Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Introduction
form might thus appear counterintuitive. After all, there are few
things more apparently obvious than the visual appearances and the
representational functions we attribute to photographs.
This is, in part, due to fact that the photographic image in its
current cultural form cannot be fully accounted for from any position
that begins by taking for granted what an image is. Accordingly, there
is no single theory of the image that emerges from On the Verge of
Photography; neither does it promote any particular methodological
approach. Rather, it sets out to provoke questions about the
contem-porary image and to explore different ways of responding
to these questions. On the Verge of Photography entertains the
idea that the networked digital image has moved us in important
respects beyond visual representation. But what might this mean?
In their contributions to this anthology, some authors respond to
these questions and problems by embracing the idea that there is or
should be a beyond to representation. Others argue that, despite its
transformed terrain, representation remains basic to the production,
dissemination and consumption of images and, indeed, to human life.
Some pursue critical examinations of novel photographic forms and
practices. Others take the contemporary condition of networks as the
object of their theoretical attention. These individual analyses and
the dialogue that emerges between them will, we hope, serve both to
widen and to focus theoretical and critical attention on the recent fate
of photography and its relationship to the networked digital image.
This plurality of methodological approaches marks the moment
when photography is able to extract itself from dealing only with
questions of truth, the archive and the index in order to become
interested in its transformed conditions of production, its own states
of becoming. One of the consequences of the much lamented loss
of ontological connection with the real is that the digital-born image
can now be seen for what it is and not only for what it represents.
Consider, for instance, that the digital image embodies within it
notions of instantaneity and simultaneity which are no less integral to
it than the chronology of before and after is to the representational
image. In todays visual regime an image can be uploaded to
someones Facebook stream in the morning, liked and tagged at
various points of the network and by the evening re-emerge as part of
diverse and varied series, search results and image-sets that have no
linear connection with the event of the original upload: it is trending
on twitter, it is siphoned into image mashups, remixed into palimpsets
and aggregated with other bits of information to form new images,
texts and sounds, all of the time drawing from an infinite stream
of computer data. Just as the analogue images relationship to time
could be said to embody the linear chronology of a living organism,
instantaneity and simultaneity are not only the technical qualities
of the digital image, they are also expressions of the mental and
spiritual reality of anyone who is hooked to the network through it.
Once uploaded online, an image can appear anywhere there is a
networked device and it can do so simultaneously across the entire
globe. The digital networked image, it could be said, moves along
two rather than one temporal axes. It moves along the axis of
chronological time in which the image maintains connection with an
event in the past, and it also moves along another axis on which the
instantaneity of its dissemination takes precedence. Here an image is
not an archive of past events but a force that shapes the present. For
instance, in news reporting, photography can no longer be reduced
to the documentation of political events as it has become a principal
actor in the unfolding of political situations. In this globalised context,
there are more images produced and disseminated than ever before,
but today we are less sure than ever of what we mean when we talk
about an image and what an image is capable of doing.
There is much more going on with this digital-born image than
meets the eye. If we only talk about the event-image in terms of
visual appearances, we risk missing the infinitesimal complexity of
the underpinning algorithms which account for the fractal-like
ability of the digital image to be repeated, mutated through repetition
and spread through various points of the network, all the time
articulating its internal consistency on the one hand and the
mutability and differentiation of each instance on the other. Within
the digital-born image the logic of representation is augmented by the
logic of self-duplication and mutation. It is as if the photograph is not
the mirror of the world any more, but is itself placed between two
mirrors triggering an endless circulation of reflections. And while the
logic of representation is based on the guiding principle of truth as
correspondence, the logic of mise-en-abyme suggests an economy of
repetition that does not depend on correspondence for its agency. This
double articulation of the digital image as a representational image
and as a network event, suggests that the digital-born image is a good
entry point into understanding the mysteries of the online organism.
Perhaps, then, photography is an orifice of the network. But as
long as it is considered from an ocularcentric perspective we stand to
miss crucial factors that shape its meanings and use. If we cannot
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Introduction
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Introduction
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Notes
1.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton
(London & New York: Continuum, 2004), 331.
2.
Vilm Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy
Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) 66.
3.
Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language, trans. Rupert
Swyer, in L. Searle and H. Adams, (eds), Critical Theory Since 1965
(Gainesville: Florida State University Press, 1986), 150.
4.
Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus, in Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl et al,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 9.
5.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 341, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in
German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams,
trans. Josefine Nauckhoff & Adrian Del Carlo, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 250.
6.
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche; The Eternal Recurrence of the Same,
trans. David Farrell Krell,(San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 41. See also,
Being and Time. trans. Edward Robinson and John Macquarrie (Malden,
ma; Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 334 (365).
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