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EITHER / AND INDEX

Archiving On The Line

Translation of Photographic Archive


into Algorithmic Time
Wolfgang Ernst

Still time? Analogue daysand photographic in/formation

Let us look at a digitised photography in a media-archaeological way.


Phenomenologically its image quality (provided that the sampling rate has
been sufficient) looks more or less like the analogue original, but chrono-
technically it embodies a totally different essentiality. Even if it is subject to
physical and chemical entropy, the analogue photographic print remarkably
endures, while its digital version is a function of data arrays which need to be
electrically powered or even refreshed permanently. While the analogue print
is embedded in physical time, the digital image reveals its processual
character and is thus generated by its own internal temporal mechanism
(oeprative algorithms); it has to be re-generated out of computer storage.
The photographic punctum corresponds with the indexical temporal
momentum, but there is no "still photography" in digital representation.

There are two approaches to the conservation of analogue photography. The


one cares for preserving the physical, especially chemical and electro-
magnetic properties of the physical and chemical storage medium (all media
are material in the first place). The other, somewhat opposing approach is to
preserve medium-based memory as information, up to the extreme point of
view that the material body might be abolished after its essential
transformation into its pure binary information units: "We no longer collect
the carriers, clay tablets, books or floppies, just the information". [1] But to
which degree does the archival authority of an archival record still depend in
its material physical embodiment?

Imagine two photographs of one and the same ancient chapel of St. George

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in the mountains of Bulgaria. One photograph has been developed upon


chemical basis, the other as a digital snapshot. Analog photography itself is
indifferent towards the tempor(e)ality of its present or "historic" referent; its
historicity lies rather in the entropy of its own physical state. Against this,
digital photography is a-temporal, carrying the temporal trace not in its
information (which is its binary essence), but in the hard- und software into
which this information is embedded.

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.

As has been accentuated by the media philosopher Vilém Flusser: A code


has been obtained that comprehends images. [3] This leads to the option of
creating new images out of the code language which can be activated
online. Media archaeology deals with such techno-mathematical logic, not
just with origins and previous image engineering in the traditional sense. An
archive of different temporalities opens.

For the oldest signal-based medium in the technical sense, photography, in


1859 Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed to the fact that the symbolic trade of
media and material was introduced by photography:

"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]

What was form in analogue days, becomes information in digital space.


Once the light signals which have been chemically engraved on material
carrier has been transformed into digital, immaterial information, it can be
(virtually lossless) "migrated" from one storage computing system to another.

Photo-archival preservation: from materiality to information

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We observe the transformation of the material storage into an archive in


electronic motion, in electromagnetic ephemerality and latency. The gain of
flexibily and computability, though, is paid for with a dramatic loss of
durability. Permanence and archival endurance thus is not achieved in the
traditional way any more (which has been monumental fixation, stasis so
far), but by dynamic refreshing.

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]

In trans-photographical archives as data spaces the message of the medium


is the alpha-numerical code. This implies a profound mathematisation
(instead of inconisation) of what used to be called an "image". A digital
photography is no material light inscription any more, but its numerical
information - as becomes evident when the "core dump" mode is chosen for
its representation on display.

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Digital regimes: The archival from within photography

Let us refer to the epistemological notion of "archive" as expressed by


Michel Foucault's Archéologie de Savoir (1969): Which rules defines what
kind of photographic memory can be expressed and remembered (that is:
stored) at all? It is not only human archivists any more, but in a higher
degree than ever it is technologies upon which the readability of such
documents depends. The archival record has become techno-mathematical
sublime in electromagnetic latency - being there, but not accessible to
human senses any more. All of the sudden, the Foucauldean archive turns
out in digital photography. With the digitization (thus mathematisation) of
photographic matter into information its temporal essence transforms as
well: "Time no longer has physical meaning." [7]

Analogue photography by its very materiality inscribes traces of time,


whereas in digital photography, the temporal index becomes a para-text, in
fact: meta-date without physical evidence of aging.

In current media art, the "archaeological" use of anachronistic media like


16mm film appears like a retro-effect against digital atemporality - an archaic
counter-practice, archival resistance, a nostalgia for the passing of time. [8]

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.

In a Deleuzian terminolgy and re-reading of Foucault, the archive presents a


kind of diagram. The multi-media "archive", rather, represents an operative
diagram, a diagramatic machine, still topological (graphs, nodes) but with the
additional dimension of algorithmic temporality.

Photographic signal inscription for decades has been a kind of analogue


measuring of time, as opposed to the familiar symbolic registration of past
events in alphabetic writing. The non-linearity of photo-archival memory
separated this aggregation from the smooth continuity effects of
historiographical narrative.

With advanced digital media, both regimes - the symbolical order and the

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signal-based "real" - miraculously converge: The computer, by digital signal


processing (DSP), is capable now of emulating all "analog" happenings in
the real physical world (which before only the "analog media" like
gramophone and video could perform) by means of algorithmically
processing the strictest of all symbolic, in fact: alphabetic regimes, which is
the binary code. This results in the ultimate algorithmic temporalisation of
archival photographic memory.

Digital compression is the basis for the online streaming of cinematographic


arrays of photographic images - in fact a delicate micro-archival calculatios.
Only parts and sections of an image are updated at a temporal moment.
MPEG technologies divide each frame into small blocks of pixels in order to
analyze changes from one frame to the next. A group of frames is
established around one key frame at intervals. [9]

To achive real time transmission of photographic images in the Internet the


intervention of dynamic algorithms for effective data compression is required
"to reduce the spatial redundancy among the picture elements and to reduce
the temporal redundancy between successive frames". [10] Such predictive
coding is not a visual trace from the past any more but more time-critically a
trace of the immediate future." A sky could be mostly blue. Rather than
transmit an exact replica of the sky, why not use an algorithmic process that
transforms the blue sky into a quasi-statistical summary of the spatial
distribution of blueness?" [11] This allow to compress those components of
an image that are most perceptually redundant to human perception. The
basic photographic format, tis frame, is being deconstructed. Rather than the
single image being the elementary unit of photography, the block becomes
its basic component.

New "anarchival" options in re-membering digital images

A kind of "anarchival impulse" engenders photography collections in terms


of mathematical stochastics once images exist have been translated into the
digital regime. [12] In virtual memory space, new options of sorting images
arise, different from categorical logocentrism and indexing by metadata, in
fact: arrangements which arise from within the digital image itself (so-called
"imaged-based image retrieval“). [13]

Tagging and meta-dating of images is a supplementary, belated symbolical

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operation applied to images. Automated sorting of images to a large degree


still depends on such annotation: "Computers can help us. But only after we
help them first by feeding images descriptions." [14] Since once an image
has been turned from a physical carrier into information by the act of digital
scanning, is transforms into a mathematical representation devoid of
semantics. The computer has to be trained in order to gain icono-logical
knowledge; to teach the computer human "thinking" has been the dead end
of Artificial Intelligence. But let us turn this argument upside down. The
apparent computational lack, the "semantic gap" which separates the Turing
machine from human understanding, can be interpreted as its virtue, since it
opens an aesthetics of parametrical sorting and archiving - opening
unforeseen spaces of visuality.

Walter Benjamin once identified the ephemeral human awareness of


similarity as the essence of lived experience - a mixture between vague
impression and intentional perception. [15] With, for example, the
progressive sorting of distributed pixels according to colour similarity, an
anarchival or rather para-archival impulse can be identified in the algorithms
of similarity-based image retrieval.

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.

Media arts have already become avant-guarde in that sense by


experimenting with new forms of access to image down to its single pixels.
[16] The strict basis for such experiments, though, is algorithmic knowledge.

Image-based search for images takes information itself as criterium in the


order of images. The loss of material authenticity in technomathematical
reproduction in return leads to arriving at another level of abstraction; its
mathematical intelligence is based on technically standardised, unified
alphabets. In fact there is nothing really anarchic in the digital world, since
the alphanumeric regime - which is the symbolic regime - is always about
order.

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Between image-based sorting of photography and logocentrism (George


Legrady)

In his Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915) the art historian Heinrich


Wölfflin once aimed at formal criteria for sorting art historical images
according to criteria like "open" vs. "closed" form. [17] Today, this vision can
be realised by automatic image-based image grouping. [18] Such a
clustering sucessively liberates image configurations from word-based
tagging. Even commercial digital images sorting software for private
photographies sometimes offers the display of histograms (diagrams
displaying the statistical distribution of colour in images); this is a perfect
training in image-immanent navigation of the visual archive.

In optical scanning, the computer does not recognize a photographic "image"


in its cultural (thus human) sense, but rather its elementary parameters:
statistical colour distribution, edges, lines, shapes et cetera. Stochastic
rather then library-oriented, classification-based sorting of images thus
becomes feasable. At the same time, digitisation of images results in an
ultimate addressability of each single picture element, the so-called pixel.
Adressability is a central characteristic of the archival operation; thus we can
say that by digitisation the image becomes essentially archival. [19]

Even cinematographic movies which - as we know - consist of sequences of


discrete photographic frames - can thus be transformed into a vast
searchable data-set.

The correctness of computer memory is its essential lack when compared to


human remembrance operations which rather distort memories; according to
the inventor of the graphical user interface in computing, Licklider (1960), the
human is a "fuzzy, noisy device", but in turn gifted with the capability of
parallel signal processing. From that results a different attitude towards
image collections:

"Fuzzy" computer-sorting will begin to make useful comparisons of similar


(but not identical) images on the basis of new protocols. Or should we rather
"work harder on the alphanumeric labelling and keywording of pictures (...)
aided by re-born analogue machines"? [20] Shall we aim at closing the
"semantic gap" between the anarchivic element within humans and
computing? Shall we train computers to behave counter-logically?

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Close to such neuro-aesthetic insights, the traditionally “dialogic“ rhetoric of


the archive is currently being replaced by operational archival interaction, as
illustrated by Pockets Full of Memories (http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/g.legrady
/glWeb/Projects/pfom/Pfom.html), an online and museum installation by the
media artist George Legrady in which the audience creates an archive by
contributing a digitally scanned image of an object in their possession during
the exhibition visit. [21]

In multi-media space, the act of re-activating the archive can be dynamically


coupled with feedback. Interaction is an aspect Bertolt Brecht pointed at
already in the 1920s for the emerging medium radio, insisting that it can
technically - when provided with a feed-back channel - be used in a
bi-directional way by the receivers to communicate instead of being
unilaterally subjected to central broadcasting. [22] The unidirectional
communication of books still dominated the user experience. With different
hierarchives, a network is not a text any more, rather an archi(ve)texture.

The "dynamic archive", in fact: the sorting engine of Legrady's installation is


based on a self-organizing map, known in computer science as the Kohonen
algorithm. The Kohonen algorithm corresponds with neuro-scientific
evidence: "The self-organizing map captures some of the fundamental
processing principles of the brain, especially of the experimentally found
ordered maps in the cortex." [23]

It is in terms of an auto-associative network that an electronic switch-


principle for visual memory is being discussed for explaining image
generation in the brain, especially within the cortex region. Computer
science adopts this by modelling auto-associative networks; these have
properties that are comparable with visual memories. Within a matrix of
parallel-switched neurons their synoptic links react on themselves in loops,
thereby starting to store content.

The self-organizing map in Legrady's installation translates the key-words


(semantic information) and object description and turns them into numbers;
this is how the mathematically determined organisation happens. Many of
the given meta-data influence the positioning, for instance, the date, possibly
the object's origins.

In terms of informational communication theory theself-organising map is a


semantic memory model which is dynamic, associative and consists of

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adaptive prototypes. This correponds with Vannevar Bush's insight which


became essential for the development of hypertextual knowledge: "Memory
is transitory." [24] Bush in 1945 formulated his design of a Memory Extender
(MEMEX), a memory machine which is not oriented at the artificial taxonomy
of libraries but at the human brain functions which operates less logically but
associative.

Temporalising the archive: Fromspace-basedtotime-basedarchives

The art historian Aby Warburg once created a dynamic collection of


photographic reproductions of historic works of art called the Mnemosyne
Atlas (http://www.mediaartnet.org/works/mnemosyne/) which aimed at
tracing the rather unconscious tradition of visual expressions in occidental
culture. Warburg thus established, between the two World Wars, a visual,
photography-based archive of gestic expressions (so-called pathos
formulas)in Western art history, in the form of his Mnemosyne-Atlas (a kind
of visual encyclopedia where the reproductions, provided with numbers,
could be constantly re-arranged and re-configurated). But although Warburg
conceived of his chart sequentially, even there the apriori of this pictorial
memory is still the order or the library. It is the famous Warburg file catalogue
(Zettelkasten) which translates both texts and images in alphanumerical
notations which then allow for the hypermedia-like linking of visual and
verbal information.

Philippe Alain-Michaud describes Warburg's Mnemosyne panels as


functioning like screens on which the phenomena produced in succession by
the cinema are reproduced simultaneously. [25] Archiving of photographies
"on the line", most literally, re-calls the cinematographic stripe and reel of
celluloid indeed.

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

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subjected to algorithms of pattern recognition – procedures which excavate


unexpected optical and even "sonic" statements out of the photographic
archive. In the media installation Voice of Sisyphus under George Legrady's
artistic direction, methods of digital archaeology (operative image analysis)
have been used to sonify the image-as-memory itself. A black & white
photographic image from the 1970s displaying a hotel scene "At the Bar" is
filtered by a computer program which then reads the segments and
produces sounds out of these data resulting in a continuously evolving
composition. [26] This is no deliberate metaphorisation, but a
algorithm-based transformation of the archive (in Foucault's sense), giving a
voice to the photographic image.

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.

While the traditional photographic archive (such as André Malraux' musée


imaginaire) still represents a spatial order ("l'espace de l'archive"), today the
online image archives themselves take place in time. [27] Dynamic access to
image archives needs a flexible tool which allows for the coexistence of
different orders without destroying the existing database structure.

The archive itself gets in motion; the storage of large amounts of


photographic objects results in new types of transmission, compression and
retrieval which are based on differentiation like the send-on-Delta sampling
which only registers decisive alterations to sequences of similar images.
Dynamic access now replaces the static classification of the traditional
logo-centristic catalogue, just like statistical probabilities have replaced
particular knowledge in information theory, and pattern recognition replaces
individual identification.

"Social archives" in Web 2.0?

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

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appropriation and migration of photographic records and generate new forms


of image archives - be it artistic or non-artistic. The emphasis shifts from the
storage imperative towards transmission and circulation. It is in fact
debatable whether image portals in the Internet represent an "archive" at all.
Is YouTube an archive or rather anarchival?

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]

In most cases, though, image contents can still not be algorithmically


searched and accessed. The uncalculable is the real challenge to the "digital
archive". Most photographic collections in the Web are rather libraries and
not itself an archive. Rick Prelinger defines the Internet Archive in San
Francisco itself as a "nonprofit digital library"; preservation is neither its
mission nor its practice. [30] It is open access which distinguishes such a
library (or musée imaginaire) from the archive which tends to keep secrecy
by definition - like the protected mode within microprocessors. [31]

From semiotic analysis to "cultural analytics"

In so-called digital humanities, the archaeologists of knowledge are not


exclusively human scholars any more but algorithmic media as well.

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]

Here, statistical rather than semantic analysis of huge amounts of grabbed


single photographies (of which one special form is films as dissected into
single frames) performs digital image processing such as pattern analysis
and subsequent two-dimensional re-visualisation. When such algorithmically
calculated data re-appear by computer graphics on the screen, digital
photography is transformed into visual diagramatics. A new kind of archival

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iconology thus arises, based on logical operations rather than content


analysis.

The dominant criteria for the sorting of digital or digitised (sampled)


photographies come from within their visual information, that is: digital pixel
values such as hue (the color type or tone), saturation (a measure of how
much it has been diluted), and lightness (intensity of light reflected from
objects). [33] "In other words, we describe images with images." [34]

The Software Studies Initiative at the University of California in San Diego


has developed a couple of such tools which are available online. All of the
sudden, terms derived from statistical mechanics and physical
thermodynamics enter which have been adopted for the mathematical theory
of information by Claude Shannon; entropy becomes a measure for the
accidental or improbable distribution of picture elements.

Creative dis/order and the temporalisation of thephotographic archive

Finally the photographic archive might become poietical itself, by generating


new patterns of making use of stored visual evidence.

There is a reverse proportional memory economy at work with photographic


archives. Physical storage of the photographic print provides, when being
taken care of by professional conservation, a relatively stabile enduring
memory, but more difficult to access. Once being digitised, the electronic
image is open to almost real time access and new search options like
similarity-based image retrieval; at the same time, the "virtual" essence of
the electronic image becomes more fragile and subject to alteration than
ever.

The traditional architecture (tektonics) of the archive is based on


classificating records by inventories. This is being replaced in the digital
media by order from fluctuation, that is: dynamic order. But this is an
"archive" no more, but algorithmically ruled processuality.

In such a new order, images cannot only be retrieved as contained in their


frames, but even by their atomic elements, pixelwise. Thus even what has
not been meta-dated at all by human indexing can be automatically
retrieved, opening new options of visual memory (be it in photography, be it
in film). [35] Such a distribution of image elements does not belong to the

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library or the traditional archive any more, but builds up a new,


mathematised generative principle, thus: an archive in the Foucauldean and
Shannonean sense, being based on information itself. This new panopticism
is being applied by commercial and military agencies already. New software
like Microsoft's Photo DNA which allows for the automated idenficiation of -
for example - child pornography on websites already indicates by its name
that the basis of biological and technomathematical life forms start to
converge.

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]

Maybe, instead of thinking the archive in terms of order by classification, we


have to think entropically, that is: allowing for a certain amount of disorder,
which contains, according to communication theory, a higher measure of
(possible) information. In a lecture under the title "The Storm-Cloud of the
Ninetenth Century" Ruskin in 1884 implicitely replaced the museum like
concept of classification by a theory of an archive in motion, a kind of steady-
state. Instead of the order of things attributed to culture within the well-known
Victorian museums, Ruskin founds in the weather a thermodynamic
phenomenon which brings forces into play that radically alter ordinary
mechanistic representation of nature: order by fluctuation, a form of order
understood as process rather than state. Entropy - the conceptual enemy to
the traditional archive as authority of tradition - thus is not just the negation
of order but rather its alternative, "an organizing principle of disorder" [37]
that all of the sudden makes sense when observed from on high. Such
analysis oscillates between the micro- and the macrophysical level and
results in cultural and even political aesthetics. Cloud modelling (developed
for weather forecasting) is the name of the challenge to answer this
anarchivic dynamics by fast calculation.

Maybe instead of thinking the archive in terms of order by classification, we


have to think entropically, that is: allowing for the highest degree of disorder,
which contains, in communication theory, the highest degree of (possible)
information.

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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.

Just as digital art challenges "the conditions of archiving in our current


regime of telecommunications" [38], photography from the beginning has not
just been about permanent fixation of images but as well about immediate
transmission; Alexander Bain already in 1844 invented a system for image
telegraphy. With photography, the image not only became durable but as
well in an antithetical way evanescent - a tendency enhanced by the very
nature of the electronic image (fluxus in every sense), and in the age of
digital media the image becomes coded information in a channel.

Unlike traditional image archives, Web based online collections of


photographies are being updated almost by the minute. The radical
temporalisation of image collections transforms the "archive" dramatically,
with the recent "Web 3" economy leading to the real time net.

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).

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Visual immediacy: Towards a dynamic technology of photographic image


retrieval

Most image extraction from analogue photographic archives is done by the


grip on the single print as the storage medium, not by accessing its smallest
picture elements. [40] In order to get a photography from a media library, one
still has to type a verbal term into the search machine - even if the interface
literally promises vision.

Is it possible to navigate through large amounts of images without being


guided by verbal language? Is there something like an im-mediate access to
images, unfiltered by words? The answer is in the new mode of image
existence: the alphanumeric code, the symbolic regime of the digital image.

Expressing pictures by numbers undoes the old dichotomy between image


and meta-data; there is rather an implosion of images and numbers in digital
space.

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.

The computability of images has been preceded by the art of Renaissance


perspective (the rules of projective geometry), anticipating depiction by
photographic means. Reversely (analytically) this makes possible to
calculate pictures out of numbers and rules.

But should a digital photography still be called an "image"? What is a


photography: a set of data, a format, an “epistemic thing“ (Jörg
Rheinberger)? And at what moment does it become an image? By human
perception only, or independent from human awareness already within its
medium? Without human interpretation of certain visual patterns, the image
would just be a cluster of data. Optical signals become information “in the
eye of the beholder“ only. The computer can deal with the symbolical
analysis of physical data only, not with the imaginary.

Michel Foucault's archaeological and archivological analyses autopoietically


refer to the alphabet-based world of textual libraries. But "discourse analysis
cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film rolls." [41] What digital
space allows for instead is the option of navigating images in their own
medium - without changing from visual to verbal language at all. In digital

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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).

Different from printed letters in a book, the symbols in digital technoscapes


are arranged and distributed algorithmically.

Humans almost irresistably interface to photographic images in an iconologic


way. Let us thus search for visual knowledge instead uncovered from within
the visual endo-data: entering the image itself (data-immersion), which is the
media-archaeological gaze that can be performed by machines of image
processing bettern than by human perception. Such informatised
organisation of visual knowledge generates diagrams (which is as well the
Deleuzean intepretation of the Foucaultdean archive) - infomapping. Our
visual culture is still dominated by semiotically iconic, photographic-like
images; the twenty first century though allows for genuinely computer-
generated visual information, closer to diagrams than to "images", which will
eventually take their place and enable unprecedented types of "visual"
representations.

There is a sublime knowledge already implicit, virtually “dormant“ within the


electronic image, which - different from external inscriptions by meta-data -
waits to be un-covered from within. A critique of external description of
photographies draws on the assumption that there is a kind of visual
knowledge which either does not need to be meta-dated or cannot be
grasped by logocentristic addresses all. Even if the vocabulary applied in
Flickr.com is user-generated (thus individualised, different from an archival
thesaurus), it is still logo-centristic. Let the image rather be informative itself -
by means of operating with values that are, already, intrinsic to the image in
its digital state when the essence of the "image" itself transforms into
something else: alphanumerical, bit-mapped data. For instance,
computer-based retrieval can find all edges in a bit-mapped image. Such a
“digital image“ is an image no more; what looks like images, is rather a
mathematical function of data distributions.

Digital data-bank of images, when cleverly adressed, render a kind of


knowledge to us which would otherwise be unimaginable in the Gutenberg

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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.

Navigating images on the borderline of digital addressability

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.

The digitisation of photographic archives now promises “that images that


traditionally resisted the human attempts to describe them with precision –
will be finally conquered“ (Lev Manovich) - now that images are being
understood themselves as data sets, as clusters of pixels and colour values.

Addressing and sorting non-scriptural media remains an urgent challenge


which, since the arrival of fast-processing computers, can be met by
digitising analogue source material. The result is not necessarily better
image quality but, rather, the unforeseenability to address not just images
(by frames) but every single picture element (each pixel).

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).

Contrary to traditional semantic or iconological research in the history of


ideas, such an endogenic visual archive will no longer list images and
sequences according to their authors, subject, and time and space of
recording. Instead, digital image data banks will allow visual sequences to be
systematised according to genuinely iconic notions and mediatic rather than
narrative common-places(topoi), revealing new insights into their im/material
values. Our predominantly script-directed culture still lacks the competence
of genuinely visual navigation.

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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.

The real iconic turn in adressing photographic images in archives is still to


come - a visual sorting of images on the threshold of digital image
processing and retrieval, which is digital image archaeology by functions like
“searching images“. Instead of having to meta-date images by words, we
can handle the data within the image itself. Photographic images and
soundtracks can therefore be made accessible in their own medium, if only
perfectly adequate algorithms of shape and pattern recognition are being
made available.

(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

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& 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.

"Contentism" is the iconological heritage and cultural burden which hampers


our digital performances. Beyond cultural software, is there something like
non-cultural images? [44]

The metadata provided by an image database software to organise digital


photo collections tell us all kinds of technical details such as what aperture
my digital camera used to snap this or that image – but nothing about the
image content from within (which is the media-archaeological perspective).
Calculating images, MPEG-7 allows for layered image composites and
discrete 3D computer generated spaces; this means a shift from low-level to
high-level meta-data that describe the structure of a media composition or
even their semantics.

For monitoring sytems to process a large amount of electronic images, such


as human faces, automated image retrieval systems have to get rid of
semantic notions of Gestalt. This is why the IBM Query By Image Content
system does not radically decide in the dialectics between semantic versus
non-semantic information, but rather distributes the task according to the
respective strength in the human-machine interface. This instanciation of the
dynamic image archive is a retrieval system for computer-based search for
non-semantic aspects of a digital image (a mathematical operation), but can
be supplemented by human help (tagging) for the semantic, iconological
aspects.

"Humans are much better than computers at extracting semantic


descriptions from pictures. Computers, however, are better than humans at
measuring properties and retaining these in long-term memory. On of the
guiding principles used by QBIC is to let computers do what they do best –
quantifiable measurements – and let humans do what they do best –
attaching semantic meaning".[45]

- which allows for the difference between human (neurological) and digital
(algorithmic) data processing to take place, thus not trying to efface, but to

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creatively enhance the human-computer-difference where they meet.


George Legrady's above mentioned installation Pockets full of Memories has
been such a mixture of both human (semantic tagging) and inhuman
(algorithmic) sorting of images. In his up-dated version called Cell Tango
(http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/celltango/cell.html),
Legrady (together with Angus Forbes) displays a projection of constantly
changing cellphone photos.[46] The photos are first sent by individuals to
pix@celltango.org, and then projected rhythmically over a large, black
screen in a variety of patterns. Fresh snapshops swiftly adjust to that mosaic
according to formal criteria (image-based matching) and according to their
tags (meta-data), mingling with photos taken from the photo-sharing Web
portal Flickr. In one of the four modalities of the installation, "Cell_Bin", the
most recent images are placed on the black screen first, and an algorithms
randomly distributes them. The space left inbetween is successively filled by
smaller incoming photographies. This loosely coupled patterns evolve
dynamically. In this form of media art, algorithmic information is the artist's
main medium.[47]

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

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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

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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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