## ONTOLOGY OF AN IMAGE

## Esther Leslie

Life begins with cells. That is the first chapter of every book on biology. Life is cells. Life has no existence before the cell. That is to say, it goes something like this: 'Cells are basic units of structure and function for all living organisms and the structural order in cells forms the basis for properties of life including interaction with  environment,  movement,  energy  processing,  growth, reproduction  and  evolution.'  The  cell  appeared  as  image,  as diagram, until it became represented in some more technological manner, which is, not to say photographed, strictly, but digitally apprehended. Recently, I have seen a human cell and its contents shimmering in purple, pink, green and yellow, and blue. What I have seen is 'an image of a cell' made by a biomedical animator, Evan Ingersoll, in association with biological chemist, scientific visualization researcher and artist, Gael McGill. Its lateral view shows the internal segments of a cell: perceptible are the cell wall, Golgi  apparatus,  mitochondria,  endoplasmic  reticulum,  and hundreds of protein structures and membrane-bound organelles. It is a Eukaryotic cell, which is found in humans, animals, fungi, and plants. The rendering of the cell -which can be clicked on, enlarged, manipulated, its aspects highlighted, its pathways and movements delineated -is  an  effort to recapitulate the myriad pathways  that  are  mobilised  in  signal  transduction,  protein synthesis,  endocytosis,  vesicular  transport,  cell-cell  adhesion, apoptosis,  and  other  such  biological  processes.  If  we  engage with this image, we can see ourselves at work, or perceive work and process underway inside ourselves in our smallest parts, the minimum point of life -or, if the cell is not us, and this one is not, of course, directly, then what we see is something that has not been seen before, in all its intricacy, and we should feel some intimate relation to it, if only because it has made so much effort to please us. Do we see the cell? Do we see something that is like the cell? Is the cell an image? Or do we see instead a diagram come to some sort of life, a model painted, dressed in some way? Is this what is presented to us: something known in itself that has been converted into something to be known by us?

There  is  no  cell  that  has  these  colours  in  this  way.  These wild colours, these sparkling effects. Like blossoms and golden threads and polystyrene crumbles and plastic flecks. There is no cell that comes to us like this, backlit on our devices with nothing surrounding it but the blackness or whiteness of its frame, the frame of liquid crystal in whatever flex you have chosen. There is no cell that appears to our eyes with each part defined and distinct and awarded a different colour, contrasting to maximum effect with those around it. The colour on this cell is a device that improves the clarity of seeing, for understanding and for its beautiful effect. This image is an image. This image is only an image. Or it is not an image. A cancer researcher at Stanford, Mahjabin Noorji, called it the 'most detailed model of a human cell to date.' It is a model. It is not an image. But it is made using imaging technologies. It was produced out of datasets from technologies that can gain access to the smallest areas. These technologies include X-ray microscopy, which can perceive a form, if it can be crystallised, and scatter X-rays  to  outline  its  structure  by  implication.  It  encompasses nuclear  magnetic  resonance  imaging,  which  produces  image information  through  measuring  the  absorption  and  emission of  energy  in  the  radiofrequency  range  of  the  electromagnetic spectrum.  It  uses  cryo-electron  microscopy,  a  flash  freezing procedure that fixes tiny biological structures in glassy ice. What all these technologies produce are timeless, spaceless images, or detached from singular time and space, because the image that results is a composite of many images, thousands of 2D snapshots of the object to be visioned, caught in random orientations, across many times. These things to be brought into the world of image do not inhabit it, if that image world is dependent on light. What is seen by the electron's capacity for sensing is smaller than the wavelength of photons, and thus is imperceptible to human vision. There is a process, many processes at work, in which, mysterious to  our  sense  of  things,  electrons  interact  with  nano-scale components, and retrieve something from that encounter. These processes in their multiplicity are brought back to the computer software: Digizyme, the vizualisation company responsible for the  cell  'landscape,'  founded  by  Gael  McGill,  used  Molecular Maya custom software, Autodesk Maya, and Foundry Modo to import, model, rig, populate, and render all structural datasets in three dimensions. All this software power becomes our route to seeing what has been seen in the realm of the unseeable. And then the word of aesthetics piles in -as bold colouring is applied, ostensibly,  in  the  name  of  labelling.  That  notwithstanding,  it is  also in the name of making it attractive for the purposes of gushing through social media -a process that also affects many humans and commodities. The image of a cell has a title, and this might lead us to think it is more like a painting or an artwork than a photograph. It is called 'Cellular Landscape Cross-Section Through A Eukaryotic Cell.' This is a landscape. It belongs to the tradition of landscape painting or landscape photography or film. Its enlargement is an invitation to linger within somewhere that has been envisaged and framed by the artist.

This image of a eukaryotic cell is an image with a referent, to which it  bears  a  relation,  shares  a  name  and  a  sense  of  itself. That  relation,  or  sense  of  itself,  has  become  conceptual,  and distinctly  aesthetic,  in  the  sense  that  it  has  become  beautiful, attractive  to  the  eye,  composed,  constructed,  enhanced,  and made into something akin to historical and humanised nature. This  aesthetic  of  vivid  colours  and  various  textures  means  it turns metaphorical. It looks like Delhi on the nights of Diwali, with twinkling lights, so say the people who discuss it on social media and pass it around their circles so that it makes ever greater ripples in the digital worlds of discussion and entertainment. It looks like a theme park, with the most elaborate of roller-coasters and water chutes and confetti blowing all around. It looks like the world in the future, with monorails and organic-styled buildings. And there were arguments on social media about whether this intricate design -like a city with museums and infrastructure and parks and housing and music venues -was evidence of the order and complexity of intelligent design or was proof of the messy organicism of nature evolving in bizarre and contingent ways. And this is an image of the tiniest of things that can become more than a city and more than a fairground. The image portrays what seems to be a world and it is an operative image, as is Google Earth. In Google Earth, the cosmos becomes small, able to be manipulated on a smart phone. This image, conversely, takes the smallest part and discovers in it a cosmos. We can click on any part and it will enlarge itself and allow us to wander amongst farflung ruins of this landscape that is so thoroughly mediated by technology -not least the ruins of our sense of vision, of what an image is and how we might apprehend it.

These  new  microscopy  technologies  of  multidimensional imaging have made it possible to research structure and process -to  bring  cell  behaviours  to  light,  while  tracking  of  epithelial morphogenesis  has  revealed  things  about  cell  migration and  interactions,  and  morphodynamic  processes  have  been identified in epithelial closure, tissue elongation, nervous system morphogenesis, stem cell maintenance, and tumour progression. Fluorescent transcriptional reporters are introduced into samples in  order  to  produce  signals  and  biomarkers  so  that  pathway activities and various types of cells and parts can be monitored -an image within that to be imaged, then, for purposes of analysis. Microscopes achieve finer detail and automated image analysis circumvents  the  human  eye  to  enable  rapid  screening.  What ontology then -what is  the  being,  the  existence,  the  presence of this image that is not an image, this thing that can be seen that  cannot  be  seen,  this  flatness  that  is  three-dimensional, this colourful confection that has no colour, the pattern that is recognised automatically and does not surface as image for us? What ontology? What image?

And I struggled to respond to this question: 'What is the ontology of the image?'. Ontology has such a dense aura hanging around it. Ontology seems to ask about something so fundamental that it cannot be accessed without heavy baggage, without extensive quantities  of  philosophical  knowledge  and  a  commitment  to classification,  which then insists -contra my inclinations -on being disaggregated from the messiness of processes and the contingencies  of  partiality.  But  then  it  all  resolved  itself  into itself as I realised that for those who look into the cell through these imaging methods ontology is relayed as something crucial. Cell  ontology  is  a  structured  controlled  vocabulary  for  cell types. Fundamental to the field of bioinformatics, ontology is the  process  of  outlining,  defining,  labelling  and  networking everything that is known about a subject in a hierarchy of terms and  relationships.  These  subjects  are  known  through  their imaging, which changes over time, but which is the vector of knowing both what exists in them and, as the imaging develops to include time and dimensionality into its capacities of visioning, what processes and relations exist. Unregarding of the decoration and confectioning that is a necessary adherence to the imagemodel  after  it  has  made  its  passage  into  the  world,  ontology for them, its maker-modellers, is a tool for the development of shared  understanding.  Ontology  for  those  who  work  on  data imaging in Life Science is a mode of description of metadata for an integrated database of optical and electron microscopy. It involves identifying concepts and proposing a way of classifying that which appears in terms that can be understood by all who are  concerned  with  it. 1 Ontology  is  a  name  for  a  very  good description -such that all that is factual might become theory, as Goethe put it. Ontology's processes begin by making a diagram with labels. Ontology is a model of all that is pertinent about the image-model. The image works only in as much as all its parts are identified and labelled. The image's ontology is a combination of factors divided into labelling within the concepts of Biosample, Screening,  Image,  Instrument,  and  Experimenter.  The  imagemodel that images life today is distributed across these various objects, conditions, locations, and moments. Would the aesthetic mediations, the colours and titles and functionality, feature in this  cataloguing? It is unclear. If such an image-model as the landscape of a cell is operative, it is operative in many ways and for various purposes. Its ontology concerns us, if we wish to use it to learn or analyse, but it concerns us too, if we want to know the distance between what is envisioned and what it envisions for us. What might all the preceding suggest for our -and others' -sense of ontology? For we catch this ontology at the point when it is moving somewhere else. It is shifting from description into design.  Cells  are  known  and  databased  in  order  to  facilitate bioengineering  in  synthetic  biology.  Modelling  of  the  forms detailed in the image of the cell -or less pleasingly aestheticized versions  of  the  same -are  used  within  machine  learning  to develop predictive bioengineering, in the quest for biofuels and increased crop yields, the combatting of disease, synthesis of drugs, non-meat meats, or other biomaterials. Ontology leads to a revolution in the image, to its hitherto unattested existence as and in the future, after becoming, in the realm of the yet to become, the logical discourse of what will be.

ESTHER LESLIE is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck. Her books include Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde; Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry; Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage; Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form , and the milk projects, Deeper in the Pyramid and The Inextinguishable (both with Melanie Jackson).

- 1 See, for example, Satoshi Kume, Hiroshi Masuya, Yosky Kataoka, Norio Kobayashi, 'Development of an Ontology for an Integrated Image Analysis Platform to enable Global Sharing of Microscopy Imaging,' October 2016, Conference: ISWC2016 The 15th International Semantic Web.