Glossary Glossar

Glossar

Recherchiert und zusammengestellt von Doris Gassert und Marco De Mutiis für SITUATION #144 – Study for a Post-Photographic Glossary

Eine Kopie einer Kopie einer Kopie

“I am just a copy of a copy of a copy Everything I say has come before Assembled into something into something into something I don’t know for certain anymore I am just a shadow of a shadow of a shadow Always trying to catch up with myself I am just an echo of an echo of an echo Listening to someone’s cry for help”

Nine Inch Nails, lyrics to “Copy of a”, in Hesitation Marks, Columbia Records, 2013.

Aufmerksamkeitshändler

“Some of the more popular users of Instagram (typically young, attractive, and female) managed to become attention merchants, selling product placements in their photographs. “Companies have realized that one photo on the Instagram account of someone with over 100,000 followers is reaching more people directly than any traditional ad campaign,” explained a new social media ad agency; a popular, microfamous Instagrammer might charge brands $1 per “like” earned by a sponsored photo. […] For the better known—those already in the business of capturing and reselling attention, the utility of Instagram as an additional platform and revenue stream was obvious; of course their publicists or other staff could be expected to do most of the work for these incorporated personalities. In a major attention-capture stunt, Kim Kardashian famously used Instagram in 2014 to send out a picture of her nearly naked backside in an attempt to “break the Internet.” It may not quite have done that, but it paid off in attention earned; it must have, because Kardashian’s management, normally so efficient about getting paid, negotiated no other compensation. It was further evidence of attention’s having become an accepted form of currency. James Franco, a C-list actor under the old metrics, and himself a self-confessed “Instagram addict,” would speak to its broad acceptance: “It’s what the movie studios want for their products, it’s what professional writers want for their work, it’s what newspapers want—hell, it’s what everyone wants: attention. Attention is power.”

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, Penguin Random House, 2016

Gegenvisualität

“It … countervisuality [is] the attempt to reconfigure visuality as a whole. […] Countervisuality proper is the claim for the right to look. It is the dissensus with visuality, meaning ‚a dispute over what is visible as an element of a situation, over which visible elements belong to what is common, over the capacity of subjects to designate the common and argue for it.‘ The performative claim of a right to look where none exists puts a countervisuality at play.”

Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 24.

Digitaler Abschaum

Image spam circulates endlessly without ever being seen by a human eye. It is made by machines, sent by bots, and caught by spam filters, which are slowly becoming as potent as anti-immigration walls, barriers, and fences. The plastic people shown in it thus remain, to a large extent, unseen. They are treated like digital scum, and thus paradoxically end up on a similar level to that of the low-res people they appeal to. This is how it is different from any other kind of representational dummies, which inhabit the world of visibility and high-end representation. Creatures of image spam get treated as lumpen data, avatars of the conmen who are indeed behind their creation. If Jean Genet were still alive, he would have sung praise to the gorgeous hoodlums, tricksters, prostitutes, and fake dentists of image spam. They are still not a representation of the people, because, in any case, the people are not a representation. They are an event, which might happen one day, or maybe later, in that sudden blink of an eye that is not covered by anything. By now, however, people might have learned this, and accepted that any people can only be represented visually in negative form. This negative cannot be developed under any circumstance, since a magical process will ensure that all you are ever going to see in the positive is a bunch of populist substitutes and impostors, enhanced crash-test dummies trying to claim legitimacy. The image of the people as a nation, or culture, is precisely that: a compressed stereotype for ideological gain. Image Spam is the true avatar of the people. A negative image with absolutely no pretense to originality? An image of what the people are not as their only possible representation?

Hito Steyerl: “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation” in e-flux journal no. 32, 02/2012

Fakten, keine Erinnerungen

“Memory’s not perfect. It’s not even that good. Ask the police, eyewitness testimony is unreliable. The cops don’t catch a killer by sitting around remembering stuff. They collect facts, make notes, draw conclusions. Facts, not memories: that’s how you investigate. I know; it’s what I used to do. Memory can change the shape of a room or the color of a car. It’s an interpretation, not a record. Memories can be changed or distorted and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.”

Christopher Nolan, in Memento, Newmarket Capital Group, Team Todd, I Remember Productions, Summit Entertainment, 2000.

Hackerazzi

“A Florida man who pleaded guilty to hacking into the email accounts of celebrities to gain access to nude photos and private information was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a federal judge in Los Angeles on Monday. […] Prosecutors said Chaney leaked some of the private photos to two celebrity gossip websites and a hacker. […] Chaney, a native of Jacksonville, Florida, was arrested in October 2011 after an 11-month FBI investigation dubbed “Operation Hackerazzi” and he continued hacking after investigators initially seized his personal computers. Shortly after his arrest, Chaney told a Florida television station that his hacking of celebrity email accounts started as curiosity and later he became “addicted.” “I was almost relieved months ago when they came in and took my computer … because I didn’t know how to stop,” he said.”

Eric Kelsey, “Florida man sentenced to 10 years in ‘hackerazzi’ case”, Reuters, 18 December 2012, reuters.com/article/entertainment-us-celebrityhacker/florida-man-sentenced-to-10-years-in-hackerazzi-case-idUSBRE8BG1B020121218

Homo Photographicus

The profusion of images that sustains this capitalism of appearances is not engendered solely by the needs of the media and the market. It is also nourished by corporate and public entities, given the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and facial recognition systems, satellites, and other automated gizmos for capturing graphic information. The real novelty lies in the incorporation into this frenzy of Homo photographicus, the species toward which we humans have evolved, in response to an environment characterized by the proliferation of inexpensive, easy-to-use pocket cameras and cellphones with built-in cameras, which produce photographs at zero cost. For the first time, we are all producers and consumers of images, and this simultaneous combination of circumstances has triggered an almost infinite visual avalanche. The image no longer acts as a mediator between us and the world, but fuses us with it, when it is not its raw material.

Joan Fontcuberta, “The post-photographic condition”, in The post-photographic condition, Kerber, 2015. p.10

Bilder ohne Betrachtende

“In the digital habitats of secondary visuality, the ostensibly odd or unique image is immediately collectivized. It becomes one among many: 49 weird family photos from the seventies; 23 worst celebrity plastic surgery disasters; 10 most beautiful sunsets; 39 babies in Renaissance paintings who can’t even. Websites like Buzzfeed and other clickbait aggregators specialize in the collectivization of the weird, the rendering of what might have once been seen as singular as common. The singular image is isolated and alone. The images that register are the ones that share with others and that others share. Their force comes from being many. The greater the circulation, the greater the force: we know that others have seen it and shared it (the number of retweets and shares is right in front of us). […] Communicative capitalism’s circulating images are images without viewers. It’s not that images are unseen (although many go unshared, culled, deleted like so many thoughts unsaid). It’s that they are not seen as separate images; they flow into our life montage, becoming the visual common through which we converse, the archive or inchoate lexicon of our expression. Digital images don’t present themselves as objects for scrutiny and analysis but for repetition and imitation. The less unique, the better. We don’t have time to look at them – just a quick glance and then we’ll share and scroll down.”

Jodi Dean, “Images without Viewers: Imitation, Repetition, Circulation”, in Images Without Viewers, Still Searching, 2016, fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26421

Indexikalität

“Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that respect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection.”

Charles S. Peirce, “What Is a Sign?” (1894).

Vernetzte Bilder

[…] the networked snapshot is overlooked not simply because it is bland, banal and repetitious but also because it is a non-object. And it is not just in the sense in which photographs always had an insecure presence as an object through their role as signifiers that we tend to look through rather than look at. Within online networks the individual snapshot is stripped of the fragile aura of the photographic object as it becomes absorbed into a steam of visual data. By giving up the attributes of a photograph as a unique, singular and intentional presence, the networked snapshot is becoming difficult to comprehend with the conceptual tools of visual literacy and photographic theory. […] By taking on the appearance of a snapshot, the networked image is camouflaged as a non-political, non-significant and non-ideological site that does not merit textual analysis. This is perhaps a source of the persistence and power of the networked image. Invisibility, of course, is not without its benefits; not only does it help to evade analysis, criticism and deconstruction that are the fate of the louder, more visible images, but through being unnoticed, vernacular images appear normative, all- encompassing, and inherently benign.

Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, “A life more photographic; Mapping the Networked Image”, in Photographies (1,1), Routledge, March 2008. p.23

Arme Bilder

“Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it. […] The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history. It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the “original,” but on the transience of the copy. It is no longer anchored within a classical public sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation state or corporation, but floats on the surface of temporary and dubious data pools.”

Hito Steyerl: “In Defense of the Poor Image” in e-flux journal no. 10 , 11/2009

Post-Fotografie

A number of critics have […] lamented the loss of photography’s “truth effect” under the pressure of new photographic simulation technologies. These critics draw a distinction between photography as a direct inscription of a referent in the world and the photographic as a practice dependent on the recirculation of already existing codes and images. The suggestion is that a diminution of our collective faith in the photograph’s indexical relationship to the real will inevitably lead to the death of photography as an autonomous medium. The irony of this scenario is that photography as a separate entity might well be on the verge of disappearing forever, even as the photographic as a rich vocabulary of conventions and references lives on in ever-expanding splendor. In short, it appears we have already entered a “post-photography,” that moment after but not yet beyond photography.

Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, MIT Press, 2001. p. 108

Remediation

„[W]e call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of new digital media. […] Remediation [is] the mediation of mediation. Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other in order to function as media at all. Remediation [is] the inreparabilityof mediation and reality. Although Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and simulacra might suggest otherwise, all mediations are themselves real. They are real as artifacts (but not as autonomous agents) in our mediated culture. Despite the fact that all media depend on other media in cycles of remediation, our culture still needs to acknowledge that all media remediate the real. Just as there is no getting rid of mediation, there is no getting rid of the real. Remediation [is] reform. The goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media. Furthermore, because all mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process of reforming reality as well.”

Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media (Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press 2001), 45 and 55/56:

Sehende Maschinen

“How do we see the world with machines? What happens if we think about photography in terms of imaging systems instead of images? How can we think about images made by machines for other machines? What are the implications of a world in which photography is both ubiquitous and, curiously, largely invisible?”

“Seeing machines is an expansive definition of photography. It is intended to encompass the myriad ways that not only humans use technology to “see” the world, but the ways machines see the world for other machines. Seeing machines includes familiar photographic devices and categories like viewfinder cameras and photosensitive films and papers, but quickly moves far beyond that. It embraces everything from iPhones to airport security backscatter-imaging devices, from electro-optical reconnaissance satellites in low-earth orbit, to QR code readers at supermarket checkouts, from border checkpoint facial-recognition surveillance cameras to privatized networks of Automated License Plate Recognition systems, and from military wide-area-airborne-surveillance systems, to the roving cameras on board legions of Google’s Street View” cars. What’s more, the idea of seeing machines I’m sketching out here isn’t confined to the imaging devices and systems I’ve described in broad strokes. The definition extends to include the images (or data) produced by such imaging systems, the digital metadata associated with those images, as well as additional systems for storage, archiving, search and interpretation (either human or algorithmic). Finally, and crucially, seeing machines encompasses not only imaging systems, search, and storage capacities, it encompasses something a bit more abstract, namely the “styles” or “practices” of seeing that different imaging systems enable (i.e. the difference between what a view camera and an automated license-plate reading camera “want” to do and how they see the world differently).”

Trevor Paglen, “Is Photography Over?” and “Seeing Machines, in Is Photography Over?, Still Searching, 2014, fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26977 and fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26978

Selfie-Kommunismus

Selfies are a communist form of expression. The narcissism critique approaches the selfie as if it were analyzing a single photograph. It views the person in that photograph as the photograph’s subject. Selfies, though, should be understood as a common form, a form that, insofar as it is inseparable from the practice of sharing selfies, has a collective subject. The subject is the many participating in the common practice, the many imitating each other. The figure in the photo is incidental. […] Multiple images of the same form, the selfie form, stream across our screens, like the people we might pass walking along a sidewalk or in a mall. When we upload selfies, we are always vaguely aware that someone, when it is least opportune, may take an image out of its context and use it to our disadvantage. But we make them anyway as part of a larger social practice that says a selfie isn’t really of me; it’s not about me as the subject of a photograph. It’s my imitation of others and our imitation of each other. To consider the selfie as a singular image removed from the larger practice of sharing selfies is like approaching a magazine through one word in one issue. A selfie is a photo of the selfie form, the repetition of a repeated practice.

Jodi Dean, “ Images without Viewers: Selfie Communism”, in Images Without Viewers, Still Searching, 2016, fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26420

Das Recht zu schauen

“It is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable. The right to look confronts the police who say to us, “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” Only there is; we know it, and so do they. The opposite of the right to look is not censorship, then, but visuality, that authority to tell us to move on and that exclusive claim to be able to look. Visuality is an old word for an old project. It is not a trendy theory-word meaning the totality of all visual images and devices, but it is in fact an early nineteenth-century term, meaning the visualization of history. This practice must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images, and ideas. This ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the “normal” or everyday because it is always already contested. The autonomy claimed by the right to look is thus opposed by the authority of visuality. […]

The autonomy claimed by the right to look has thus been, and continues to be, opposed by the authority of visuality. Despite its name, this process is not composed simply of visual perceptions in the physical sense but is formed by a set of relations combining information, imagination, and insight into a rendition of physical and psychic space. I am not attributing agency to visuality but, as is now commonplace, treating it as a discursive practice for rendering and regulating the real that has material effects, like Michel Foucault’s panopticism, the gaze, or perspective. A given modality of visuality is composed of a series of operations that can be summarized under three headings: first, it classifies by naming, categorizing, and defining — a process Foucault defined as “the nomination of the visible.”11 This nomination was founded in plantation practice from the mapping of plantation space to the identification of cash-crop cultivation techniques and the precise division of labor required to sustain them. Next, visuality separates the groups so classified as a means of social organization. Such visuality segregated those it visualized to prevent them from cohering as political subjects, such as workers, the people, or the (decolonized) nation. Finally, it makes this separated classification seem right and hence aesthetic. As Frantz Fanon had it, such repeated experience generates an “aesthetic of respect for the status quo,”13 the aesthetics of the proper, of duty, of what is felt to be right and hence pleasing, ultimately even beautiful. Classifying, separating, and aestheticizing together form what I shall call a complex of visuality.”

Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right To Look”, Critical Inquiry, 37, 3 (Spring 2011), 473–496, here 474–476:

Schauen heisst Arbeiten

By some technological sleight of hand, machine-mediated perception is now inextricable from your psychological, economic, visceral and ideological dispensations. Spectatorship, as the fusion and devel-opment of the cultural, industrial, economic and psychological, quickly gained ahandhold on human fate and then became decisive. Now, visuality reigns and socialtheory needs to become film theory. At the moment, in principle, that, is, in accord with the principles of late capitalism, to look is to labor. The cinematicization of the visual, the fusion of the visual with a set of socio-technical institutions and apparatuses, gives rise to the advancedforms of networked expropriation characteristic of the present period. Capitalized machinic interfaces prey on visuality. Recently, corporations such as FreePC, whichduring the NASDAQ glory clays gave out ‘free’ computers in exchange for recipi-ents’ agreement to supply extensive personal information and to spend a certainamount of time online, strove to demonstrate in practice that looking at a screencan produce value. Almost a decade ago, I argued that the historical moment hadarrived which allowed us to grasp that looking is posited by capital as labor. If, inthe early 1990s, the idea was difficult for academics to fathom, corporations havebeen faster on the uptake. What I call ‘the attention theory of value’ finds in thenotion of ‘labor,’ elaborated in Marx’s labor theory of value, the prototype of thesource of all value production under capitalism today: value-producing human atten-tion. Attention, in all forms imaginable and yet to be imagined (from assembly-line work to spectatorship to internet-working and beyond), is that necessary cyberneticrelation to the socius for the production of all value for late capital.

Johnathan Beller, “Kino-I, Kino-World”, in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Routledge, 2002

Werkzeuge des Verschwindens

“[…] many people by now walk away from visual representation. Their instincts (and their intelligence) tell them that photographic or moving images are dangerous devices of capture: of time, affect, productive forces, and subjectivity. They can jail you or shame you forever; they can trap you in hardware monopolies and conversion conundrums, and, moreover, once these images are online they will never be deleted again. Ever been photographed naked? Congratulations—you’re immortal. This image will survive you and your offspring, prove more resilient than even the sturdiest of mummies, and is already traveling into deep space, waiting to greet the aliens. The old magic fear of cameras is thus reincarnated in the world of digital natives. But in this environment, cameras do not take away your soul (digital natives replaced this with iPhones) but drain away your life. They actively make you disappear, shrink, and render you naked, in desperate need of orthodontic surgery. In fact, it is a misunderstanding that cameras are tools of representation; they are at present tools of disappearance. The more people are represented the less is left of them in reality.”

Hito Steyerl: “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation” in e-flux journal no. 32, 02/2012

Wahrheit ist ein Trick des Lichts

“The mass image attempts a parallel therapy. At first, like cinema, it adds more and more images to the lone photograph in order to end its tragic alienation from the world it pictures and its isolation from other photographs. But at a certain point quantity becomes quality. Instead of trying to produce a more perfect image, it presents the total agglutination of every possible image in such a way as to supplant the flux that the image was alienated from in the first instance. This is how the mass image not only reconstructs the world in its own image but takes the place of reality. This could be understood as a disaster, as the sociologist of simulation Jean Baudrillard understood it. But it also produces the profounder truth that reality is never given, but is always to-be-constructed. We can learn from machines that photographs are not fragments of the real but appearances, and that therefore they act as bifurcations in the givenness of presence. What is constructed is not reality but illusion. In this sense the machine teaches us not that all imaging is illusion; but that reality itself is illusory. Truth is a trick of the light.”

Sean Cubitt, “What Do Databases Want?”, in Processing, Still Searching, 2 March 2017, fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/30067_what_do_databases_want

Universeller Voyeurismus

[…] We find ourselves in an era in which images are comprehended through the idea of excess, an era in which we speak of the consequences of mass production as asphyxiation rather tan emancipation, just as we reprise, in adapted form, the old dialectic between the apocalyptic and the integrated. The idea of the excess of images –an apparent “epidemic of images” – seems to cause hypervisibility and universal vouyerism on the one hand, and blidness or insensitivity on the other. It calls for a deeper and more critical treatment that addresses not only the specific conditions of the image but also the logic of management, dissemination and control […].

Joan Fontcuberta, “The post-photographic condition”, in The post-photographic condition, Kerber, 2015. p.11

Was wollen Bilder?

“Computers, as we know, are nothing but calculating machines. They are also […] mysterious new organisms, maddeningly complex life-forms that come complete with parasites, viruses, and a social network of their own. New media have made communication seem more transparent, immediate, and rational than ever before, at the same time that they have enmeshed us in labyrinths of new images, objects, tribal identities, and ritual practices. Marshall McLuhan understood this irony very clearly when he pointed out that “by continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse, or the executive of his clock.” So we must ask the question, what do pictures want from us? And stay for the answers, even though the question seems impossible to begin with.”

W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press, 2005. p.26

Zeitleiste

Siehe das vom Fotomuseum Winterthur entwickelte Projekt https://www.photographic-flux.ch/, eine „Zeitleiste, die einen Überblick über die Geschichte der fotografischen Techniken, technischen Erfindungen und aktuellen Phänomene der visuellen Kultur bietet – von der Heliografie bis zu computergenerierten Bildern, von der Camera obscura bis zum Selfie“.