GIF Today

The revival of the animated GIF marks a point in the history of the web when it finally became sufficiently advanced to take pleasure in its own obsolescence. Like the rusty engines and the leaking pipes of the derelict spaceship in Alien, the lo-fi jitter of the GIF signals a moment when the novelty of technology fades off and becomes the backdrop rather then substance

Digital Image

This paper considers the ontological significance of invisibility in relation to the question ‘what is a digital image?’ Its argument in a nutshell is that the emphasis on visibility comes at the expense of latency and is symptomatic of the style of thinking that dominated Western philosophy since Plato. This privileging of visible content necessarily binds images to linguistic (semiotic and structuralist) paradigms of interpretation which promote representation, subjectivity, identity and negation over multiplicity, indeterminacy and affect. Photography is the case in point because until recently critical approaches to photography had one thing in common: they all shared in the implicit and incontrovertible understanding that photographs are a medium that must be approached visually; they took it as a given that photographs are there to be looked at and they all agreed that it is only through the practices of spectatorship that the secrets of the image can be unlocked. Whatever subsequent interpretations followed, the priori- ty of vision in relation to the image remained unperturbed. This undisputed belief in the visibility of the image has such a strong grasp on theory that it imperceptibly bonded together otherwise dissimilar and sometimes contradictory methodol- ogies, preventing them from noticing that which is the most unexplained about images: the precedence of looking itself. This self-evident truth of visibility casts a long shadow on im- age theory because it blocks the possibility of inquiring after everything that is invisible, latent and hidden

The Grin of Schrödinger's Cat; Quantum Photography and the limits of Representation

The famous quantum physics experiment 'Schrödinger's cat' suggests that some situations are undecidable, i.e. they exist outside of the normative distinctions between 'truth' and 'false' because both states can co-exist under certain conditions. This paper suggests that photography has very close links with this state of affairs, because photography allows one to move from the world of certainty into the quantum dimension of undecidability and indeterminate states

Discourse in a coma; A Comment on a Comma in the Title of Jean François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure

One of the key claims in Jean-Francois Lyotard's "Discourse, Figure" is that the dialectical method (the backbone of Western philosophy) tends to obscure and hide all which is invisible, illegible and sensual. Lyotard's strategy in exposing this rift within language (and philosophy) is by way of showing that the distance between the sign and the referent should not be thought of as negation but as a form of expression. Instead of the dialectical relation between the image and the object Lyotard proposes radical heterogeneity that he names 'thickness'. This paper examines Lyotard's non-dialectical approach in relation to the title of the book and argues that the comma is positioned as the sensual technology that creates the possibility of discursive continuity

Digitally Yours; The Body in Contemporary Photography

This article analyses two artworks by contemporary photographers, Alexa Wright and Wendy McMurdo. It focuses in particular on the relationship between digital technologies and representation of the body, and on the changes to accepted paradigms of sexuality, identity and sensuousness caused by the computation of the art object. The article appears in ‘The Issues: In Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics’, which explores the intersecting fields of contemporary art, philosophy and practice

Notes on the Margins of Metadata; Concerning the Undecidability of the Digital Image

This paper considers the significance of metadata in relation to the image economy of the web. Social practices such as keywording, tagging, rating and viewing increasingly influence the modes of navigation and hence the utility of images in online environments. To a user faced with an avalanche of images, metadata promises to make photographs machine-readable in order to mobilize new knowledge, in a continuation of the archival paradigm. At the same time, metadata enables new topologies of the image, new temporalities and multiplicities which present a challenge to historical models of representation. As photography becomes an encoded discourse, we suggest that the turning away from the visual towards the mathematical and the algorithmic establishes undecidability as a key property of the networked image

What is 21st Century Photography?

Commissioned by The Photographers' Gallery, in this essay Rubinstein answers "one of photography’s most complicated questions": In our contemporary image-world of computers and algorithms, what are the key philosophical questions proposed by the medium of photography today

Failure to engage: art criticism in the age of simulacrum

In this article I explore the metaphysical underpinnings of ‘Art and Objecthood’ in order to tease out its reliance on several of the tenets of conservative art criticism: Plato’s theory of forms, Kant’s aesthetics and the unquestioning acceptance of subjectivity and representation. I argue that it is due to these investments that ‘Art and Objecthood’ fails to come to terms with the condition of art in the age of advanced technology and virtual (simulated) reality. This argument develops by means of clarification of three key concepts: simulacrum, theatricality, and truth

Graven images: photography after Heidegger, Lyotard and Deleuze

This chapter connects Heidegger’s critique of identity and metaphysics with his later work on the question of technology to propose that photography, understood as an image making technology, provides a privileged point of entry into the question of ontological difference. The work of Lyotard and Deleuze, while not directly engaging with photography, seems to be pointing in this direction. My assertion is that the ‘step back’ out of metaphysics does not proceed by way of language (as Heidegger would have it) but by the way of the technical image. For this reason, photography is the visual counterpart of non-representational thinking. This paper argues that Heidegger’s inability to exit metaphysics is tied to his failure to recognise that such a leap is accomplished by means of an automata, or technology that is capable of mimetic expression. The understanding of photography as the poetic expression of techne, implies that photography is the ‘graven image’ of the age of cybernetics and allows to suggest that a leap out of metaphysics is best performed not in the field of language but in the space of the technical image. This leap, if successful, might open a path towards philosophy that works with technical images instead, or alongside of language