You are Here or What to do with all these Pictures

How does the camera, the instrument I am typing into, create a world for us to be in. Not a world view, as in a world of contested representations, but a peculiar, perceptual world ordered by unique and open instructions, algorithms that belie themselves and offer a sense at times, other than what was intended, at least for us, the readers of such arrays of pictures. If we think of image search as a camera, giving us pictures, pictures displayed as a rational ordering, image as information, is there something we might want to observe in those pictures that stray from order, that at first we dismiss and consider inexact. Is there something if not odd and strange presented as, and in the guise of information. Is there something here that is a wedding and becoming of man and machine that is contestable, playful, mysterious, complicated and poetic. Can we consider Search as photographer, that transpersonal space, the inhuman-becoming of the human, the network and its algorithms as image makers AND image consumers: an image metabolism.

When pictures, writing, sound and movement came together as motion pictures and adding the immersion of experiential space we become wrapped inside a world that replaces the world. Cities like Songdo and Eko Atlantic, new nervous systems of data my be harbingers an earth, as McLuhan said, increasingly becoming an artwork, programmed and designed, dialed in, dialed up and dialed down, all the while not quite being right. 

We do this by making pictures. Picture taking like writing allowed us to command the world by making a double of it. You can read this in the writings of Baudrillard. 

The photograph in becoming an image, becoming digital has the photograph disappear and become an image photograph. That's the starting point of my book, to see photography. To picture it, to make an image of photography, to photograph it.

I wanted to see how photography might locate me.

And dislocate me. 

The strange and beautiful thing about photography is that it gave us this sense of seeing the world. It was this instrument that pictured the phenomena of the world, a world we recognized as ours. We took its appearance for the world.

Not that the Lascaux caves are not an image of the world that those that lived 17,000 years ago thought was other than the world they were seeing and perceiving. Perhaps we can think of our network as the Lascaux caves. Not in some distant future looking back at it. But in looking at it today. Maybe the awe, the mystery and bewilderment, the strangeness and magnificence we have for these caves and their many drawings we could look on upon our network with that sense now. Of course we are doing quite the opposite with big data, and our data analytics, we want this enormous instrument to be domesticated, we want it tamed and we want to master it and with it and computation we want to master our world. 

Lately I've been thinking about the network as this vast space and there's these spaces and images there I just don't know how to read. So I wonder how to see them. I've come to let go of trying to understand them and to think of them as kind of hieroglyphs in the sense of a  language I can not read but that might suggest things to me other than there intent.

 

There is some sense here, something ordered, repetitive, a pattern, that much i can see.  But what do they tell me, what can I have them tell me. 

In these next pictures there is a human figure seeing, The figure becomes us and we can relate to the surrounding images in their relation to this figure.

These following pictures they are also telling me something. I can read them.

But what of these pictures. What are they?

  

Is there something in them akin to this image. Are they are guides to something?

Below is a image from Ah Pook is Here which explores different juxtapositions of images and words, a collaboration between William Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill, a book-length meditation on time, power, control, and corruption that evoked the Mayan codices and specifically, the Mayan god of death, Ah Pook. 

As we know the Maya developed a highly complex system of writing, using pictographs and phonetic or syllabic elements. Their writing was highly sophisticated and most likely only members of the higher classes were able to read their symbols.

This idea of images that I can not read, images rich in poetic information producing a productive mis-reading intrigues me. Even in this most technical instrumentation of visual information and rationality and computer science the web and the network is full of poetry if we slightly turn our sight just this way.

I imagine this wall of projection as all of us, everywhere looking into the network, looking for something, something that we know is there, but we're too distracted in our clicking- about to see it. 

Consider this quote by the Czech composer Leoš Janácek:

«When anyone speaks to me, I listen more to the tonal modulations in his voice than to what he is actually saying. From this, I know at once what he is like, what he feels, whether he is lying, whether he is agitated or whether he is merely making conventional conversation. I can even feel, or rather hear, any hidden sorrow. Life is sound, the tonal modulations of the human speech ... I have a vast collection of notebooks filled with [the “melodic curves of speech”]—you see, they are my window through which I look into the soul.”

I've been thinking about google image search-results and search as a camera creating pictures. And with that the narrative that confers authenticity to photographs, that makes them legible instead of being hieroglyphs.  But before we finish I want to invite you to see them in the way that the composer Janacek hears people speaking. I want you to listen to them with your eyes as way to time travel. 

But before we ask what is the algorithm that brings them together, let's look at the ordering of pictures in the results, hoe they are frame, how they are pictures. The ordering of information is in itself a sense. I like the Malevich results, black on black on black in black. it doubles for me the absolutely reductive sense of the black paintings themselves. 

The Malevich query returns to us a quite straightforward result.

I type in 'Malevich', or' black paintings', and by search indexing the text surrounding any image a match will be made with the given query. If the query matches, the corresponding linked image is retrieved. Once a set of images appear, we can select one and begin to search and find related images. The image you've selected is used to find similar images.

An image algorithm works by looking or detecting in images their deformations, their scale, rotation, illumination, visual similarity, color value and in Google's case by ranking. 

In addition to linking text surrounding an image to that image we can link all visually similar images to that image with the same text.

There is no perfect algorithm, so the return depends mainly on the application, and what kind of trade-offs the application can tolerate. And that' where things can get interesting.

The best an algorithm can do is amalgamate. It takes discrete things, assumes certain relationships between them, then streams them together to look for 'like' things. But you, a person, is a continuous state of becoming. Your taste, your metabolism, is not made of discrete things or moments. It is a becoming. An algorithm is premised on arithmetic: this + this + that. You are a calculus, a trajectory, a duration made up of many infinitesimal changes.

It's these abrupt changes and the gaps between them that make search results at times most interesting. Certain search queries take on narratives of their own, narratives that were not made or curated from authors, image by image, but by this logic of the applied algorithms.

The results of this logic can lead readers to sensing a kind of surrealism or plain nonsense or as kinds of cut ups, gives us things poignant, ironic, sad, beautiful and much much more than what was bargained for in the query. Like an oracle, or augury or the i ching, procedural rules have a kind of indifference. In the case of these algorithms by not seeing the pictures, not understanding there semantic and cultural sense, things come together that ordinarily would not.  And this can be quite perplexing, confounding, even annoying but can also be viewed as quite liberating and a new kind of poetics. 

Search is a camera assembling for us very new composite pictures. Permutations of another order, a tropology of assemblages, which for me I see now now akin to my earlier series Permutations. 

Here, in this set of images, is a narrative, poetry, presented free of the words that tell you what you have looked for. These pictures only need the attribution of a subject, a position, to be narrated to come alive. But without attribution we must name them and narrate them ourselves, even quietly, without words but in seeing them.  What I find fascinating is that this surrealism, this aggregate I am pretty certain we look past on our way to find what we want. But most likely there is something here, as it is, that's perfect. Perfect, in the sense, that it is, as such.




Now the same images with the title line. Locating these images.



Here another set.



In his book, Future of the Image, Jacques Ranciere talks about the Aesthetic Regime, a regime of image operations, one of which includes the decoupling of the image from narrative. It was the regime of Representation when narrative lead the image, inducing it -  but in the aesthetic regime images just are.

Instead of looking for the picture that we want and looking past or discounting the set of pictures we receive perhaps we're missing something, something very interesting.  Perhaps the inexactness of these results has something to tell us.

Each is a curation, a miniature archive, a kind of virtual Joseph Cornell box of 8 images, a cabinet of curiosity.

Let's not be mistaken that the form of its presentation, it's very format gives it a sense, manages the dream.  Most immediately we see each image equivalent in size, often color and just something.

Of course that something one of hundreds of algorithm, the instructions launched by your search.

I like this as a photograph. A visual algorithm.








Now the image collection below is curated by a person and the one's above an algorithm.





If you look at the white box on the first image on the left, it's these shapes and values that are bringing up the image on the right.



Perhaps while search, and links take us into this vast labyrinth the order that is not that there is the very thing we should pay attention to.

Not only are our algorithms telling us new stories. So do our visual tools.



It's all of this that I consider further the idea of image photograph. A photography that includes a number of complex readings, re-visualisations, machine seeing, algorithms, appropriations, re-photogaphy, software formats, original photography, search, large data sets  and so on.

We might say that each text, each search places an image in a narrative, in a micro history.  But how does history gets imaged and written.

So why play with pictures?

I want to find that ground or maybe the better metaphor is flight between the temporality of technologies as material orderings of movement and the temporal flows of my subjective experience. Flows that seem more and more to be ordered by me entering myself into this machine, but through I want to write a way out.