## HOW TECHNOLÓGOS 'RESPONDS' TO WHAT USED TO BE CALLED 'IMAGES.' A MEDIA-ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESPONSE TO THE 'QUESTIONNAIRE ON THE CHANGING ONTOLOGY OF THE IMAGE'

## Wolfgang Ernst

## LIBERATING THE IMAGE FROM ITS ANTHROPOCENTRIC DEFINITION

'Traditionally we think of images as [...] delimited phenomena that  in  one  way  or  the  other  appear  to  the  human  mind  and apparatus of perception' (Questionnaire). The choice of words in the Questionnaire is indicative already. When optical physiology and  cognitive  image  sensation -from  the  'analogue' camera obscura -like eye to the almost 'digital' signal-computing brain -is observed closely, 1 image processing within the human turns out as, indeed, a function of an 'apparatus.' Sigmund Freud's nonmetaphorical concept of the psychic 'Apparat' in chapter VII of his Interpretation of Dreams 2 explicitly compares the preliminary stages of imaging to the microscope, or to photography. 3 The mechanistic  approach  reemerged  in  protocybernetic  research into the electrical circuit simulation of neural image perception. 4 The human 'mind and apparatus of perception' (Questionnaire) literally  became  a  nonhuman  machinery  in  Rosenblatt's computational  Perceptron,  liberating  the  'image'  from  its physiological anthropocentrism. 5

Machine  vision,  so  far,  stayed  profoundly  different  from human image cognition. But technical images as outputs from Artificial Neuronal Nets start to challenge, and to emulate, the human imaginative potential, once they are not only trained by human tagging, but (in a more complex way) by rivalling machines among themselves which are fed with big data derived from 'social media.' Just like Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, in his 1766 treatise Laokoon ,  had  almost  identified  the  aesthetic  properties  of  the visual arts as parallel perception ( aisthesis, in  the  Aristotelean sense)  of  coexistent  units  in  space,  today,  it  is  no  coincidence that  'deep'  machine  learning  takes  place  in  parallel  graphics processing units (GPUs) that were originally developed for image processing in computers. Artificial Intelligence does not simply mimick human image perception (even if Van Gogh-like paintings produced  by  AI  are  gimmicks,  according  to  contemporary discourse), but more profoundly, it challenges the narcissistic view that humans are the only beings able to develop a semantic sense of imagery. The outputs of Artificial Neural Nets (such as the SelfOrganizing Maps), which are predominantly images, remind the human of the technicity of his, or her, image perception itself.

## THE 'NETWORKED IMAGE': TEXTUALITY, LITERALLY

The current 'intensification of what we might call the networkedness of the image' (Questionnaire), from a media-archaeological point  of  view,  is  an  externalization  of  the  inherently  'textile' essence  of  technical  image  production. 6 The  technical  image within media-archaeologies has already been networked from within, both materially and logically: as a tissue, which became techno-logical in Jacquard's programmable loom. The general theme  of  the  Dutch  Electronic  Art  Festival  in  Rotterdam  in February-March 2003, 'Data Knitting,' 7 reminded of this first proto-digital 'image' production in France around 1800, which soon  afterwards  provided  the  model  for  data  processing  in Charles Babbage's design of a first programmable computer.

## RE-ALPHABETIZING THE 'IMAGE': PIXEL ANALYSIS

A mathematical, computationally defined image is an arbitrary and physically improbable (therefore negentropic) configuration of picture elements. The pixel as the smallest conceivable digital picture element makes sense in an iconic way only when appearing within a group. Digitizing images is technologocentric. 'I want to  take  control  over  every  pixel,'  media  artist  Andreas  Menn once expressed in his experimental film about digital images titled Workout . 8 From here, new options for searching with(in) engines  emerge:  visual  search  with  precise  targeting  down  to each pixel in an image. Such an analysis can be set in motion by a sorting algorithm, which step by step deconstructs the image's iconological  meaning  by  rearranging  the  pixels  according  to color  similarity  values.  The Searching Images project  website expressed this by an enduring flash animation. 9

It  is  not  the  high  resolution  of  an  image  that  is  crucial  for its  digitized  reproduction  (or  rather:  transformation),  but  its addressability  at  every  discrete  pixel  element.  This  is  a  nonsocial approach, since it ignores the discursive implications of, for example, the painter's intention. With digitization, what has belonged  to  the  Humanities  so  far,  becomes  algorithmically 'inhuman.' Electronic face recognition identifies schemes, not individuals.  Once  translated  into  computable  numbers,  the memory of  art  from  the  cultural  past  invites  for  algorithmic analysis, such as pattern recognition (aka 'style'), in amounts previously unattainable for a single scholar.

## MACHINE VISION, AND ITS COLD (MEDIA-) ARCHAEOLOGICAL GAZE

In  its  escalation  from  passive  'analogue'  telecommunication to  algorithmicized  'digital'  intelligence  (in  all  senses),  the age of electronic signal transmission, storage, and processing, has  resulted  in  'a  proliferation  of  machine  imagery  that operates  independently  of  human  perception  and  cognition' (Questionnaire)  indeed.  What  cultural  aesthetics  used  to  call 'image' so far, radically transforms into a techno-mathematical image function. Such technically operative (rather than bodily performative) images have become 'images without a social goal' (Questionnaire). They relate to the 'cold media-archaeological gaze' instead.

The cold camera-eye gaze of tele visonary media relates to media-archaeological aesthetics. Friedrich Nietzsche's 'pathetic distance'  in  philosophical  analysis  insists  on  the  exteriority of  analysis,  as  opposed  to  hermeneutic  empathy.  Even  more rigorously,  this  corresponds  with  Ernst  Jünger's  aesthetics of  detachment  as  a  mode  of  perception  created  by  optical technology. 10 The  image  searching  software  of  the  company Cobion in Kassel, Germany, for example, once crawled the Web for  pornographic  child  abuse  images -this  task  could  have been painful for humans, but not for the machine. 11 The mediaarchaeological gaze is cold in McLuhan's sense of differentiating between 'hot' and 'cold' media -with the latter ones inviting a human receiver to participate actively when putting visual signal streams into relation(s). When media themselves become active archaeologists of data, the cold gaze of the machine is no longer an empathetic vision but an optical element in cybernetic feedback systems.

Does it make sense at all for media theory to metonymically apply the category of the human gaze to machine vision? Dziga Vertov, in his film The Man with the Camera , makes the cameraeye (the KinoGlaz) an agent of vision. In Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds ,  at  one  point,  the  camera  switches  to  the  birds-eye perspective from above, making the whole scene look completely different. But the overall perspective in this film is, technically, that of the camera 'eye' which is still an analogy to human panoptic perception. In techno-mathematical systems, however, the notion of seeing itself  becomes  metaphorical.  In  their  processing  of optical inputs as data, signals are radically abstracted. In such technologies,  'command,'  'control,'  'communications,'  and 'intelligence'  converge.  Cruise  Missiles  are  guided  by mapping prerecorded visual coordinates with what is actually perceived, like in GPS for navigation, where topological data, rather than images, are communicated. Such operative images are hardly even 'images' any more.

Media-archaeological 'vision' in fact corresponds with the aesthetics of technical image reading. The scanning beam itself is  an  actual  archaeologist  here,  as  in  the  case  of  detection  of underwater traces of ancient monuments. The search for the wrack of the ocean liner Titanic has been a true instantiation of such a submarine archaeology. While the gaze of the camera is able to search for pure evidence (in the sense of remotely sensing data), the human eye immediately confounds the visual impressions with imagination when it comes to 're-presencing' 12 such relics. 'Out  of  the  darkness,  like  a  ghostly  apparition,  the  bow  of  a ship appears [...] just as it landed eighty-four years ago,' reads the screenplay of James Cameron's Titanic , as the film director recollects his experience of the submarine search: 'Initially [...] I  was like the astronaut who experienced the moon as a series of  checklists  and  mission  protocols' -the  true  archaeological gaze. But 'at a certain point I abandoned 'the plan' and allowed the emotional part of my mind to engage with the ship. It made all the difference in the world.' 13 The gap between visual knowledge and  historical  imagination  seeks  to  replace  archaeological evidence  by  historicist  reanimation,  the  navigation  of  data -by hermeneutic empathy, just like sonar echoing in submarine archaeology  becomes  cultural resonance within  humans.  But let  us  not  confuse  data  with  imaginative  vision.  Sometimes the  iconological,  cultural,  or  historical  knowledge  of  image contextualization can hinder an operative insight.

## FOR A PHENOMENOLOGY OF MEDIA VISION FROM WITHIN TECHNOLOGY

Even if human visual impression is still the essential purpose of most image technologies, the actual events of optical signal transduction  and  digital  signal  processing  remind  us  of  a completely  different  inner-technological  insight  into  what  an 'image' is (or does). Its specific configurations reveal a different kind of media phenomenology.

Media archaeology looks at digital images not iconologically, but technologically. The 'cold archaeological gaze' recognizes the  digital  image  format  as  border-defined  functions  of  data manipulation,  once  they  have  been  sampled  into  the  digital regime by analogue-to-digital conversion, 14 or  when  they  are born algorithmically. Images thus become calculable, rather than narratable.

Media  archaeology  addresses  the  technical  aspects  of  the image, that is: 'as medium.' But even the term 'technical image' is actually misleading, since technology does not know images in the human sense. Let the image be rather defined mathematically, as  'a  real-valued  function  of  two  real  variables.' 15 Does  the 'image' therefore make sense (in its double meaning) only for human  phenomenology,  or  is  there  something  like  an  'alien' image phenomenon from the technical point of view? 16 'The term 'picture'  suggests  a  flat  object  whose  appearance  varies  from point to point.' 17 This variation has been a perceptual function of human vision so far, but now returns from within technology, where a spatial distribution becomes radically temporalized. 18 Already with electronic television,  it  has  been  the  human  eye only which finally integrates the 'flying spot' emanating from the cathode rays tube into an 'image' -while '[a] machine can capture the same image, without any consciousness or experience of the visual form.' 19 Is there something like the technologically 'implicit image'?

While human-made, body-linked images, as cultural techniques, cannot be 'liberated' from cultural semantics and (art)  historical iconology, 20 genuinely technically coded image actions 'do not represent an object' any more (Questionnaire), 'but rather are part of an operation' (Questionnaire). Such imaging is  no  longer primarily cultural iconology, but a truly technical iconology coming to its own, a 'log-icon,' 21 in Charles S. Peirce's sense of diagrammatic iconicity.

## 'ZOOMIFICATION' OF THE SOCIAL IMAG(IN)ERY, AND 'SOCIAL DISTANCING'

Techno lógos ,  while  oscillating  between  the  electrophysical real (matter) and the computational symbolical (programming), does  not  know  any  'imaginary'  in  the  psychoanalytic  sense. Images  in  computational  (aka  'new')  media  are  increasingly mediating  'social'  relations,  replacing  conventional  face-toface  communication  in  real  presence  by  telecommunication via interfaces. But there is nothing 'social' in so-called 'social media' any more, just communication in terms of engineering. 22 'Much social interaction has been referred to the interfaces of different real-time communication technologies, to the point that the social field is now largely constituted by the production and distribution of images' (Questionnaire). At first glance, it looks as  if  the  pandemic  crisis  has  accelerated  the  impact  of  global image  circulation  by  accelerating  digital  video  conferencing formats like Zoom. But the 'zoom' has become an opto-technical metaphor itself which lags behind the decisive transformation of  indexical  visual  media  against  total  datafic(a)tion.  While only a material camera lens allows for a truly optical zoom, the digital zoom 'adjusts the image in the camera itself [...], which is simply some in-camera image processing' which enlarges the image area at the center of the frame and trims away the outside edges. 23 The camera itself has no sense of the 'image' but only knows techno-mathematical image functions. The digital 'image' technologizes the visual image. Shouldn't the 'visual' here be put in quotation marks, or rather the 'image' itself?

In  media-archaeological  analysis,  the  former  'social  field' becomes a data matrix. A UK company Vivacity Labs company has  installed  a  thousand  of  surveillance  cameras  across  the country  for  the  permanent  registering  of  pedestrians,  bikes, and cars. Once transcribed into data, such optical signals can be interpreted by an Artificial Intelligence algorithm, in order to  predict  and  anticipate,  for  example,  a  traffic  jam. 24 All  of a  sudden,  the  Corona  pandemic  altered  the  function  of  this panoptical dispositive of dataveillance in favour of automatically controlling 'social distancing,' by modifying the algorithm to measure the prescribed distance between passers-by. Thereby vivacity itself (literally) becomes a technical function -in direct analogy to the Corona-warning (or -tracing) apps in smartphones on the basis of Bluetooth distance metrics that does not capture images of humans any more, but simply the data of their mobile communication  devices.  Ironically,  it  is  now  the  face  masks (meant  to  hinder  viral  contagion)  that  hinder  automated  face recognition which has been the concern of privacy protection so far. It is only anonymous data which are thereby generated. 'Discourse' becomes data traffic.

## HUMAN IMAGE AESTHETICS VS. ICONO-LOGICAL IMAGE PROCESSING

A  truly  techno-logical  ontology  of  the  image  takes  place  in computer  graphics.  The  most  radical  media-archaeological analysis is enacted by the machine itself, as an approach 'that challenge[s]  an  anthropomorphic  register'  (Questionnaire). Most  images  in  social  media  are  still  'indexically  derived' (Questionnaire) and thereby referenced to the human lifeworld. Such digital imagery is nothing but a mere 'extension of man' in McLuhan's sense. The digital image comes to its own, and starts to develop its own ontology, only when it is 'born' algorithmically.

'[T]he  advent  of  operative  images  and  machine  vision' (Questionnaire) changes the 'ontology' of the image (ibid.). In object-oriented  ontology 25 the  image  is  granted  a  nonhuman existence. But the question how 'we -as artists, theorists, critics, analysts,  etc. -conceive  of  these  changes  in  the  ontology  of the image' (Questionnaire) still limits the debate to the human cultural, or intellectual, sphere. The anthropocentric 'we' affirms the focus on human aesthetics. The 'image' stays bound to human culture as long as the analysis of such developments is restricted to human perception. But Walter Benjamin's diagnosis of 'profound changes in apperception' by photography, and cinematography, already assumes the point of view of the camera lens itself. 26

How, then, are works of art in the age of nonhuman imagery to be analyzed? 'Can they still be grasped within the established fields  of  visual  culture'  (Questionnaire),  or  by  art-historical iconology  (Erwin  Panofsky)?  The  analysis  of  the  'technical image' 27 rather requires a media-scientific approach. 28

## TRANSCODING THE IMAGE ARCHIVE

The contemporary image-space is no longer defined by cultural semantics, visual discourse, and body-related cultural techniques like  painting,  but  by  'the  very  conditions  of  the  work  of  art' (Questionnaire)  and  their archive (in  Foucault's  definition 29 ) change as they become grounded in nondiscursive technologies. '[...] the word 'la arché' in French [...] signifies the way in which discursive events have been registrated and can be extracted from the archive.' 30 From a computational point of view, this is not an archival metaphor, but what the microprocessor does in visual processing is, in fact, assigning the image its storage locations and providing them with addresses. A radical media archaeology of technical images studies such non -discursive conditions of an emergent visual formation.

The image archive, as a visual memory institution, has had a rather passive agency so far, depending on humans to enact the iconological meanings of the visual records. But with their current digitalization and -more importantly -algorithmization, which alters the conditioning principles of imaging, most conventional image collections become operative themselves, as assuming an active agency.

Even if the temptation is still there '[...] to replicate already known models like a database with standard field descriptors and an interface for public consultation mimicking the photo album,' 31 the alternative media-archaeological approach takes the digital scan at its face value. The digitization of an image is not simply a practical conversion from one format to another, but 'changes the ontology of the archive itself. [...]. The DNA of a digital image is a matrix of pixels that can be manipulated mathematically and allows for a very different set of operations' (ibid.) when compared to the traditional iconological art-historical approach.

With the pervasiveness of operational images and machine vision,  'more  and  more  images  seem  to  gain  meaning  and significance through their relationships with other images and from being networked [...]' (Questionnaire). Once an image has been digitized and therefore becomes addressable pixel by pixel, each of its elements can be linked, compared, and mapped upon elements in other images, resulting in a kind of alphabetization of image collections. Such hyperimages allow to navigate the image archive in unforeseen ways. Film works such as Eye / Machine (parts I-III, Germany 2001-2003) by Harun Farocki, who coined the term 'operational image,' 32 now themselves become subject to algorithmic experimentation in the archive.

## DISAPPEARANCE OF THE 'IMAGE OF MAN'

Let us finally return to the initial concern of the 'Questionnaire.' Not  only  the  exclusiveness  of human 'image'  perception  is displaced by the operative image, but the image of man as the author of images itself vanishes. In the notorious final remark of his Order of Things , Foucault predicts that the image of the human will disappear like the shape of a human face drawn into the sand at the sea shore. 33 In times of highly integrated microcomputer chips, this sand is indeed silicon, which dissolves the image of man by 'calculation' -literally 'counting with calculi, ' that is: with pebbles. The corporal image of man reappears on computer screens, but temporarily disappears in the actual medium channel. Foucault's apocalyptic metaphor becomes micro-temporalized by actual computing, which is recording, transduction, processing, transmission and storage of man as 'data face.' Such a machine imaging escapes human 'vision' all together. All that remains, for humans, is to learn circuit diagrams, and to read code.

WOLFGANG ERNST is Full Professor for Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Science at Humboldt University in Berlin. His current research covers 'radical' media archaeology as method, the theory of technical storage, the technologies of cultural transmission, micro-temporal media aesthetics and their chronopoetic potentials, and sound analytics ('sonicity') from a mediaepistemological point of view. Ernst's forthcoming book in English is entitled Technológos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology, & the Computational Machine (2021).

- 1 Such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optiks (Leipzig: Voss, 1867).
- 2 Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig: Deuticke, 1900).
- 3 As discussed by Jean-Louis Baudry, 'Le dispositif. Approches metapsychologiques de l'impression de realite,' Communications 23 (1975): 56-72.
- 4 See Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, 'How We Know Universals. The perception of auditory and visual forms,' Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 9 (1947): 127-147.
- 5 Frank Rosenblatt, 'The perceptron: a probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain,' Psychological Reviews 65 (1958): 386-408.
- 6 See Birgit Schneider, Textiles Prozessieren. Eine Mediengeschichte der Lochkartenweberei (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007).
- 7 See https://v2.nl/events/deaf03.
- 8 Academy of Media Arts Cologne, 1999, https://en.khm. de/studentische\_arbeiten/id.9986.workout.
- 9 Online in operation: www.suchbilder.de.
- 10 Ernst Jünger, 'Photography and the second consciousness,' excerpt from E. Jünger 'On Pain,' in Photography in the Modern Era. European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913 / 1940 , ed. C. Philips (New York: Aperture, 1989), 207-210.
- 11 'Daß Maschinen kein Empfinden haben, bedeutet in diesem Fall eine große Hilfe.' Sandra Kegel, 'Auf der Suche nach den verlorenen Kindern,' in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 20, 2001, 56.
- 12 See Vivian Sobchack, 'Afterword. Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past,' in Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 323-333.
- 13 Joel Avirom, Jason Snyder, James Cameron's Titanic , foreword by James Cameron (New York: Harper Perennial,1997), xii.
- 14 See Bernard Loriferne, Analog-Digital and Digital-Analog Conversion [FO La Conversion Analogique-Numérique, Numérique-Analogique , Paris 1976] (London: Heyden, 1982).
- 15 Azriel Rosenfeld, Picture Processing by Computer (New York: Academic Press, 1969), 1.
- 16 See Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
- 17 Rosenfeld, Picture Processing by Computer , 1.
- 18 See Timothy Scott Barker, Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Tim (Hannover, New Hampshire: Darmouth College Press, 2012).
- 19 Harun Farocki, 'Reality Would Have to Begin,' in Documents ½, trans. Marek Wieczorek, Thomas Keenan, Thomas Y. Levin (Fall/Winter 1992): 136-146.
- 20 For such 'culture-free images' see Claus Pias, ed., Kulturfreie Bilder. Erfindungen der Voraussetzungslosigkeit (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, forthcoming).
- 21 A neologism coined in Francesco Striano's PhD thesis Through the Screen. Towards a Philosophical Mediology (University of Turin, summer 2020).
- 22 As identified in the adaption of communication engineering to sociological analysis: Niklas Luhmann, 'Die Unwahrscheinlichkeit der Kommunikation,' in Soziologische Systeme, vol. 3: Soziales System, Gesellschaft, Organisation (Opladen: Westdt. Verlag, 1981), 25-34.
- 23  Website 'Dummies', accessed December 24, 2020, https://www.dummies.com/photography/digitalphotography/the-difference-between-optical-zoomand-digital-zoom-on-your-digital-camera.
- 24 Website 'Forschung und Wissen', entry 'Covid-19-KIKameras beobachten Social Distancing', accessed December 19, 2020, https://www.forschung-undwissen.de/nachrichten/technik/covid-19-ki-kamerasbeobachten-social-distancing-13374211.
- 25 See Levi R. Bryant, Onto-Cartography. An Ontology of Machines and Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
- 26 Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' [1936], in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1969), 217-251.
- 27 Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
- 28 For such an analysis, see Wolfgang Ernst, Stefan Heidenreich, 'Digitale Bildarchivierung: der WölfflinKalkül,' in Konfigurationen. Zwischen Kunst und Medien, eds . Sigrid Schade, Christoph Tholen (Munich: Fink, 1999), 306-320.
- 29 In his Archaeology of Knowledge (French original 1969), 'Foucault describes the archive in terms of the conditions of the possibility of its construction': Website 'Sparknotes,' accessed December 27, 2020, https:// www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/arch/terms.
- 30  'Dialogue on Power. Michel Foucault and a group of students,' in Quid , ed. Simeon Wade (Los Angeles: Circabook, 1976), 10.
- 31 Accessed December 11, 2014, http://sissv.activearchives.org/w/ Welcome\_to\_the\_Digital\_Darkroom.
- 32 See Trevor Paglen, 'Operational Images,' e-flux no. 59 (November 2014), accessed December 26, 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61130/ operational-images.
- 33  '[...] like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea': Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2009), 422.