Bernard Garnicnig’s “Almost White”
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Selections from Almost White by Bernhard Garnicnig (source: flickr – images taken between 29 Mar 2006 & 04 Aug 2010)
Photographs taken to set a camera’s white balance.
“Almost all cameras allow the user to set the photographic white point manually. To make this setting on some cameras, you have to shoot a picture of a usually white surface and set it as the white point reference.
These pictures, usually deleted right after confirming the setting, question the concept of subjective realities in the photographic process and document the photographers surroundings from his part unconscious, part mechanic eye. This is one of the last kinds of photography where no post processing is applied by a human while it shows how much the camera is manipulating the image already.
Its one of the last snapshots of photographic truth in the digital imaging age.” — B. Garnicnig
So much of the world is left on the cutting room floor. This is a necessary part of relating experience, whether in the transmission of factual information or the telling of story based on fact. Not every detail is needed in order to give a general picture or to convey the essence of an idea or experience, nor can every detail be captured, recalled, or communicated. Exactly what is omitted reveals the circumstances (bias) around and through which the material aspects of an experience are transformed by the process of relating and crafted into media.
Where lived subjective experience is often filled or obscured by the mediated experience of information displayed or rendered through electronics, today those scraps are increasingly difficult to find. Our culture of digitally mediated exchanges has been carefully structured to remove the perception of the framework through which we conduct our daily activities. The unwanted bits are tucked away on our hard-drives or tossed in the recycling bin—in some cases, deleted in-camera. Everything is curated, edited, cleaned and polished (even the raw webcam feed is a considered choice to convey honesty).
It’s not so much an issue of noise—the din of cellphone rings, tinny ear buds cranked way too high, the drone of our air handling systems and refrigeration units, the screeching, grinding and rumbling of our transportation machines is certainly something we will not easily rid ourselves of—the dust that imposed itself on the grooves of a record, the grain of a piece of paper and the pen-in-hand overcoming it to scrawl a letter, the grit of static and dead air between the stations, are all disappearing.
It is not so much a sense of nostalgia but a reflection, looking back on where we were but a few years ago, while understanding that today digital media strives for higher levels of fidelity (which ironically force television personalities to pursue more extreme methods to alter their physical appearance; this in addition to the artificial sharpening and saturation applied to just about every image these days) in an attempt to look forward into the potential media of the future where everything is so radically fabricated and manipulated that there is no honesty, no substance, no reality left but a simulated phantom of what once was.
What is striking to me about Bernhard’s Almost White series is that it brings to the surface issues of the photographic medium, how its digitization has been quietly accepted as Photography wholesale. The question of what makes photography different than digital imaging has been unearthed. By using these artifacts as evidence of the manipulation nearly every digital image undergoes, Bernard opens the door to questioning the honesty behind every media image. Even tempting us to ask exactly how staged are these white balance calibration shots? Has “fidelity” in the digital (dark) age become a matter of passing off artificially enhanced hyper-realism as reality? Or has it becomes something more subtle, staging reality in such a way that the extraordinary seems mundane?
DCP Series as Textile Art – Glitch Textiles
DCP 0216
On Vision Machines:
We are surrounded by digital images. The digital camera is the reigning tool of inscription of our time. We frame, capture, edit, enhance, upload/download, re-imagine and re-shape our world by the digital image. The window, the frame, the stage, the screen, and the monitor are, today, superfluous objects marking a historical trajectory: of vision and its transparent boundaries—our minds have been conditioned to see the world as a flat glowing plane filled with images, the world seen through a lens, beamed directly to the retinas.
The Glitch is a signifier, a flag, indicating the interruption of this flow of data underscoring daily routines.
The End of Photography?
There is still a question as to the legitimacy of the digital image in the realm of photography, at least in my mind. The knowledge, skill, and craft that goes into the photochemical images produced by pre-digital photography is perhaps mirrored in the digital domain through the utilization of algorithms and processing tricks; however, it’s clear the cultures of both practices are vastly different. There is no need to lament, simply to observe that the hand has been supplanted by the algorithm, by mathematics. The great benefit is now that the image is free of a definite physical manifestation (the negative), it can be mapped onto any surface and manifest myriad physical forms.
The print no longer holds the power it once did. It is seen merely as a fixed (and rather boring) screen. The best an artist can hope for is to create ambiguity which holds attention for more than a single glance. If we are lucky, a second glance, but a considered gaze is a rarity.
Everything is being digitized and presented on a glowing screen, smudged by greasy fingers. That doesn’t prevent us from using film, from continuing to learn from the practice of pre-digital photographic techniques. Although now the effects can be reproduced using a clever combination of digital filters, perhaps the difference is that we still have not found the right equations to capture the individual nuances of expression, the hand.
Though I do not have a preference for analog works over digital works (each is equally problematic), I can see the appeal of the former from the traditionalist’s perspective: the hand of the artist is evidenced, remains as the invisible referent. Beyond the image acting as an arrow pointing inwards through the lens to the person standing behind the camera, there is still something of Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “essence” of the creator embedded within the object as a consequence of its making.
The Digital Dark Age
We are still in the digital dark age, groping around for something new, beyond the scope of re-combination. Digital technologies offer a new way of formalizing information, one that is directly amenable to mathematics, and yet common knowledge of mathematics has not progressed much (one may say that it has been in retrograde). The dependence upon mathematics for innovation in the digital era requires us to out think mathematics in a system where mathematics is the absolute rule. Over-formalization of the problem is in essence part of the problem. Mathematics is but a veil which glosses over complexities until they can be resolved, and as they are, the veil becomes increasingly transparent and revealing, yet it will always fail in striving to become the object it enshrouds.
Everything up until now has been the reproduction of old forms within the digital domain. We are no longer surrounded by an array of specialized electronic objects; the computer is everywhere and not even a phone is a simply a phone anymore but also a camera, a calculator, a planner, an entertainment center. It has only been a matter of formalizing and encoding behavior. Software may be that new site of innovation, and there is strong evidence that we do have some very compelling and truly new software, but the barriers of its underlying system are still to be overcome.
Re-thinking Noise
Glitch Art has popularized the surface features of algorithmic interpretations of what a system designer would typically call noise, interference. There remains the issue of output. If a file format is corrupted, how is it to be presented? A disc image can easily be played back as audio, the zeros and ones translated directly into the force pushing a speaker cone, setting the air in motion. Does the image necessitate output on a screen, or a print? To weave a tapestry of a fragmented image allows us to do literally what we are doing symbolically: wrapping ourselves in images, accepting the faults of technology as an integrated part of day-to-day life. Whatever the forms may symbolize, the respect of file formats is preserved and an image becomes another image mapped to an object, a mosaic. What would it look like opened into a 3D modeling environment? Could these forms be constructed?
Are we approaching the moment of a new line of thinking in architecture? Could Glitch escape the realm of surfaces and obtain real depth? As an architectural manifesto, Glitch could provide a new way of approaching behavioral design through scripted space by throwing away the script altogether.
Compression Study 01
With the opening of the Algorithmic Unconscious group show at Devotion Gallery earlier this month, my interest in iterative video processing has been renewed as a method of exploring compression algorithms. You might be familiar with the technique, it was the same used for the epic Alvin Lucier inspired Video Room where YouTube user canzona uploads, downloads and re-uploads a video to youtube 1000 times. Where his work explores the impact of the compression schemes native to YouTube, the new video work above explores the motion JPEG-2000 compression algorithm.
The source video is a custom made 16 second loop cycling through the 8 fully saturated primary and secondary additive colors—black, red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, white. In quicktime, the JPEG-2000 compression algorithm is chosen to export a .mov file of the lowest quality (smallest size). At this setting, the compression algorithm is repeatedly making decisions concerning what information is relevant or important while discarding the rest—up to 99% of the original data. The result is a considerably low quality reproduction of the original with visible data-compression artifacts. By applying a handful of filters to the compressed file and then re-compressing, data-compression artifacts are amplified. By repeating this iterative or recursive process hundreds of times, an effect similar to feedback is achieved where the visual output becomes degraded from the original and the artifacts take on a generative nature.
For this study, 193 iterations were time compressed to fit within a roughly 10 minute span. The video was then paired with audio from “Metamorphopsia”, a track from the Macular Degeneration project.
Leading up to this completed study, several attempts were made to work with h.264 on fades between black and white frames. Similar work was down with audio compression algorithms and white noise. Further works in this series will investigate the effects of different compression algorithms on simple patterns of varying motion, shapes, and transition effects.
As a note, this work is less about abstraction and more about taking the concepts of Concrete Art to a place where expression re-emerges through the algorithm, which I am taking to be an abstraction of human perceptual features mediated by a deterministic system of discrete logic.
Change Blindness
Without thinking about it, I had turned the TV on and settled on the couch. In an attempt to halt my exhausted mind, I was letting the stream of media wash over my brain, when a story about a recent fashion show featured an brief interview with designer, Gareth Pugh, set in motion a cascade of thoughts. He went on about opposites: black/white, male/female, good/evil—binary states. There was no grey area in the way he spoke about the elements he was working with in developing his fashion. My gut feeling is that this obsession with opposites and extremes, although cliche, is perhaps indicative of a general malaise.
Initially I was tempted to ask myself if extremism is merely a coincidence, concurrent with maturing global capitalism, or if it is a consequence of employing digital technologies in the advancement of free markets, but to make it an issue of economy casts the issue in the wrong light altogether. Digital technologies are symbols of speed, communication, efficiency, but also exemplify certain attitudes towards the material nature of reality—attitudes that express little about the spiritual content that define our connection to it.
Does building a culture upon a technological substrate that is based upon systems of discrimination, determinism and absolute binary states have subtle consequences for the formation and development of social behavior? Out of a sufficient number of bits (although each bit embodies an equal possibility of being in one of only two states) any quantity can be expressed in discrete terms. 32 bits is roughly 4.3 billion unique states, but does combinatorics have anything to say about the gray areas of our age? Ethics is replete with gradients; the events resulting from the meeting of cultures whose values and customs precipitate diverse ethics and morals, often times contradictory and incompatible, demand analysis which can reconcile extreme ideals and beliefs in a position between or outside them. Else, it could be reasoned to give both sides the means to eradicate the other.
Is it simply a matter of perspective? We can’t perceive the discrete nature of our digital age (perhaps this is why it slips by undetected), but it reflects a desire in our thinking for absolutism. Deterministic systems can easily be represented in deterministic machines, but what is the necessary fudge factor to introduce indeterminism into these same deterministic systems? Bigger numbers? Better math? Brute force computation? At what point does it matter?
For painting a digital gradient between incompatible color palettes, maybe it is a question of the limitation of our sense organs, but a simulation is a simulation and the world modeled after a complex system of mathematics lacks a certain spirit. Our ability to express becomes limited to the scope of our mathematical equations. Though we may be writing ourselves into the machines in the form of our programs, code, algorithms, the necessary reformulation of an indeterministic experience into discrete language to be executed on a deterministic machine robs its fruits of a certain vitality. Perhaps it’s a simple limitation of or present state of technological development that we have no mediated equivalent of a handshake, and sensual physical encounters are not yet possible over the so called broadband networks spanning the more developed parts of our globe. Perhaps a supplement should never be taken as a replacement for the real thing.
Objects are born from the mind and realized with the almost exclusive use of automated machines, or humans guided by routines optimized by machines. If we program the machine, does that necessarily imbue it with a spirit? What is there to be said about spiritless machines overdetermining the actions of spirited machines? Does this situation diminish or enrich the spirits of those machines who possess them? We are hard pressed to turn up well reasoned answers, and yet we’re removing the hand, which is attached to the spirit, from the making of our world. Curves formed from discrete values, guiding the indeterministic materials of the real world; the mind acting on matter, however mediated—we shape our world but to what extent? Where do our machines begin to exert their crude reduction of our intentions on our own thoughts as a form of deterministic human enabled machine agency? The relationship between human and machine is dynamic and reciprocal and we cannot easily formulate a way of quantifying it. It is difficult, if not impossible, to program that which we do not fully understand, let alone that which refuses to be subjected to discrete forms of classification and analysis.
Perhaps there is something that I fear and I can’t quite express it. There’s sense of a loss, but it’s not the loss itself that troubles me, it’s the general attitude towards that loss: indifference, ignorance, or complete obliviousness. And in the middle of this intuition is a sense of helplessness at the fact that nothing can be done to reverse the trend, only to create an isolated pocket of appreciative practitioners. Not Luddites, no. We will die without our technologies; they are outgrowths of our species and we share a common blood. But a world made by hand is quickly becoming the world made by the hand guided by the machine; its a pointless paranoia and the best I can do is make note of this uneasy feeling, reach for my pills and sleep it off.
Remnants: zip tie line drawings
Remnants_002 - Click for Flickr Set
Entity I, Fruiting Bodies of High-Voltage Transmission Lines, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, The Owls Are Not What They Seem—each of these projects involves the use of zip ties or cables ties to bind wires together, and once trimmed, these fragments are left behind as waste. I have been saving these zip tie clippings for the past two years, the collection growing with each installation of the works mentioned above. The collecting began when at the end of a long night in the studio binding the wires for Entity I I found the floor littered with hundreds of zip tie fragments. I gathered them up, but couldn’t bring myself to simply throw them out. Something flashed through my mind—Karmic guilt perhaps. Each one of these zip tie fragments is so much like a blade of grass, only these will last a thousand lifetimes.
The Remnants series is a collection of sketches, scans of configurations half tossed randomly onto the surface of a scanner and some more deliberately positioned arrangements.
Photogenesis
Meditations on chemical and digital photographic processes
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In non-digital photography—the “capture” of images through exposure—a moment in time is sublimated into a successive process of chemical mediations. These translations are obscured in the resulting photographic image except to the skilled who can recognize certain chemical techniques for enhancement or manipulation. The deception of the photographic image lies in the obfuscation of technique—texture is an illusion resulting from light playing off surfaces or through objects. In painting, the technique, because it always produces a certain texture, becomes integral to the perception of the work and its content. Perhaps it is because painting must transcend or reconcile with its deception, and that it is not simply an image, that distinguishes it from photographic image making—the subject or referent is simulated through the illusion of light created through the application of paint on a surface, where in photography it is a photo-chemical impression upon physical material, a literal play of light upon surfaces. The digital images from the DCP Series complicate this issue of texture and technique. They exhibit a richness in detail, where the technique of manipulating the electronics of the camera asserts itself as simulated texture within the image, not in such a way as to reclaim that domain of texture occupied by painting but to draw attention to the fact that it—the digital image itself—is almost pure simulation, that there are many imperceptible layers of mediation involved in the production of the digital image which remove it from its referent.
DCP_Series - Modified Kodak DC280
The referent in the DCP Series images is the process of digital photography revealed through intervening with the physical hardware during image capture. Here the illusion of texture arises from the play of data through algorithms; light, and therefore exposure, is amputated from the digital photographic process. Where the mediations separating the real from the simulated within non-digital photography involve photo-chemical transformations of materials via exposure and development, the mediations involved in the creation of the digital images in the DCP Series involve complicated algorithms which are made visible through the intervention of wires intersecting processes by connecting points on the circuit boards which were never intended to meet. Though the specifics of the tools and methods involved in both practices are radically different, because digital photography evolved from non-digital photography, there exists not only an overlap but a discontinuity between the two. By scrutinizing work produced at the limits of each practice, and attempting to locate the essence of one within the other, the possibility of creating new forms arises.
Locating the analog of the physical process of manipulating the circuits of digital cameras in the photographic process poses an interesting set of problems. That the image of film based photography exists in a physical domain and the image of the digital era exists as a data set corresponding to the charges stored in vast arrays of microscopic capacitors already complicates any attempt to unite the domains of digital and photo-chemical image making. The translation of light to a data set makes the digital camera an all in one image making machine; you don’t need to have a photo lab to produce images. Data acquisition and storage; data read back and software interpretation of data; and output to the monitor replace the processes of exposing and developing film and then exposing and developing photographic paper. Algorithms and silicon replace film, paper and chemical baths.
Parallels to the process of intervening in the electronics of the camera can be found in chemically processing unexposed film. Created completely in the darkroom through the application of different chemicals directly on the film emulsion, the resulting images circumvent the need to expose film to light. This raises the question of whether a photographic image requires the exposure of film at all, or whether its development takes precedence in the creation of photographic images.
Man Ray’s photograms alter our perception of the processes that define photography by discarding not only film, but the lens and the camera altogether. By inserting physical objects between light and photographic paper to create images, the mechanism of the camera—the voyeur’s perspective onto the world—is circumvented. In the digital domain, instead of adding objects to photographic paper, the addition of objects to the circuitry—alligator clips and wires—circumvents the cameras inherent image capturing capabilities. However, because the process of modifying the cameras used in the DCP Series overrides the process of exposure, the Rayogram still falls short as a suitable analogy with which to locate the resultant digital images within the context of traditional photography.
Is it still possible to have a photograph without any of the mediums being exposed to light?
If images produced by developing unexposed, but chemically manipulated positive film or photographic paper (chemigram) can still fall under the umbrella of photography, then we have shifted the emphasis of photography from the subject, light, and exposure, to the chemical process of development which may not even involve light (except in the mediation of the electromagnetic forces responsible for chemical reactions). To develop a single frame of unexposed (positive) film and/or an unexposed sheet of photographic paper would exemplify this process. The question is now: where can we locate the notion of development within the practice of digital photography?
Inside the prepared digital camera, the element typically exposed to light in the production of an image, the CCD, is bypassed and the electronics responsible for interpreting its signals and writing them to a digital storage medium are manipulated to produce the image. The process of data acquisition, processing and storage is akin to exposing film to light, and developing its negative. When the data is read back, it is interpreted by decompression algorithms and presented on a screen. With this software, the data set that describes the image can be manipulated using any number of mathematical operations. This whole process of generating data and interpreting it as an image could of course be emulated within software, but the result would involve neither the mechanisms of exposure nor development in any traditional sense and thus the result could not be considered photographic. Digital images produced within the camera occupy this interstitial zone between photography and algorithmically generated imagery, because the tools involved are designed to focus light, expose a surface and record the resulting data. Perhaps by circumventing the process of exposure, the images produced by these prepared cameras cannot be considered photographic in any traditional sense.
DCP_0055
It is still tempting to identify the process of creating these images with photography. The shutter release is still involved; however, the act of initiating an exposure is abstracted, initiating a Rube Goldbergesque chain of pre-programmed instructions, where photons generate electrical signals which are quantized and stored as data points. After the intervening processes employed in the production of the DCP Series, the digital camera thinks it’s taking an exposure but the paths from the CCD to the recording device have been severely compromised. By bypassing the CCD electronics, we intercept the digital processes of “development”—analog to digital conversion, compression algorithms, etc.— and dump our redirected electrons onto what would in film photography been the exposed and developed negative: the flash memory card. It’s like taking a picture with the shutter mechanism disabled and afterwards bathing the film in a cocktail of different chemicals; you trigger the mechanics of an exposure but what happens in the treatment of the “film” is what we’re concerned with. You could almost discard the camera altogether, except that in the digital camera the translation of the image from CCD to storage medium—what would otherwise be from film to developed negative and then to photograph paper etc.—is dependent upon the system of components and short-circuits that have no algorithmic equivalent, they escape the type of emulation that would allow us to forget about the physical object altogether.
No doubt, this whole process is, in the end, digital, but perhaps there is hope that it is actually a possibility to contextualize it within the domain of photography and not simply relegate it to the domain of digital image production. It may be that by preparing poloroid cameras so that the film is physically damaged while it is being pulled through the mechanisms, we find the closest parallels to these images in the DCP Series.
As a final note, this whole exercise of attempting locating this work within the tradition of photography is necessary because it is not based in emulation. The act of using a digital camera locates the resulting image within the practice of photography. The question then is if altering the electronics of the camera is a photographic process, does it have a precedent from previous photographic traditions and if so in which specific stage of the whole process can we find the closest similarities? Of course, I’m also interested in how this obscures the definition of photography—whether digital or film-based—and also whether there are other practices that have touched upon this problem of “what is photography?”. So that the traditionalists may understand the images and the process in terms of what they already know, we can refer back to those artists who are chemically manipulating unexposed film and developing the results. Though the analogy is not a perfect match, the form of photography discovered and exploited in the production of the DCP Series is the digital age’s answer to those artists.
See Also
Artists:
Pierre Cordier
Polli Marriner
Francoise André
Reading list:
Luis Nadeau, Encyclopedia of Printing, Photographic and Photomechanical Processes New Brunswick, NJ (Atelier Luis Nadeau), 1989, and the related website, photoconservation.com
Gordon Baldwin, Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms Los Angeles and London (J. Paul Getty Museum in association with the British Museum Press), 1991
Formations and Fragmentations
To cut across categorical structures and arrive at a point of solace, where the differentiation that occurs within the waking self ends and an expansive void opens in its place, the structures adhering thought to action/inaction must be laid to waste. There is sweet meat waiting within the carapace. As the organism within grows, the shell must be discarded so that a new suit of armor may form. During this phase of moulting, the shell is supple, soft, penetrable; the organism is at its most vulnerable.
