Pub Date : 2021-07-02DOI: 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127841
Emmanuel Alloa
How to qualify the changing ontology of the image—that is the suggestive as well as provocative question we are invited to answer in this questionnaire. The question itself is formulated rather vaguely, and leaves space for at least two interpretations: Does it mean that the ontology of the image is undergoing a major change today (because of the mutation in its materialities, its codes, its modes of circulation, for instance)? Or does it mean that the ontology of the image—its imaginal or iconic being— could never be addressed other than in terms of inconstancy and change? Either interpretation is suggestive and provocative, as it either hints at a change within ontology or at an ontology of change. Both interpretations, however, presuppose that we can address images in ontological terms at all, and that visual studies should talk about images qua being. For sure, for centuries, a lasting onto-theological tradition made such an endeavour unthinkable: in Aristotelian metaphysics, images belong to a category of relational entities that have no substantial existence of their own, while in a Platonic setting, images are defined by their lack of being. While excessive in their appearance, they are deficient with respect to the being they depict.1 Against the backdrop of such a lack that expresses itself in the guise of falsehood (pseudos) or non-being (mè on), images can’t be grafted onto an ontology; or, inversely, they can’t offer secure grounds for any ontology to come. If the point of any ontology is to study what remains unchanged of a being throughout all its contingent alterations, both the idea of a change within the ontology of the image as well as the idea of an ontology of change tout court must resonate rather oddly. Either the contemporary image changes to a point that it becomes something radically diverse, setting up an altogether new way of being that has nothing in common with what was before. Or it forces, in its ever-changing modes, to change the very project of what we call ontology, beyond the substantiality of the unmodified. Undeniably, the current fixation of certain regions of the social
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Pub Date : 2021-07-02DOI: 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127856
I. Blom
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Pub Date : 2021-07-02DOI: 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127863
W. Ernst
LIBERATING THE IMAGE FROM ITS ANTHROPOCENTRIC DEFINITION “Traditionally we think of images as [...] delimited phenomena that in one way or the other appear to the human mind and apparatus of perception” (Questionnaire). The choice of words in the Questionnaire is indicative already. When optical physiology and cognitive image sensation—from the “analogue” camera obscura-like eye to the almost “digital” signal-computing brain— is observed closely,1 image processing within the human turns out as, indeed, a function of an “apparatus.” Sigmund Freud’s nonmetaphorical concept of the psychic “Apparat” in chapter VII of his Interpretation of Dreams2 explicitly compares the preliminary stages of imaging to the microscope, or to photography.3 The mechanistic approach reemerged in protocybernetic research into the electrical circuit simulation of neural image perception.4 The human “mind and apparatus of perception” (Questionnaire) literally became a nonhuman machinery in Rosenblatt’s computational Perceptron, liberating the “image” from its physiological anthropocentrism.5 Machine vision, so far, stayed profoundly different from human image cognition. But technical images as outputs from Artificial Neuronal Nets start to challenge, and to emulate, the human imaginative potential, once they are not only trained by human tagging, but (in a more complex way) by rivalling machines among themselves which are fed with big data derived from “social media.” Just like Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, in his 1766 treatise Laokoon, had almost identified the aesthetic properties of the visual arts as parallel perception (aisthesis, in the Aristotelean sense) of coexistent units in space, today, it is no coincidence that “deep” machine learning takes place in parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) that were originally developed for image processing in computers. Artificial Intelligence does not simply mimick human image perception (even if Van Gogh-like paintings HOW TECHNOLÓGOS “RESPONDS” TO WHAT USED TO BE CALLED “IMAGES.” A MEDIA-ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESPONSE TO THE “QUESTIONNAIRE ON THE CHANGING ONTOLOGY OF THE IMAGE”
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Pub Date : 2021-07-02DOI: 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127885
Marina Gržinić
How are racism, colonialism, classism, and exploitation re/ produced in images today? This will be my main question. What is the image’s “relation to the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial line that cuts global neoliberal capitalism from within and heavily conditions contemporary necropolitical capitalist production” and its financialized/digital images?1 My attempt here is to radicalize the status of images of the digital (financial) mode of production.2 Much like the novel in the 19th century—that as a cultural form allowed the spreading of colonialism despite the monstrous history of racial slavery’s violence, which gave rise to supremacist orders of modernity in the Americas and the imperial capitalist world—the digital image, albeit floats, sustains the race/class/ colonial /exploitative divide. This may sound as a pretty doubtful statement; given all is floating, digital, laisse-faire, borderless? One of the hypotheses I share is that every period of capitalism developed its proper form of extreme re/production. Capitalism is always extreme, and we have to redefine, reformulate what is it that this extreme entails. Technology provides a direct boost to capitalism.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-02DOI: 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127861
S. Cubitt, Celia Lury, S. McQuire, N. Papastergiadis, Daniel Palmer, J. Pfefferkorn, Emilie K. Sunde
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Pub Date : 2021-07-02DOI: 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127895
M. B. Rasmussen
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Pub Date : 2021-07-02DOI: 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127864
O. Goriunova
A cull of images is coming, an automated decimation, which will transform the ontology of the image once again. Google announced that from June 1, 2021, they will stop the free back up of compressed “high” quality photos. The significance of this development is hard to overestimate. At this point, any connection of smartphone photographs to the original medium of photography and associated practices will finally be fully severed. In the recent decade, substantial discussions about networked images accounted for some of the core principles of image operations today1:
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Pub Date : 2021-07-02DOI: 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127893
J. Parikka
A history of images about images is as mesmerising in its own right as images themselves are. This is not merely a history of the copy—the attempt to reproduce an image through an image— but also of the various guides and diagrams that tell a story of production of images. This is also the entry point for my argument about the changing ontology of the image. This argument about ontology concerns then not merely what an image is in its essence, but how images function as as operative ontologies1: described, drawn, pictured, instructed, guided, and diagrammed into existence. Such diagrams are an educational arm of knowledge about images, but obviously they are also images already in themselves. Diagrams occupy a central role as a modern form of knowledge about images. Diagrams that describe the operations and insights of image geometry are a special case in point, where the linear perspective in (and since) the Renaissance period has given rise to a long line of commentary, in the arthistorical way of tracking the changing ontologies of the image. How to calculate image surfaces, lines, and ratios becomes instrumentalised into a productive machinery and subsequently into an analytical machinery, as is the case in the various techniques of reading the geometric data packed into an image. From Johan Heinrich Lambert’s Die freye Perspective, oder Anweisung Jeden Perspektivischen Aufriß Von Freyen Stücken Und Ohne Grundriß Zu Verfertigen (1759) to Colonel Aimé Laussedat’s works on photogrammetry (or “metrophotography”) toward the latter part of the 19th century, the work of descriptive geometry becomes crucial to the diagram of the technical image and image as data.2 They are manuals of “this is how that operates” and take on a second order quality themselves: a cultural technique that recursively images an image. One can also observe a similarity with the function of the metapicture, as per WJT Mitchell’s term that refers to such images that “might be capable of reflection on themselves, capable of providing a second-order discourse that tells us—or at least shows us—something about pictures.”3 In terms of the contemporary image, the shift from questions on the ontology of digital images (do they capture reality? Do THE DIAGRAMS OF AI (IMAGE)
关于图像的图像历史本身就像图像本身一样令人着迷。这不仅仅是一部复制的历史——试图通过图像来复制图像——也是讲述图像生产故事的各种指南和图表的历史。这也是我关于图像本体变化的论点的切入点。关于本体论的争论不仅涉及图像的本质是什么，还涉及图像如何作为可操作的本体论起作用:描述、绘制、描绘、指导、引导和图解。这样的图表是关于图像知识的教育工具，但显然它们本身也是图像。图表作为一种关于图像的现代知识形式占据着中心地位。描述图像几何的操作和见解的图表是一个特殊的例子，在文艺复兴时期(以及自文艺复兴以来)的线性视角引发了一长串的评论，以艺术史的方式跟踪图像本体的变化。如何计算图像的表面、线条和比率成为生产机器的工具，随后成为分析机器，就像读取图像中包装的几何数据的各种技术一样。从约翰·海因里希·兰伯特(Johan Heinrich Lambert)的《自由透视》(Die freye Perspective)、《自由透视》(oder Anweisung Jeden Perspektivischen Aufriß Von Freyen stcken Und Ohne Grundriß Zu Verfertigen)(1759)到19世纪后半叶的艾姆斯·劳塞特上校的摄影测量学(或“都市摄影”)作品，描述几何的工作对技术图像的图解和图像作为数据变得至关重要它们是“这是如何操作的”的手册，它们本身具有第二级质量:一种递归地描绘图像的文化技术。我们也可以观察到与元图像功能的相似之处，正如WJT Mitchell所说的那样，指的是这样的图像，“可能能够反思自己，能够提供二阶话语，告诉我们——或者至少向我们展示——关于图像的一些东西。就当代图像而言，从对数字图像本体的质疑(它们是否捕捉到了现实?)做人工智能的图表(图片)
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Pub Date : 2021-07-02DOI: 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127862
A. Downey
Images made by machines for machines are void of an aesthetic context. They are part of a machine-based operative logic and do not, in the words of Harun Farocki, “portray a process but are themselves part of a process.”1 Defined by the operation in question rather than their referential logic, and following Farocki’s formulation, such images are commonly referred to as “operational images.” Structurally, they are not propagandistic (they do not try to convince), nor are they instructive (they are not interested in directing our attention). They are not, moreover, content-based, inasmuch as they exist as abstract binary code rather than pictograms. Void of anthropological or aesthetic intention, the practical process-based functionality of “operational images” effectively anticipates the obsolescence of “perception” as a human-defined activity. Although “operational images” would seem to be largely understood in negative terms (based as they are on insular and closed procedures), they have a purposiveness that is revealed in their real world impact—the way they are used, for example, in surveillance technologies and in the establishment of autonomous models of warfare. This recursive and yet purposive functioning of “operational images” foreshadows the opaque architecture of “black box” technologies and the artificial intelligence (AI) systems that underwrite contemporary structures of data gathering and aerialbound forms of warfare. Needless to say, the technologies that commandeer and exploit airspace are demonstrably detrimental to those who are subject to their autonomous apparatuses, which raises a crucial question: how do we conceptualize the threat associated with both the opacity of “black box” assemblies and the all-too-real impact of air-bound technologies that, to a large extent, remain beyond the purview and control of the vast majority of the world’s population? THE ALGORITHMIC APPARATUS OF NEO-COLONIALISM: OR, CAN WE HOLD “OPERATIONAL IMAGES” TO ACCOUNT?
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