clicking conception

clicking conception.

[ or ]

digital rebirth of the artist.

© jeremy rose 2007

 

The Camera Inside.

I am told that the line between human and tool is blurring.[i] Similarly troubling, I am then informed that my camera is an extension of my body, rather than a device that I use to create art.[ii] This is troubling on more than the simple level that it is patently incorrect; insofar as this view is propagated by respected theorists, such as Norbert Wiener and Celia Lury, a potential shift in the cultural perception of use-oriented objects is perched precariously on a fence that would but a short time ago, even during the lifetime of Wiener himself, have seemed unthinkable to climb.

The cellular autonomy of the individual human has stood as foundation on which has been built concepts of freedom, rights, and motivation, the basic principles of western individualism.[iii] What follows in this text is, firstly, a brief explanation of why this theory of human-tool indivisibility has acquired a newfound strength from the digital camera revolution and, secondly, the glaring error in this theoretical approach.

From Alhazen’s eleventh-century camera-obscura, through the development of the now-arcane technology known as film development, the camera has had a relatively pronounced impact on society. Physically manifested mimesis has, in other words, always been a popular concept. Snapshots of family vacations and wedding portraits evolved into an assumption rather than a functional choice. There was always one distinct issue separating the artist from the device, however. The location of creation for the art object has always been contentious during the era of film. It is impossible to decide whether the moment of creation takes place at the point of button-depression, of composition, of development, or of printing. What is fundamentally significant about this question, it must be noted, is that creation is the result of a binary process. An object has either a created state or it does not; there are no half-measures in this regard. What this means, in short, is that there can be no joint creation process, whereby the image is partially created at the time of photographing and also partially created at the time of developing and, yet again, partially created at the time of printing (which becomes even more complicated due to the fact that printing may occur multiple times from the same negative original and the outcome may be different during each process). The artist and theorist must choose one point for creation. And this, of course, is where the procedure becomes much more complex and contentious.[iv]

This question is no longer valid. The moment of creation is now and this leads to a breaking down of the boundary between artist and digital paintbrush.[v] Speaking about creation here is only partially correct, as a semantic device; what truly is meant by creation is mimesis[vi], or the instantiation of a new object through the procedure of visual duplication. The camera is the ultimate tool for mimesis, since what takes other artists quantifiable expanses of time to produce, the photographer creates instantly. The demonstrative property of creation transmits exactly the image from world, through lens, into storage, as instantiated mimesis.

The digital camera allows for the instantaneous creation of art – push the button and the artwork appears, fait accompli, in front of your eyes. This creates a freedom from other humans, mechanical processes, and the potential audience, allowing the procedure to be repeated, ad infinitum, to the joy of the artist and until she is satisfied. What this accomplishes is the placement of the creative process wholly in the hands of the artist. She needs not interact to create and this is where the distinction problem arises.

It is important to understand the difference between a potential audience and an artist, since these are not simply interchangeable words and are, rather, opposites. The artist is the creative force, she who chooses to take the photograph, in this case. To the extent possible, the artist is an island, an entity free of outside interference. She may be affected by her past, but this simply defines her mind and it is her mind, one step removed from this outside world, which is the single influencing force in her artistic creation. This is compared with the potential audience, often since this is a theoretical construction of the mind, and audience is frequently mislabeled as a placeholder for artist. While this is an understandable miscomprehension, it is inherently false. The primary difference between artist and potential audience is necessity of existence. For the art object to exist, in this case, there must be a subject, a camera, and a photographer. The potential audience need not exist and, through this simple difference, cannot be substituted for the artist. In addition, the audience, in its potential existence, does not simply inhabit and is not merely a creation of, the artist’s mind. She does not instantiate this concept from nothingness; she has experienced an audience reaction numerous times before, from both sides of the isle, one would expect, and bases her potential audience on this. It is not, therefore, a creation of her mind and, by transition, an extension of her creative necessity.

The digital camera is truly ubiquitous. Market saturation is as close as is necessary and it is now possible to say that everyone has a digital camera.[vii] There is, then, a fine line between the definition of human and the physical division of the camera and the body. It is in three ways that this argument progresses – the camera extends the capabilities of the human body; it is approximately as common as many other human physical traits; it allows the user to feel complete as a person whereas, without such a device, this would not be possible.[viii]

The camera compliments the eye and improves[ix] the memory. Its lens holds the potential to see what the human cannot and its art object is possibly eternal in its existence, compared to an eye that is biologically sensitive and a memory that is fleeting at best. In the way that a cane improves the functionality of a damaged leg or an aeroplane improves the vertical resiliency of a falling human, it must be accepted that the camera extends the range of capacity of the human body.

The next piece of the argument is blatantly obvious. The availability of digital photographic equipment is approximately at the same level of ubiquity as the possession of two functional legs or ten fingers. I put it in those words to compare against the notion of digital photography being as ubiquitous as the film camera. This is not the case. The digital camera is as prevalent in western society as existence itself; each person has access to digital image creation equipment, within a reasonable margin of error, approximately equal to the population’s relative size that does not possess said two legs or ten fingers. This point needs not be belabored but it is an important building block in the argument and cannot be ignored. Digital photography, as a universally-accessible process, necessitating no artistic talent for the most basic creation of the art object, this saturation point is an absolute necessity. This point having been reached eliminates the potential for argument against, on the grounds of inaccessibility.

The final piece of the puzzle is human completeness. This concept is a difficult needle to thread, admittedly. What can be said about it, though, is that the human is a complex entity, from the emotional point of view. The camera gives her a purpose[x], a raison d’être[xi], a necessity for action and that action provides a sense of completion that cannot be achieved without purposeful doing. Another way of looking at the argument is that the human is an entity that requires becoming to be fulfilled, a constant change, and that without an action that creates an object of some sort, no change can be experienced. It is important to note that there is only one human in this discussion – the artist-photographer. She, the artist who is performing the action of creating the art object, is the entity that is seeking emotional completion through the instantiation of art. In creating, she is inherently changing her environment and this change is easily likened to the becoming that leads to emotional stability. The strong part of this argument, however, is that humans are complete, unto themselves, and if this requires an external object, that this object is part of the whole being. Completeness is not a subject for debate; it is a physical reality. A human is a biological entity, comprised only of cells, and its completion is inherent in the combination of these cells.

It is here where the argument begins to fall off of the rails.

Firstly, a human is a complete entity, by definition, as is any physical object. The argument for this is fairly straight-forward and is as follows. An object is a collection of matter, whereby the instantiation of a single example of this collection creates, simply by its instantiation, the existence of one thereof. The one in this procedure implies completeness and this, by sheer common sense, must be the case. Were an object incomplete, the instantiation of the preceding collection would not result in the creation of this object, rather it would result in the creation of a different object, also complete, yet different from the first object. All object, then, must be complete. There is no partial instantiation of any object.[xii]

There is no mental state required for completion of a human any more than there is a mental state required for the completion of a stone or a blade of grass. This is directly related to the issue of impossibility of instantiating an incomplete object. For a human to require a mental state, this would mean that an incomplete human is a theoretical (even physical) possibility when, by definition of object instantiation, it is not. A mind is a theoretical object superimposed on a physical entity. Only the physical entity is necessary for the status as a human object. Chipping a piece off of the stone results in two complete stones, rather than one incomplete one and a mown blade of grass is no less a complete piece of grass than it was in the pre-mowing state. A human, then, is a human, is a human, is a human. If human is a potential object for creation, the collection that creates human must either exist or not.

A camera, of course, is a physically discrete object and has no direct interaction with the internal systems of the human body, even the mental system. Interpretation must occur between the mental processes, the physical countereffects, and the camera’s responses. This is the interaction of two discrete entities. The completion of the human and the undeniable object nature of a camera show that these two entities cannot be combined into one. This argument, then, is not only spurious but inconsequential and an unresolvable paradox. The continuation of this point becomes even more unthinkable due to the biological-mechanical divide. It is argued that tools become part of a human in the way that upgrades become part of a whole, discrete computer. This argument neglects to take into account the nature of the human object, insofar as it is a biological object, and the nature of the tool, insofar as it is a mechanical object. The inclusion of mechanical parts in a biological object changes the nature of the biological object, creating a robot with biological components, rather than a human, which is a complete biological collection, instantiated into a single object.

The other two components of the argument, while they sound perfectly sound, are much less complex to refute. They are correct, insofar as they are factual. The camera extends the human body and is incredibly common. Its commonality, however, does not lend to its inclusion in the body, itself. A toothbrush, as was aforementioned, is common but it is not a human extension, especially in its use. Use does not imply inclusion, manipulation of the original object to include mechanical entities inside its boundaries; it simply implies what it states – a physical use of an object to accomplish a potential goal. To go beyond this, a dog is common, likely almost as common as a digital camera but I invite any arguments to the positive that a dog is simply a part of the human body of her owner. In this same vein, the extension of the human can be related to the pencil, insofar as the pencil prolongs the movement of the arm into a more tangible form, on paper, for example. A dog extends the human’s capacity for defense, for speed, and for volume, among other things. The strongest defense against this argument, however, is the extending capacity of another human. Another human’s existence in the life of the first does not, to any degree, constitute an extension of the physical form of the first. Again, I invite any argument to the positive, since its impossible nature is implicit in its definition. The human must remain separate from other humans or she is, in herself, not a human – the combination of more than one human would negate the existence of any second human, by combining, necessarily, all humans into one form.

The argument that results from this line of thought is that of prosthesis. This term alone defines itself as being on the non-inclusion side of this debate. From the Greek prostithenai, in English, addition, that is exactly what the issue entails. The addition of one complete (although, as has already been shown, incomplete is not an option here) object to another, extant, also complete, object. To argue that a toothbrush is a prosthetic entity is a perfectly reasonable, yet utterly progress-free debate. While it may be true that the addition of any tool to a human is potentially viewed from the perspective of prosthesis, this does not in any way allow for the assumption that the tool is included in the object that is the human.

The digital camera, then, is ubiquitous. It is an extension of the human capacity for many things, and it makes her feel complete. We shall, as a collective society, rejoice at its creation and its adoption. It is not, however, a part of her, a part of me, or a part of you. In our search for alteration of the body, the camera remains a discrete object. Its pose is the same as it always was – struck from the body.

 

Reference Materials and Further Reading.

This list is over and above those works that are discussed in the footnotes throughout the text. As this text is simply the framework for a larger study and as it is mostly comprised of an argument on which very little has been specifically written, it is difficult to reference specific works in the text without muddying the waters of argumentation with irrelevant, pre-digital-photography writings. This work, however, provides a significant backdrop to the text and it would be remiss to neglect its importance to the embryonic development of the work. This list is of texts and articles that influence the discussion in some way, either through a theory of representation and artist or of the arcane photographic method that preceded the one discussed here.

Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire – Note sur la photographie, Paris: Galimard, 1980.

Batchen, Geoffrey. “Photogenics/Fotogenik” in Camera Austria, no. 62/63, 1998.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Berlin: Schocken, 1969.

Edwards, Steve. “Snapshooters of History: Passages on the Postmodern Argument” in Ten.8 No. 32, 1989.

Ewing, William. “Movers and Fakers” in Guardian Weekend, 13 Aug 2005.

Kember, Sarah. “‘The Shadow of the Object’: Photography and Realism” in Textual Practice 10, 1996.

Lister, Martin. The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Oxford: Routledge, 1995.

Manovich, Lev. “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography” in Photography After Photography (exhibition catalog), 1995.

Slater, Don. “Domestic Photography and Digital Culture” in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 1995.

Solomon-Godeau, Abagail. “Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics” in Photography at the Dock – Essays on Photographic History , Illustrations, and Practices, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Sonntag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave” in On Photography, New York: Picador, 1977.

Sonntag, Susan. “The Image-World” in On Photography, New York: Picador, 1977.

Szarkowski, John. The Photographer’s Eye, New York: The Museum of Modern Art Press, 2007.

Tagg, John. “A Democracy of the Image: Photographic Portraiture and Commodity Production” in The Burden of Representation – Essays on Photographies and Histories, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Tagg, John. “The Currency of the Photograph: New Deal Reformism and Documentary Rhetoric” in The Burden of Representation – Essays on Photographies and Histories, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Weston, Edward. “Seeing Photographically” in The Complete Photographer, Vol. 9, No. 49, 1943.

 

[i] See [Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, New York: Da Capo Press, 1988.] for historical background on this statement. Also see [Rheingold, Howard. Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.] for a discussion of this blurring line, as referenced here.

[ii] This argument is taken up in detail in [Lury, Celia. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity, London: Routledge, 1998.] and a similar line of reasoning can be found in [Kember, Sarah. Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998.], where the discussion is used to redefine cyborg as mixed-media entity, artistic creative force, including a human but not restricted to it.

[iii] This is not biological cellular impenetrability. Not having any claim to expertise in the area of microbiology, I wish to avoid this topic to the extent possible, yet it must be briefly addressed in this note. The cell is, physically speaking, a fluid, interactive object, whose outer shell functions as protective layer and allows transmission from both sides to pass. This is not the autonomy of which we speak, here. Cellular, in the popular culture sense of the word, is a synonym for the arcane version of the word atomic. It speaks to the distinct, discrete nature of the object, whereby it can be easily separated from other proximate objects and is in no way physically mingled with such objects.

[iv] From the personal perspective, I would assert that this question should be no more contentious in the film era than it is in the digital and that the moment of creation is simply the point of photography rather than the points of developing or printing. The object is created, regardless of whether it may be instantly viewed, at that point. To say that this object does not exist would be similar to asserting that a video does not exist in a room where there is no television set on which to display it, simply due to the fact that there is no easy access to the content. This is not, however, a fundamental concept to the argument here and shall not be further pursued.

[v] There is a functional difference between memory and film, as the terms are used in the photographic world. While this is an important distinction, for the purposes of the main text, it shall be assumed that you are familiar with these concepts. What follows in this note is a brief discussion of these differences. To take a photograph using a film camera, the procedure begins long before the act of button-depression. Film is acquired, loaded through a time-consuming and delicate procedure, and the canister door is firmly sealed to ensure that light does not contaminate the mimesis. The photograph can now be taken but not seen, even by the artist. The image is created, in negative form, locked on a sheet of plastic waiting for the assistance of a human for its escape. This creates a vast temporal distance between the act of initial creation and the subsequent discovery of the art object. In contrast, a digital camera’s memory is infinitely reusable. While simple film-based units are referred to as point-and-shoot cameras, it was not until the digital was introduced that this nomenclature was truly made possible. A digital device allows for true instantaneous art creation. The artist points the camera at an object, depresses the requisite button, and a representation manifests itself on a convenient screen for post-creative commentary and enjoyment. On the development side, it is possible for the film camera’s operator to perform the messy, time-consuming task of transmission of negative image to paper but, due to its relative unpopularity, it can be assumed that developing typically took place in a laboratory setting, without the control of the artist. This procedure is vastly separated from the initial creation of the image, both from a temporal perspective and from the viewpoint of human interactivity. With the use of a digital device, the image exists from the moment of storage to the memory and development is both unnecessary and impossible. Quantity is the other point for comparison and its impact cannot be swept under the metaphysical carpet. A typical consumer camera operator from the film generation will limit herself to the restraints of no more than several canisters of unexposed film. With two canisters netting a total of 48 pictures and necessitating a time-consuming and potentially destructive procedure of daylight-loading of the second canister, this would likely be a theoretical maximum for a typical amateur user. In contrast, a quick trip to a national chain electronics store flyer reveals specials on 2gb and 4gb digital camera storage chips. Holding a minimum of, respectively, 500 and 1000 photographs, per chip, the order of magnitude of the increase in potential storage is astonishing. It is significant to understand, before moving on to more theoretical discussion, that the digital image is produced at the time of button depression and the transfer from the memory to a computer or printer is simply a duplication of a work of art, which is already extant. This is much like the photocopying procedure for a document; it is not a recreation of the art, simply a duplication thereof.

[vi] Mimesis is frequently used in contrast against diegesis, or the descriptive procedure whereby instantiation of a new object may occur. The most concise way of processing these two concepts is to think of them, respectively, as showing and telling. Mimesis is a demonstrative process, during which the artist creates a new object to show her thoughts to the audience. Diegesis is the opposite, the process during which the artist describes an idea, rather than showing it, communicating the same series of thoughts to her audience.

[vii] This is a generic statement. Like all generalizations, there are exceptions to the rule. The point of the statement, however, is to demonstrate that the digital camera is an everyday object, like a toothbrush or a pencil. While there may be the very occasional person who does not possess any of these three objects, such an entity is too rare for the generalization to be false.

[viii] This third argument is the same as that, which is used for prosthetic limbs, insofar as some people consider them not to be external to the body but to be extensions of the human form. It is not necessary, nor wise, to accept this view as true, to continue reading this text. The spurious nature of this line of reasoning, however, is not within the purview of this discussion, as prosthetic limbs and cameras are decidedly different in their relationship to the body, on many fronts. An extrapolation may be made but it is certainly not assumed.

[ix] At least, stimulates, if improves cannot be accepted. I would assert that any added memory stimulation is an improvement but this is not a fundamental point and shall not further be defended or discussed.

[x] The use of the word purpose instantiates two distinct discussions. The first is the discussion of the philosophical concept of telos (often translated as purpose, hence its inclusion); the second is a discussion of the emotionality of this telos. Firstly, there is no in-built complexity to the concept of telos. It is simply an arcane term to discuss the case in which actions are purposive, rather than purposeless. This is closely linked to the concept of good, in the sense of order, rather than in opposition with evil. The photographer’s actions, in this case, can be taken as purpose-driven, since they point toward a complete, structured entity that is ordered. This is not, to tackle the second issue, inherently emotional. The good of which we speak here is a good of order and structure, rather than a good of emotion and conscience. The emotion that is inserted into the purpose of completion is simply that she, the photographer, feels emotionally improved having completed a task. This is not to say that the task is performed out of emotional necessity or that the task is only seen as a purpose because it leads to happiness. Completion, however, begets satisfaction.

[xi] For the artist, it is not necessary that this be one purpose out of many; she needs only to identify this single purpose and express herself artistically. She may identify other emotional purposes in her life but this has no effect on the purpose that creation of the art object instantiates in her emotional being. What I mean by purpose here, to be very specific, is an action that can be completed. She has the opportunity to take the photograph, an instantaneous creation of art, whereby she has completed the action and receives the potential satisfaction that arises from completion of a whole task. The difference between this and other complete-entity task assignments is that the instantaneity of the photograph allows for a much larger quantity of these experiences in a short period of time, allowing for much more potential satisfaction on the part of the artist.

[xii] The simplest example of this, in practice, is paper. The collection of matter that creates a single A4 sheet of paper is quite specific. If this collection exists, the instantiation of the object one A4 sheet of paper is the result. If, however, only half the instantiating collection is present, there is not an incomplete A4 sheet of paper, rather a different configuration of paper, altogether. The paper is not, however, incomplete; it is simply differently configured. It is a complete object that answers to the name paper but does not qualify as the object, A4 sheet. While this example is not as simple as it first appears, it is extremely practical. The creation of any object must result in the complete creation of this object; were it not complete, the instantiation process could not happen and this process must precede the act of creation.