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Imagine two photographs of one and the same ancient chapel of St. George
Evidently a different nature opens itself to the digital camera than opened to
the naked lense in the traditional photographic apparatus. [2] Walter
Benjamin's term "technische Reproduzierbarkeit" turns into "digital
reproduction", a mathematisation of the photographic process, a different
archive.
"From now on, form is separated from material. In fact, the material in visible
objects is no longer of great use, except when being used as a model from
which the form is constituted. Give us a couple of negatives of an object
worth seeing ... that's all we need. Then tear the object down or set it on fire
if you will (...) the result of this development will be such a massive collection
of forms that it will have to be arranged into categories and placed in great
libraries". [4]
When a few years ago the architectural building of the Cologne Municipal
Archive collapsed due to Underground construction works, it became
apparent that most records, though having become dirty and mutilated,
materially survived this catastrophe, astonishingly resistant agains the
pressure of stones and water. In a similar way the first-generation
audiovisual storage media turned out to be surprisingly resistant against
temporal entropy (like Edison-cylinders and gramophone records, as well as
daguerreotypes, photographic negatives and film on celluloid). More delicate
is the destiny of cultural memory based on electromagnetic storage; digital
media, finally, tend to divest themselves completely from their material
embedding - loosing the physical ground by becoming technically "virtual".
Traditional storage media have been physical inscribed (graphein in its old
Greek sense): By writing the information to be stored literally in-forms the
device.[5] Latent storage devices such as magnetic tape for audio and video,
on the contrary, only reveal their memory content in the dynamics of the
electro-magnetic field as induced signals - an "archive" which human eyes
cannot decipher any more immediately. Analogue electronic storage media
indexically take place in a sphere which is different from the scriptural regime
of the classical archive, but the symbolical regime, on the level of alpha-
numeric codes, unexpectedly returns in techno-mathematical machines. This
re-turn is a temporal figure which cannot be reduced to the linearity of
cultural history; we are confronted rather with a kind of recursion. With
computed binary data, the "archival" symbolical regime returns into audio-
visual media themselves, but in a different way which is numerical. [6]
The digital photograph preserves the iconic quality while loosing the
indexical trace. Or rather, indexicality itself here is of a different kind. While
the analogue photographic print keeps a physical trace of the past, recording
the light intensities, the digital pixels keep a schmatic, mathematically
abtracted relation to their generating (and then sampled) analogue signals -
a diagrammatic indexicality.
With advanced digital media, both regimes - the symbolical order and the
Let us, in that sense, imagine "experimental archives" different from the
well-organised institutional archive. Quantised (digitised ) images can be
transformed into a vast image bank which, once unified as data-set, can be
subjected to image-based search operations such as matching of
similarities, object feature detection, statistical colour value comparison etc.
New kinds of search engines not only answer the needs of knowledge
retrieval but develop into a creative art of the archive.
But the basic unit of Warburg's picture tables was still the photographic
frame. With digital sampling of images, all of the sudden photograph can be
literally addressed down to the single pixel.
Addressing and sorting visual images remains an urgent challenge not only
because of the commercial potential of image archives. While digitisation
does not necessarily guarantee better image quality, it does offer the option
of addressing not only images frame by frame, but even each single picture
element (pixel). Images and sounds thus become calculable and can be
With effective algorithms, for the first time, the photographic image archive
can organise itself not just according to meta‑data, but according to criteria
proper to its own data structure: an endogenic visual memory in its own
medium. By translating analogous photographic images (including film) into
digital codes, not only do images become addressable in mathematical
operations, their ordering as well can be literally calculated.
With(in) the World Wide Web and with the emergence of such "social
media" photographic archives like Flickr, traditional archiving practices which
had been restricted to authorised archivists and users change towards
A photography portal like Flickr is a repository (in archival terms). "The digital
archive is by nature a database." [28] So-called social media platforms like
Facebook, Youtube or Wikipedia represent rather searchable data banks
than archives in its proper sense. Flickr rather a random collection than a
well-structured archive, since it is user-generated, a generative archive. Its
order depends on the accidental meta-dating (tagging) by the content-
providers, not on any archival logic. Its archival logistics is rather the
underlying algorithmic structure of image database management. Archives of
photographic images themselves get in motion. [29]
This is connected with a subtle shift from cultural (mostly semiotic) analysis
of photography to "Cultural Analytics" (in terms of Lev Manovich), that is:
computer-based matching. [32]
The nostalgia for archival order is of course a phantasm surviving from the
age of print. The alternative is a media culture dealing with the virtual
an-archive of multi-media in a way beyond the conservative desire of
reducing it to classificatory order again. Data trash is, positively, the future
ground for media-anarchaeological excavations. [36]
Archives used to be intended for keeping records virtually for eternity (or at
least an approximative, asymptotic eternity as allegorized by the ancient
Greek god Aion, different from Chronos and Kairos), like the time of nuclear
and biological "half live" (Halbwertzeit) which can not be experienced by
humans but it sublimely there.
The emphatic notions of past and future are being replaced by almost
immediate retention and protention based on immediate intermediary
memories - medium, the "inbetween" (Aristoteles´ notion of τo μεταξú) in a
radically temporal sense, close to the temporal logic of electronic or neuronal
circuits.
It is this dynamic dimension of the Web which is still largely beyond the
scope of search engines which survey static web pages while relegating real
time dynamics to the so-called deep web. "Thus archives still exist, helping
you find your way around the anarchive of the net." [39]
The current search engines themselves are the real archives of the Internet.
The whole Google architecture is reminiscent of an archive. But this is not
the classical archive any more, but a processual one, with the Page Rank
algorithm re-generating the ranking of retrieved information according to
statistical and referential (URL links) values and weighting (the genotypical
level). It is still a rule governed, programmed system which organises
information so that it may be retrieved, but different to the traditional archive
this archival "inventory" is updated - and indeed reconfigured - at an
incredible speed: always another archive (on the phenotypical side).
In current image coding standards (MPEG7), the visual content and the
meta-data are contained within the same file - a kind of mirror of the
von-Neumann-architecture of computing itself.
space, the task of searching images does not only mean searching for
images, but has a second, active meaning as well: images that search for
similar images, without the interception of words - navigating images in
Dataland (as named in 1973 by William Donelson), not in the Gutenberg
Galaxy (McLuhan 1962).
printed information culture. That is, digital images render aspects of visual
knowledge which only the medium knows, virtually in the „unconscious“ of
the daten-bank. The media-archaeological program is to uncover such virtual
visual knowledge.
Any archival record, as opposed from being looked at individually, gets its
meaning from a relational structure (which is the archival structure), the
contingency to other documents. But opposed to the archival algorithms (its
taxonomies) which operate on symbolic records within its own medum (the
alphabet), a photographic archive is rather a collection of symptoms than an
archive proper, due to the indexical nature of its records.
Images and sounds have become calculable and thus capable of being
exposed to pattern-recognition algorithms. Such procedures will not only
media-archaeologically "excavate" but as well generate unexpected optical
statements and perspectives from an audio-visual archive that can, for the
first time, organise itself not just according to meta-data but according to its
proper criteria - visual memory in its own medium (endogenic).
Mixed pixels of differnt colour may search for twin pixels by colour similarity.
[42]
But for more sophisticated forms of visual rhetoric the computer is not yet
capable; so far he can not really identify the whole of an object from the sight
of a part of it. The computer in its traditional sense as logic machine is not
brilliant in spotting associations between seemingly unrelated pieces of
information and deriving generalisations of images, therefore fuzzy
computer-sorting for useful comparisons of similar but not identical images
on the basis of new protocols has been developed - just like neurons in the
human brain do not primarily process, recall and transfer iconological
content but rather patterns of memory. The image here exists rather in a
structural, that is: archival latency.
(By statistical operations, evidence can be revealed which has never been
seen before in images. Actually, the mathematician David Mumford has
reduced the vocabulary of picture elements (would be pixels?) in Western
visual culture down to 23 elements - just like the letters of the (Greek)
alphabet.[43] Image-endogenic systems of sorting such as geometric
topologies of images or even cinematographic sequences replace
meta-dating. Whereas previous image sorting in a primarily writing-based
culture has so far been clearly iconologically orientated (Erwin Panofsky),
computing now offers the possibility of applying non-semantically operating
image-sorting programs which rather recognizes formats and creates a
strictly form-based image assortment, turning the ground (medium) into
figure itself (an argument derived by Marshall McLuhan from Clement
Greenberg's analysis of modernist painting).)
Visual search engines that can deal with "semantic" queries are still in their
infancy - for example crawling the web for illegal trade-mark copying. Search
& destroy: Let us not forget that “the similarity-based images retrieval
technology is either militarily or commercially, not really culturally driven“
(Lev Manovich). In his film called Eye / Machine (http://www.farocki-film.de
/augem1.htm), the film maker Harun Farocki draws our attention to operative
images. So-called intelligent weapons as well become data-driven by
matching images, not pre-directed by meta-data any more.
- which allows for the difference between human (neurological) and digital
(algorithmic) data processing to take place, thus not trying to efface, but to
Footnotes
1. Tjebbe van Tijen, ‘We no longer collect the Carrier but the Information’, interviewed by Geert
Lovink, MediaMatic, 8:1, 1994 ("The Storage Mania Issue"). back
2. This is of course a play with a quote in Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Illuminations,London, 1973, 238. back
3. Vilem Flusser, Für eine Philosophie der Fotographie, Göttingen, 1984. back
4. Wolfgang Kemp, Theorie der Fotografie I (1839–1912),Munich, 1980, 121. back
5. Ira M. Sage, ‘Making Machines Remember’, ProductEngineering, Bd. XXIV, April 1953, 141.
back
6. Vilém Flusser, DieSchrift.HatSchreibenZukunft?, Frankfurt/M, 1992. back
7. A term borrowed from Elizabeth Skadden, Collapsing New Buildings, Master Thesis at the
Rhode Island School of Design. See as well Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Archive, Storage, Entropy.
Tempor(e)alities of Photography’, in Krzysztof Pijarski, ed, The Archive as Project. The
Poetics and Politics of the (photo) Archive,Warsaw, 2011, 67-86. back
8. Malin Wahlberg, ‘A Relative Timetable. Picturing time in the era of new media’, John
Fullerton and Jan Olsson, eds, Allegories of Communication. Intermedial concern from
cinema to the digital, Rom, 2004, 93-103. back
9. Trond Lundemo, ‘In the Kingdomof Shadows. Cinematic Movement and Its Digital Ghost’,
Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, eds, The YouTube Reader,Stockholm, 2008, 314-329
(316f). back
10. Tomas Fryza, ‘A Complete Video Coding Chain Based on Multi-Dimensional Discrete Cosine
Transform’, Radioengineering, 19:3, September 2010, 421-428 (421). back
11. Adrian Mackenzie, ‘Codecs’, Matthew Fuller, ed, Software Studies. A
Lexicon,Cambridge,Mass.,London, 2008, 48-55 (50f). back
12. Subject of the international workshop The Anarchival Impulse in the Uses of the Image in
Contemporary Art,Museum ofContemporary Art,Barcelona, October 24th, 2012. back
13. W. E., Stefan Heidenreich, Ute Holl, eds, Suchbilder. Visuelle Kultur zwischen Algorithmen
und Archiven,Berlin, 2003. back
14. Lev Manovich, "Metadating" the Image, Lev Manovich, et al, Making Art of Databases,
Rotterdam, 2003, 3. back
15. ‘Sie <sc. Ähnlichkeitswahrnehmung> huscht vorbei, ist vielleicht wiederzugewinnen, aber
kann nicht eigentlich wie andere Wahrnehmungen festgehalten werden’, Walter Benjamin,
‘Lehre vom Ähnlichen’, Walter Benjamin, Allegorien kultureller Erfahrung. Ausgewählte
Schriften 1920-1940,Leipzig,1984, 125-130 (127). back
16. See for example the installation BLOW_UP T.V. of Angela Bulloch in the
gallerySchipper&Krome,Berlin, September to November 2000. back
17. Wolfgang Ernst and Stefan Heidenreich, ‘Digitale Bildarchivierung: der Wölfflin-Kalkül’, Sigrid
Schade and Christoph Tholen, eds, Konfigurationen. Zwischen Kunst und Medien,Munich,
1999, 306-320. back
18. van Huisstede 1995: 158: ‘Wenn es jemals ein Projekt gegeben hat, das in einem
elektronischen Medium wie der CD-ROM angemessen zu präsentierten wäre, dann ist es
der Mnemosyne-Atlas’. back
19. Claus Pias, Maschinen/lesbar. ‘Darstellung und Deutung mit Computern’, Matthias Bruhn,
ed, Darstellung und Deutung. Abbilder der Kunstgeschichte,Weimar, 2000, 129. back
20. Duncan Davies, Diana Bathurst u. Robin Bathurst, The Telling Image. The Changing
Balance between Pictures and Words in a Technological Age,Oxford, 1990, 64f. back
21. See http://www.pockektsfullofmemories.net; see as well http://www.medienkunstnetz.de
/werke/pockets-full-of-memory back
22. Bertolt Brecht, ‘Der Rundfunkt als Kommunikationsapparat’, Gesammelte Schriften, 18,
Frankfurt/M, 1967, 117-134. back
23. Timo Honkela and Juha Winter, Simulating Language Learning in Community of Agents
Using Self-Organizing Maps, Helsinki University of Technology, Publications in Computer
and Information Science, Report A71, December 15, 2003. back
24. Vannevar Bush, ‘As We May Think’, Atlantic Monthly, July 1945; http://www.isg.sfz.ca/~
duchier/misc/vbush/vbush-all.shtml, 6 back
25. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement,Paris 1998. back
26. The digital image sonification installation Voice of Sisyphus has been presented at the 18th
International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-2012), June 18–22, 2012,Atlanta,USA.
See http://vimeo.com/34859885 back
27. Michel de Certeau, ‘L´espace de l´archive ou la perversion du temps’, Traverses. Revue du
Centre de Création Industrielle, 36, January 1986, 4-6. back
28. Pelle Snickars, ‘The Archival Cloud’, Pelle Snickars and Vonderau, eds, 2009: 292-313
(304). back
29. Ekekhard Knörer, ‘Trainingseffekte. Arbeiten mit YouTube und UbuWeb’, Zeitschrift für
Medienwissenschaft, 5:2, 2011, 163-166. back
30. Rick Prelinger, ‘The Appearance of Archives’, Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, eds,
2009: 268-274 (268). back
31. Friedrich Kittler, ‘Protected Mode’, Manfred Faßler / Wulf Halbach (eds.),
InszenierungenvonInformation.MotiveelektronischerOrdnung, Gießen, 1992, 82-92. back
32. For a case study in Cultural Analytics, see Matthias Wannhoff, ‘Finden, was wir nicht suchen
können’. Ein Versuch in algorithmischer Spielfilmanalyse mittels Cultural Analytics (summer
2012), http://www.medientheorien.hu-berlin.de (section "Hausarbeiten online"). back
33. Oge Marques, Practical Image and Video Processing Using MATLAB,Hoboken, 2011, 398.
back
34. Lev Manovich, ‘How to Compare One Million Images?’, David M. Berry, ed, Understanding
Digital Humanities,Basingstoke, 2012, 249-278 (263). back
35. Harun Farocki, ‘Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik’, Meteor – Texte zum Laufbild, 1, Dezember
1995, 49-55 (50). back
36. Links to recycling: Redundant Technology Initiative http://www.lowtech.org and Mark
Napier´s www.potatoland.org back
37. Thomas Richards, ‘Archive and Entropy’,
TheImperialArchive.KnowledgeandtheFantasyofEmpire,London andNewYork, 1993, 73-110
(86f). back
38. Charlie Gere, New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age; http://www.tate.org.uk
/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04autumn/gere.htm back
39. TS Kjetil Jakobsen, ‘Anarchival society’, Eivind Røssaak, ed, The Archive in Motion. New
Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices, Oslo, 2010,
127-154, referring here to Alexander Halavais, Search Engine Society, Cambridge, 2010, 16.
back
40. It should be emphasized here that even if the analogue photochemical images is built up out
of points and decomposes into points, this is not to be confused with the numerical picture
element ("pixel"). back
41. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone - Film - Typrewriter,Palo Alto,Cal.,1999, 5. back
42. See the Flash animation on top of the web site www.suchbilder.de back
43. See his Algebraic Geometry and his The red book on varieties and schemes (1999) back
44. See Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Sehen wie ein Scanner’, forthcoming, Claus Pias, ed, Kulturfreie
Bilder. Erfindungen der Voraussetzungslosigkeit, Berlin. back
45. Myron Flickner, et al, ‘Query by Image and Video Content: The QBIC System’, Mark T.
Maybury, ed, Intelligentmultimediainformationretrieval,Menlo Park,CA, 1997, 7-21 (8). back
46. See http://tango.mat.ucsb.edu/pfom/databrowser.php back
47. Fifield (Boston Cyberarts Inc.), ‘Can you see me now?’, The Boston Globe,
http://www.wellesley.edu/DavisMuseum/exhibitions/exhibitions_celltango.html; accessed
August 2010. back
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