Image Management, Kim de Groot

International Journal of Creative Interfaces and Computer Graphics, 2011

The valence of any visual paradigm and its accompanying technologies is subject to the contingencies of political regimes and cultural shifts. The instigation, implementation and even reconfiguring of any associated technological system effects a translation and adjustment to the structure and use of these supporting mechanisms that both redefines the relationship between object and viewer and ultimately influences its translation into material form. The permeation of digital systems throughout contemporary urban space is typified by Internet Protocol webcam systems, instigated by civic authorities for surveillance and the imagistic promotion of iconic city form. This paper examines how this system's reception and subsequent translation of transmitted data signals into digital information not only presents new material to mediate people's engagement with public space, but moreover, how it presents new opportunities for the designer to materialize its three-dimensional form within the spatial ambiguity of virtual and real-time environments.

2014

The cybernetic condition of photography has largely been overlooked in contemporary art and society. An emphasis on the image encouraged a perception of photography as a means of reflecting the condition of modernity only. With 550 billion photographs shared daily on social networks, it is clear that the story of photography as reflection is far from over. Photographic images however, could be perceived as a by-product of (or distraction from) many other processes; phenomenological, ontological, sociological, philosophical, historical and technological that have largely been ignored as a result of the over emphasis on images. There is an alternative history of photography that reflects its ontological emergence in the context of maths and industry. This technological condition (and history) of photography needs to be re-examined particularly in light of the emergence of ‘information’ as the connective thread in the cybernetic relationship between man and machine. ‘Information’ has become the new tool, the new machine, the new factory and the new value. I suggest an analysis of photography and the information machine as emerging from the same ontological conditions and a focus on the relationship between them. Photography like the computer has from its inception incorporated ‘information’, i.e. processes, mathematical computation and micro-movements of the human body. They are both also involved in an information feedback loop, or cybernetics. That both the information machine and the photographic machine are perceived as mysterious and magical, i.e. a black box, further indicates the close relationship that I intend to explore. My strategy will be to start with the observation, that both also produce data, which can be defined as unprocessed information. In my paper I would like to detail the various forms of numerical value, statistics, or images this can take. The information machine can create and collect copious amounts of data. Like the copious amounts of images (or data) that the camera too can create, much of this ‘data’ remains unprocessed. As the contemporary condition of photography illustrates, we look but don’t see or process what we are looking at. The awe we feel in the face of billions of images is much the same as the awe we feel when we attempt to conceive of how fast the information machine can process information. It is not enough however, to just think of the machines. Deleuze says that ‘Machines don’t explain anything, you have to analyse the collective apparatuses of which the machine are just one component.’ My final goal is to sketch how information machines indicate the condition of contemporary political philosophy and have since the industrial revolution. This is why it is necessary to examine them and to ground our relationship to them in telling their alternative history. References Deleuze, G. (1990) Futur Anterieur journal, n. 1 (1990) Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri

2018

'appearing as non being' given by the image has its own kind of being that cuts across the division of beingnon-being. The result, by way of Heidegger is that technical images bring all visualisation into an essential closeness, a deseverance, that does not make images more intimate or understood, on the contrary, images become conceptually and phenomenally distant like looking glasses, equipment to be looked 'through' but not 'at'. By treating images in this way, as optical holes instead of dithering presences, something of the gigantic nature of our global technologies of envisioning are revealed, bringing with them an annihilating distance flung to the greatest point of removal beyond embodied experiences and discursive formations.

2022

Studies, for providing general oversight on the content of the exhibition. In addition, Thomas Lentz provided sage feedback on catalogue and exhibition texts, while Qamar Adamjee, Ladan Akbarnia, Mika Natif, and Fahmida Suleman were kind enough to discuss earlier versions of the structure. Without Stefano Carboni's original proposal, we would not have planned an exhibition on this theme. A debt is due to him, and we look forward to seeing his exploration of the topic come to fruition. I would also like to express gratitude to the artists, colleagues, and private collectors who provided support for loans and images, originally on a very tight deadline:

Archivo 6, 2017

Visual Anthropology, 1998

This paper proposes a relational history of media artifacts, which decentralizes the dominance of the photographer or filmmaker as the absolute author of the work. It adds an alternative account to understanding the creative process and the subsequent study of media forms by discussing film and photographic practices as the reciprocal affective relationship between the maker, their intentions, materials, technologies, non-human agents and the environment. By reorganizing the anthropocentrism of art historical narratives, which typically exclude corporeality and materiality as drivers of human history, we are able to discuss the complex dynamic meshwork of determinants that bring photographic artifacts into existence: the lived, animate, vital materialism at once emergent and mixing of different causalities and temporalities. Within this position, I will provoke discussions of cognition and photography by re-calibrating the moment of acting to a model that recognizes a distributed nature of human action into the material world of things. This new materialist position has repercussions for the way we understand processes of creativity and the emergence of media artifacts—seeing these as always already entangled and enmeshed across various corporeal and material, platforms and scales. This paper uses photography as a case study to discuss the broader theme of co-creation between humans, machines and the environment. Using documentary evidence from the archive, I sustain this argument by making a close reading of a particular photographer's contact sheet, which shows up some of the dynamics of the relational meshwork playing upon the photographer in the field. Through this reading we can begin to think about the implications for the way we understand the emerging aesthetic discourse of technological photographic practices and, more broadly, the co-creative domains of all human activity.