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Subject: Article 105- The Image Matrix
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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
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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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