[Reader-list] The Image Matrix
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Subject: [CSL]: Article 105- The Image Matrix
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 12:52:06 -0000
From: John Armitage <john.armitage at UNN.AC.UK>
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
VOL 25, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online:
http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 105 20/03/02 Editors: Arthur and
Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
Dear CTHEORY Readers,
We are pleased to announce that Paul Virilio, one of
the world's
leading theorists of technology, culture and
politics, has joined
the editorial board of CTHEORY. Virilio's writings
include,
among other books, _War and Cinema_, _The Vision
Machine_,
_Speed and Politics_, _The Information Bomb_, _The
Art of the
Motor_, _The Aesthetics of Disappearance_, and _Open
Sky_.
Arthur & Marilouise Kroker
Editors, CTHEORY
_____________________________________________________________________
The Image Matrix
"Analog is having a burial and digital is dancing on
its grave"
===============================================================
~Arthur Kroker~
Burying the Image for the Future
--------------------------------
Today the image is so powerful that it has to be
buried alive.
Consider the following story:
It will be a surreal burial.
The Bettmann archive, the quirky cache of
pictures that
Otto Bettmann sneaked out of Nazi Germany in two
steamer
trunks in 1935 and then built into an enormous
collection
of historical importance, will be sunk 220 feet
down in a
limestone mine situated 60 miles northeast of
Pittsburgh,
where it will be far from the reach of
historians. The
archive, which is estimated to have as many as
17 million
photographs, is a visual record of the 20th
century. Since
1995 it has belonged to Corbis, the private
company of
Microsoft's chairman, William H. Gates.
The Bettmann archive is moving from New York
City to a
strange underworld. Corbis plans to rent 10,000
square feet
in a mine that once belonged to U.S. Steel and
now holds a
vast underground city run by Iron
Mountain/National
Underground Storage. There Corbis will create a
modern,
subzero, low-humidity storage areas safe from
earthquakes,
hurricanes, tornadoes, vandals, nuclear blasts
and the
ravages of time.
But preservation by deep freeze presents a
problem. The new
address is strikingly inaccessible. Historians,
researchers
and editors accustomed to browsing through photo
files will
have to use Corbis's digital archive, which has
only
225.000 images, less than 2 percent of the whole
collection.
Some worry that the collection is being locked
away in a
tomb; others believe that Mr. Gates is saving a
pictorial
legacy that is in mortal danger...
When the move is done, Corbis's New York office
will
contain nothing but people and their computers,
plugged
into a digital archive. No photographic prints,
no
negatives, no rotting mess. Analog is having a
burial and
digital is dancing on its grave.
--Sarah Boxer, New York Times,
April 15, 2001
The Death of Analog/The Power of Analog
---------------------------------------
The 20th century may have been dominated by the
spectacle of the
image, but the 21st century will witness the
disappearance of the
image into digitality moving at the speed of light.
Not simply the death of analog with its extended
burial rights for
the traditional apparatus of photography-prints,
negatives, and the
framing gaze of the photographer's eye--but the
disappearance of
the image itself. Because that is what is really at
stake in this
strange story of Corbis's necropolis of the
photographic archive.
Certainly there are serious issues of cultural
politics here: issues
of monopoly capitalism in digital form creating a
short market in the
photographic archive of the future; issues of
shutting down the eye
of photographic history itself; issues of substitute
culture--
replacing an actual worked photographic archive with
its coded, and
dramatically abbreviated, digital substitutes. All of
this is almost
self-evidently true, almost palpable in this eerie
spectacle of the
cryogenic deep-freezing of photography, this
entombment of the
reproductive rites of photography in an abandoned
mine shaft in
Pennsylvania. No more (photographic) images, no more
decomposing
smells of negatives, no more "thumbing through"
stacks of
refrigerated images, no more immediacy. Now, we are
suddenly living
in the culture of the retrieval of digitally archived
images by
remote control: images safely kept at a distance from
human contact,
uncontaminated by the passage of time. The image
archive is reduced
to the steady flicker of the cybernetic code.
Hygienic, sterilized,
catalogued on the computer screen, untouched by the
human hand,
unseen by the human eye, uncontaminated by the
ephemeral imagination.
But what does this really mean? Is this simply
another story of the
triumph of digitality over analog--the sovereignty of
the
light-image over that curious mixture of light and
time and chemicals
that is photography? Or is this assignation of the
photographic
archive to the coffin of a cold underground storage
vault a haunting
presentiment of something more monumental, more
striking for the
artificiality, perhaps even naivety, of its digital
illusions?
Certainly on the surface this may be a quick-time
fable of "analog
having a burial and digital dancing on its grave,"
but in the strange
reversals that mark the passage of life itself
through the spectacle
of the image, exactly the opposite may also be the
case. The secret
of this fable of the buried image lies in the
question of the code.
Because the code is what this story is really about,
and it is just
when we disentangle the double helix of the digital
code, that
twisting spiral of analog and digital logic as they
intersect and
implode that we can begin to understand the serious
cultural
implications of this story for the future of the
image in the new
century. It is in the nature of all codes, digital or
otherwise, to
immediately repress all signs of their opposites, to
cancel from view
and certainly from verbal optical articulation the
repressed energies
of the anti-codes that work to make possible the
violence of the
positive code itself. As in life so in the story of
the digital code.
The digital code speaks the sanitary language of
culture cleansing,
of photography itself at a distance, of the archive
by remote
control, of the deep-freeze preservation of the image
from the
'contamination' of time and history and memory and
skin and smells
and touch. Photography in a bubble. Memory in cold
storage. Images
fast-frozen. Perfectly preserved, perfectly coded.
Always
retrievable, always inaccessible. A psychoanalytics
of digital
repression.
But what if with the history of mythology as our
guide, we were also
to note concerning the future of the image that that
which is most
deeply repressed, most feared and most preserved even
to the point of
its death, never fully absents itself from culture,
never can be
removed at a safe preserve from the future anxieties
and future
boredom of the enigma of life itself. In this case,
it is not so much
the "burial of analog with digital dancing on its
grave," but analog
as the repressed memory the absence of which haunts
the once and
future spectacle of the digital.
More than is perhaps recognizable in the orthodox
media scriptures of
the digital age, we are no longer living in a culture
dominated by
the image because we are the pure image. Ours is a
culture signified
by the triumph of virtuality, by the disappearance of
the spectacle
of the graven image into code. It is as if those
torrents of words
spilled in the decade leading up to the end of the
20th century,
those anti-words that stormed the icons of
representationality, that
spoke of the hyperreality of a coming structuralist
reality, finally
found their moment of historical truth, not in the
echoes of written
language but in the language of the disappearance of
the image.
Hypering the image. Coding the spectacle. A hygienic
of (ocular)
memory. A necropolis for the photographic memory.
When a culture at
some deep informing cultural level finally loses
faith in
representationality, when it shifts its register of
acceptable
meanings to embrace the language of virtuality, then
that culture
also effaces its ability to filter memory through the
apparatus of
the image. The death of representationality then is
also about the
burial of the image, and the virtual flight from the
tomb of the
analog of the new story of the cynical image.
Indeed, if the history of 20th century photography
can be buried
alive, chilled to such a degree of zero-intensity
that it cannot be
easily disturbed, this is simply an indicator that
the image has
taken flight from the medium of analog photography to
electronic
imaging, from the image as a light-based product of
the photographic
apparatus to the vanishing of the image into the
digital simulacrum.
Or maybe something else. Perhaps the burial of the
history of 20th
century photography also announces in the absolutism
of this gesture
that the photographic image can be superfluous today
because we are
finally living out that age predicted by ancient
prophecy--a time
in which the image is made flesh.
Disappearing into Images
------------------------
~It was always intended to be this way.~
Discontented with the radical separation of flesh and
image, the body
has perhaps always yearned to disappear into its own
simulacrum, to
become the image of itself that it thought it was
only dreaming. This
is why the story of the simulacra of images has
nothing essential to
do with the languages of domination, with the purely
social stories
of alienation or reification. Escaping from the coils
of earthy
mortality, the history of the image has been most
seductive because
of its obsessive hint of pure ocularity, because of
its trance-like
status as a virtual vector in an increasingly
electro-optic apparatus
of power. A born pervert, the image is the outlaw
region of the human
imagination. A natural charlatan, the image maintains
the pretence
that it has something to do with the history of the
eye precisely
because its real electro-optical history focuses on
the shutting down
of the eye of the flesh and the opening up of the
cynical eye of dead
code. An enigma, a sky-tracer, a going beyond, a
falling back: the
image is the residual trace of the human challenge to
a universe that
knows only the game of reversibility and seduction as
responses to
challenges to the power of its silence.
Consequently, it is our future to disappear into
images. Not only
into those external image-screens-cinema, TV, video,
digital
photography--but also into those image-matrices that
harvest human
flesh: MRI, CT scans, and thermography. The future of
the media?
That's the unseen cameras of automatic bank machines,
the unhearing
machines of automatic eye scans, the unknowing
machines of planetary
satellite photography. Sliced through and diced,
combined and
recombined, the body is an image matrix. The body
desperately needs
images to know itself, to measure itself, to reassure
itself, to
stimulate its attention, to feed its memory channels,
to chart its
beauty lines, to recognize its gravity flaws, age
marks and flaring
eyes.
In a special case of the media preceding science, the
image matrix is
how biotechnology will penetrate the imagination. No
need to wait for
the sequencing machines of recombinant technology.
The image matrix
is already recombinant. No need to anticipate the
results of gene
sequencing: the results of the human genome image are
already known.
The image matrix inhabits the body. It is the air
breathed by its
photographic lungs. It is the sky surrounding its
digital eyes. The
image matrix quick-jumps the eye and seduces the
imagination. A
static line. A conspiracy line. An entertaining line.
The image
matrix is always there.
There is no longer any difference between the body
and the image
matrix, except perhaps in the default sense that the
body is still in
the way of a falling away from the intensity of the
image matrix, a
gravitational pull like a dark unseen star in a
distant galaxy that
can only be detected by its negative gravitational
presence.
Do images warp when in the presence of bodies? Like
galactic star
systems, do images flare outwards in the act of
seducing passing
bodies? Conversely, do images retract into cold
sterility when
animating empty spaces.
And what of light? Why is the image matrix washed out
by sunlight? Is
it simply a matter of physics, or something else. Is
the
disappearance of images when exposed to the light of
the sun certain
evidence that images are also possessed of the spirit
of the vampire.
And what of the future of the image in the age of
biotechnology?
The image is a gene machine, recombining, splicing,
mutating,
sequencing. No need to wait for the genetic
engineering of the body
because the image is already a gene sequencer,
mutating and mixing
culture patches.
That the history of the photographic archive of the
20th century has
now been safely interred in cold monument to the dead
image only
means that the final assimilation of human flesh and
the image matrix
is about to occur. In a culture of death, only that
which has been
buried is finally freed to live out the enigmatic
seduction of its
destiny.
A Recombinant Postscript
------------------------
~Saving the Future for the Image~
So then, a final question: What is the fate of the
image in the age
of the digital? Saving the image for the future? or
just the reverse:
"Saving the future for the image?" Consequently, the
urgent political
question: In the digital age--Saving the image for
whom?"
Saving the Image, therefore, for whom? and for what?
The real
question is not necessarily ensuring the
survivability of the image,
but of maintaining a cultural free and democratically
accessibility
to the images of the future. In effect, ensuring the
survivability of
an open future for the image. A digital future under
the global
control of the masters of the digital universe means
a future of the
image under the control of an acquisitive and
accumulative mentality
driven on by a strange, restless but nonetheless
relentless desire to
possess the future of the Image. Who will be the
guardians of the
images of the future? A Ted Turner color-your-world
future where
questions of accessibility to the electronic heritage
will be under
the control of all the (Bill) gatesways of the world.
A closed
digital future? Or an open digital future? Digitally
archiving images
of the future in which to access those images we will
have to pass
through a global networked multimedia market
centralized primarily in
the United States, or an open future free for
creative imaging.
Not just a technical question, then, of the challenge
of archiving
and curating the images of the digital future, but
now there is a
very real cultural struggle over saving the future
for creative
images.
In essence, the technical question introduced by the
move from
electronic to digital reality might well be the
implications of
digital technology for the electronic heritage. For
example, Curating
the Image in a thin/client future where networked
computer systems
make easily possible centralized storage of the
image-bank of the
world's entire film history: every film, every image
coded for easy
retrievability, and also, of course, coded for
instant digital
manipulation. A digital film bank, where if the
masters of the
digital universe have their way, will be much like
Blockbuster Video,
where a lot of independent, definitely not mainstream
films will be
quickly and silently exorcised from the electronic
future. A closed
digital future, shut down in advance by the
subordination of the
Image to a digital future acting at the behest of
private
accumulation.
Not then so much saving the Image for the future. In
the digital age,
that's increasingly a transparent question. But
saving the future for
the Image, asking the question of Images For Whom?
and Images for
What? is a political question. But it's a question
which speaks of
the life-and-death cultural struggle that will take
place over
democratic accessibility versus private intellectual
property rights
to the Images of the electronic future.
What's at stake is nothing less than our cultural
heritage in the
21st century. Perhaps that is what is really at stake
in these
stories about the death of the image: first of the
photographic image
through its entombment in a new reenactment of an
Egyptian cult of
the dead; and then of the electronic image as it
vanishes into the
specter of virtuality.
The Despotic Image or The Bored Eye?
------------------------------------
The digital age unleashes deeply paradoxical
tendencies in the
unfolding history of the image, moving simultaneously
between the
violent repression of the material memory of the
photographic image
and its recombinant recreation in the culture of the
digitized
imaginaire. Out of the ashes of photography under the
sign of analog
suddenly appears the phoenix of the digitized
image-machine. A
doubled story of repression and creation?
Or something else?
If today the image proliferates with such velocity
and intensity that
human flesh literally struggles to become the image
of its own
impossible perfection--witness the psycho-ontology of
cosmetic
surgery--then this might also mean that we are now
fully possessed
by the power of the image. Not possessed by the power
of the image as
something somehow ulterior, and possibly alien, to
human agency, but
possessed by the image as a fulfillment of human
desire, and perhaps
desperation. In a Copernican flip, we ourselves are
images to the
world surrounding us: designer bodies, rip-tide abs,
faces as
gestures, attitudes as probes, lips like invitations,
pouts like
refusals, eyes like a going under. Possessed by the
images once
thought as somehow safely alienated as
representations, we ourselves
have become founding referents to the simulacrum that
invades us.
A story of body invasion? Not really. Contemporary
society is no
longer the culture of the disembodied eye. Today, we
play out the
drama of our private existence along and within the
iris of the
image-machine that we once dismissed as somehow
external to human
ambitions. Our fate, our most singular fate, is to
experience the
fatal destiny of the image as both goal and
precondition of human
culture. As goal, the power of the image inheres in
the fact that
contemporary culture is driven forward by the will to
image as its
most pervasive form of nihilism. As precondition, we
are possessed
individuals because we are fully possessed by the
enigmatic dreams of
impossible images.
That we are possessed by the power of the image with
such finality
has the curious repercussion of driving the
image-machine mad. The
matrix of image-creation as its evolves from analog
to digital and
now to the biogenetic struggles to keep pace with the
capricious
tastes and fast-bored appetites of human flesh as an
image-machine.
It is the age of the bored eye: the eye which flits
from situation to
situation, from scene to scene, from image to image,
from ad to ad,
with a restlessness and high-pitched consumptive
appetite that can
never really ever be fully satisfied. The bored eye
is a natural
nihilist. It knows only the pleasure of the boredom
of creation as
well as the boredom of abandonment. It never remains
still. It is in
perpetual motion. It demands novelty. It loves junk
images. It turns
recombinant when fed straight narratives. It has
ocular appetites
that demand satisfaction. But it can never be fully
sated because the
bored eye is the empty eye. That is its secret
passion, and the
source of its endless seduction.
The bored eye is the real power of the image. It
takes full
possession of the housing of the body. It is the
nerve center of
flesh made image. It is the connective tissue between
the planetary
ocular strategies of the image-matrix and the
solitude of the human
body. The bored eye is bored with its (bodily) self.
That is why it
is always dissatisfied. It needs to blast out of the
solitude of its
birth-place in the human cranium in order to ride the
electronic
currents of the global eye. No longer satisfied with
simply observing
the power of the image, the bored eye now demands to
be the power of
the image. Which is why, of course, the archival
history of
twentieth-century photography can now be safely
interned. At dusk,
the eye of the image takes flight in the restless
form of the bored
eye forever revolving and twisting and circulating in
an image-matrix
of which it is both the petulant consumer and
unsatisfied author.
Ironically, the bored eye has itself now become both
precondition and
goal for the despotic image. Which is why images can
now be so
powerful precisely because they are caught in a fatal
miasma of
powerlessness before the ocular deficit disorder of
the bored eye.
The despotic image may demand attention as its
precondition for
existence, but the bored eye is seductive because of
its refusal to
provide any sign of lasting interest. A love affair
turned sour. With
this predictable result--the increasing ressentiment
of the digital
image: "Analog is having a burial and digital is
dancing on its
grave."
_____________________________________________________________________
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