art / photography / digital technology
Sally Jane Norman
Artpress, (June 1994): 20-21.
CYPRES and the Ecole d'Art of Aix-en-Provence, in association with Art-E1 and the Observatoire de l'Image, recently hosted several events around the theme of Art/ Photography/Digital Technology. Digital Photography, an exhibition organized by Art-E1, allowed Aix inhabitants to discover works of the four Americans (Paul Berger, Carol Flax, Esther Parada and the duo named Manual) that were lately shown in Paris. The Observatoire de l'Image presented a selection of Seb Janiak's disturbingly piece-meal urban landscapes. A workshop led by Alain Buttard, lecturer at the Aix arts school, focused on photography and digital pictures; Paul Berger, from the University of Washington, held a workshop dealing with digital processing of photographs. A symposium jointly organized by CYPRES and the Observatoire de l'Image took place on 11 and 12 March.
The speakers commented on the photographic and digital industries, visual perception, history of photography, and the epistemological and aesthetic stakes of new image technologies. Several pivotal questions were debated: does the onset of digital techniques mean the end of chemical supports in photography? Is the integrity of the photographic negative, time's latent but obdurate inscription, something we must sacrifice on the altar of digital civilization? How do new image technologies break traditional means of representation? Despite their being intrinsically and infinitely open to manipulation, thus to mistrust, do digital images deserve an aura of respectability as proof that "that-has-been-imagined"?
The symposium organizers convened a wide array of speakers to provide a greater number of approaches to such questions. According to historian Michel Frizot operation of any camera, analog or digital, depends on light capture, even if this is infinitesimally brief. Indeed, "pose" time has been steadily and substantially cut down throughout the evolution of photography. Historical perspective also shows that sometimes perverse effects of economic and regulatory structures are nothing new: before decrying industrial superpower control in the elaboration of a new visual culture, we should remember that the daguerreotype's victory over the calotype was merely due to procedural differences at the patent office level. By underestimating the complexity of the history of photography, we will invariably misjudge the impact of nascent visual technologies. For example, traditional photography is often wrongly viewed as a guarantor of a bi-unique correlation between a shot and its print, whereas the superimposition of negatives by masking has long been used to produce "impossible," albeit analog, pictures.
The confrontation of varied viewpoints highlighted the dangers of overpolarized reasoning. Digital encoding is an extraordinary means for obtaining ad libitum reformulations of visual information. By sheer opposition, this diabolic technology seems to have hastened canonization of the analog image, which has consequently become something of a cult object. Irrespective of the fact that uprightness of the analogous trace is illusory, such Manichean reasoning tends to obscure more urgent issues. If "the stranger only sees what he knows" (proverb quoted by Jacques Clayssen), what importance should be ascribed to the cultural grid whereby we decode visual data? How does the spectator make up for the "shortcoming in memory" which, according to Bernard Stiegler, is inscribed within each image, as within all products of discretization (the major steps in discretization being the discovery of writing, of analogous images and of digital language)? Victor Burgin sets the "analog-digital" debate in the framework of categorial shifts evident throughout the media, notably via such new hybrid, pseudo-verist genres as "informercials," infotainment" and "reality shows." A similar confusion of boundaries separating dreams from reality is seen in the ideal woman's portrait recently instated on the cover of Time. Her ethnic origins scrupulously engineered by digital eugenics, this creature is the result of pure binary coupling. Like Michael Morley's photorealist paintings, the Time heroine remains adamantly lifeless, thereby contrasting starkly with Keith Cottingham's disturbing Fictitious Self-Portraits.
Uniting philosophical conceptualization and the pragmatic discourse of image-makers in a single arena is a challenge. Although the transition form retinal cones to mental pictures and icons was at times rather abrupt at Aix, only exploration of this kind can provide a glimpse of potential lines of research on unmapped terrain. By way of an impromptu conclusion, Hubertus von Amelunxen spoke of the fantomatic aspect of images entrenched in artifice, those strange visual worlds in which "absence eats away presence." Let the feast begin.
