulène’s project in relation to its representational strategies and the notion of emancipatory aesthetic elaborated by Jacques Rancière.

PRODUKTIONSÄSTHETIK, SEBASTIAN EGENHOFER (2010) Zurich: Diaphanes, 229 pp., ISBN: 9783037341032, p/bk, €26.90

DENKEN GEGEN DAS DENKEN. PRODUKTION, TECHNOLOGIE, SUBJEKTIVITÄT BEI SOL LEWITT, YVONNE RAINER UND HELIO OITICICA, SABETH BUCHMANN (2007) Berlin: b_books, 309 pp., ISBN: 3933557607, p/bk, €32.00

MARTHA ROSLER: THE BOWERY IN TWO INADEQUATE DESCRIPTIVE SYSTEMS, STEVE EDWARDS (2012) Afterall Books, London, 112 pp., ISBN: -10: 1846380847, ISBN: -13: 978-1846380846, p/bk, £9.95

THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY: TIMES OF RIOTS AND UPRISINGS, ALAIN BADIOU (2012) London and New York: Verso, pp. 120, ISBN: 1844678792, h/bk, £17.99

GENEALOGY AND ONTOLOGY OF THE WESTERN IMAGE AND ITS DIGITAL FUTURE, JOHN LECHTE (2012) London: Routledge, 216 pp., ISBN: 0415887151, p/bk, £80.75.

Touching Photographs, Margaret Olin (2012) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, v + 273 pp., ISBN: 978-0-226-62646-8, p/bk, £22.50.

Alien Phenomenology, or What its like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost (2012) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 166 pp., ISBN: 9780816678983, p/bk, £13.50