Köln – medieninitiative

“What if the camera / really do / take your soul?”

If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously claimed, then the so-called “selfie” may be less about the face that constitutes the recognizable content of such an image, and more about a deeper, less obvious form of material-aesthetic mediation with respect to the transformation of “self” in an age of ubiquitous post-cinematic cameras.

Clearly, such acts of mediation have many levels. On the one hand, we “stage” or “perform” our selves for ourselves and for our friends (and, of course, for our Facebook “friends”); at the same time, though, we do so with an awareness of the machinery of geolocated surveillance and algorithmic facial recognition systems that we feed and help to optimize with the offering of our selfies (and the metadata they contain). Is this a self-destructive tendency or an act of defiance? Do we taunt and shake our fists at the invisible all-seeing God of Hyperinformatic Imagery (or the NSA), heroically though baselessly asserting our autonomy despite our knowledge of its baselessness? Or is it just that we have resigned ourselves to the new “situation,” in which Berkeley’s maxim esse est percipi has been made a reality through a media-technical dispositif that renders superfluous the whole apparatus of angelic and divine perceptions that Bishop Berkeley still needed to keep his system from falling apart?

But the post-cinematic camera is a post-perceptual camera. Esse is now post-percipi in the sense that networks of digital and increasingly “smart” cameras are not just collecting images of “you” or “me” but instituting radical changes in the fine-grained, “molecular” scale of temporal becoming that subtends subjective (or “molar”) perception. As I have been arguing recently (see here, for example), post-cinematic cameras produce “metabolic images” — images that operate outside of visual or perceptual registers and modulate our pre-personal relations to the environment, directly influencing us at the level of our metabolic processing of duration and relation through which our embodied agencies are defined. This has to do with (among other things) the sheer speed of computational processes, which outstrip our own cognitive and perceptual processing abilities. But it also has to do with the affective density that post-cinematic cameras themselves accrue by virtue of the gap — what Bergson would call a “center of indeterminacy,” or simply a body — that these cameras install between the input and output of images, in the space of their microtemporal computational processing. On this basis, a synchronization of human and technical temporalities is made possible at the micro-level. And perhaps this is the hidden message of the medium: the selfie is not just a paradoxical performance of self (in the way that, say, reality shows problematize authenticity), it is in fact the product of a whole new ecology of agency, an ecology of anthropotechnically co-ordinated metabolisms invisibly subtending the visible images by which we seek to represent our “selves.”

With every selfie, we experiment with this interplay of visible manifestation and invisible infrastructure. Who can we be, now, and in relation to an environment filled with rapidly proliferating digital images, where everything is in flux, nothing apparently stable? Perhaps we encounter here, and try to dispel, an old fear in a new guise: that the camera is capable of stealing our souls — both through integration into systems of surveillance, and in the dissolution of our former agencies when set in relation to the molecular, metabolic processes embodied by the post-cinematic camera. In the words of Montreal-based indie rock band Arcade Fire:

What if the camera
Really do
Take your soul?
Oh no...

Hit me with your flashbulb eyes!
Hit me with your flashbulb eyes!
You know I've got nothing to hide
You know I got nothing
No I got ... nothing

Above, my own mixed-media “reflections” on the problem of the selfie in the age of metabolic modulation. Featuring artworks by Thomas Böing (Ohne Titel [Museum König], 2006), currently on display at the impressive Kolumba — Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne as part of the exhibition “show cover hide. Shrine. An exhibition on the aesthetics of the invisible,” which runs until August 25, 2014.

Metabolic Images

This Saturday, February 1, 2014, I’ll be taking another stab at the notion of “metabolic images,” which I’ve started developing in recent talks. My talk will take place at the University of Cologne in the context of a series of workshops titled (after Isabelle Stengers) “Ecologies of Practice: Media, Art, Literature,” organized by Reinhold Görling (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf), Marie-Luise Angerer (Kunsthochschule Medien Köln), and Hanjo Berressem (Universität zu Köln). Here is the abstract for the talk:

Metabolic Images

Shane Denson, Leibniz Universität Hannover

With the shift to a digital and more broadly post-cinematic media environment, moving images have undergone what I term their “discorrelation” from human embodied subjectivities and (phenomenological, narrative, and visual) perspectives. Clearly, we still look at – and we still perceive – images that in many ways resemble those of a properly cinematic age; yet many of these images are mediated in ways that subtly (or imperceptibly) undermine the distance of perspective, i.e. the spatial or quasi-spatial distance and relation between phenomenological subjects and the objects of their perception. At the center of these transformations are a set of strangely volatile mediators: post-cinema’s screens and cameras, above all, which serve not as mere “intermediaries” (in Latour’s terms) that would relay images neutrally between relatively fixed subjects and objects but which act instead as transformative, transductive “mediators” of the subject-object relation itself. In other words, digital and post-cinematic media technologies do not just produce a new type of image; they establish entirely new configurations and parameters of perception and agency, placing spectators in an unprecedented relation to images and the infrastructure of their mediation.

The transformation at stake here pertains to a level of being that is therefore logically prior to perception, as it concerns the establishment of a new material basis upon which images are produced and made available to perception. Accordingly, a phenomenological and post-phenomenological analysis of post-cinematic images and their mediating cameras points to a break with human perceptibility as such and to the rise of a fundamentally post-perceptual media regime. In an age of computational image production and networked distribution channels, media “contents” and our “perspectives” on them are rendered ancillary to algorithmic functions and become enmeshed in an expanded, indiscriminately articulated plenum of images that exceed capture in the form of photographic or perceptual “objects.” That is, post-cinematic images are thoroughly processual in nature, from their digital inception and delivery to their real-time processing in computational playback apparatuses; furthermore, and more importantly, this basic processuality explodes the image’s ontological status as a discrete packaged unit, and it insinuates itself – as I will argue – into our own microtemporal processing of perceptual information, thereby unsettling the relative fixity of the perceiving human subject. Post-cinema’s cameras thus mediate a radically nonhuman ontology of the image, where these images’ discorrelation from human perceptibility signals an expansion of the field of material affect: beyond the visual or even the perceptual, the images of post-cinematic media operate and impinge upon us at what might be called a “metabolic” level.

Not Yet Titled: Alles in Ordnung

This weekend I had the pleasure of visiting the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, which is currently showing an exhibit called “Adjusted,” comprising a range of works by the American “Pictures Generation” artist Louise Lawler, alongside an all new permanent exhibition called “Not Yet Titled: Neu und für immer im Museum Ludwig” [Not Yet Titled: New and Forever in Museum Ludwig]. Apparently, the latter is less a permanent exhibition in the traditional sense, and more a semi-permanent configuration of museum space whose contents are scheduled to change; accordingly, it is not so much the artworks on display at any moment that constitute the object of the exhibition but rather the museum itself, its spaces and practices of exhibition, so that “Not Yet Titled” seems to defer closure in the interest of staging a quasi-permanent exhibition of flux. That’s a fairly self-reflexive undertaking, as are many of the works on display, so it’s especially refreshing to see that the museum manages to combine all this heady cross- and self-referencing with a material lightness, an architectural and visceral deferral of (en)closure that is all too often lacking in exhibitions of postmodern and semiotically complex works.

One of the exhibition’s centerpieces, Barbara Kruger’s large-scale untitled installation from 1994/1995, which you see at the top of this post (but which you also have to hear in order to appreciate fully), is a case in point: the dense commentary on our media culture, its reflexive irony and intertextuality, are embedded in a space that is at once overloaded and threatening and yet therapeutically soothing as well. The ecstatic sounds of a crowd cheering at the absurd acceptance speech for some unnamed award, where the awardee thanks his God and plays with dictatorial slogans, brainwashing tactics, sexist stereotypes and racist claims of superiority — all of these we register cognitively and appraise their political significance, but the applause enervates us directly, dangerously, on this open stage that seems as if it were designed to highlight the problematic political phenomenology of contemporary spaces: While immersed in the installation, we are able to feel the rich ambivalence of its space, which invites us both to recognize the coded nature of experience while also experiencing something that feels like a space for reflection; but the most surprising aspect of the space can only be grasped later, in a snapshot like mine above: Kruger’s installation, which positively begs to be remediated in the form of a photograph (while flaunting the fact that it can never be captured or encompassed in one), immediately collapses into a flat background, against which the human figure inevitably seems to have been added in later with Photoshop. (I swear, the picture above has not been retouched!)

Not only in Kruger’s installation, but throughout the permanent and temporary exhibitions, it was space that, for me, constituted the true attraction. Lawler’s highly self-reflexive photographs of other artists’ artworks (de- and re-contextualized to highlight the significance of exhibition practices and spatial orders) vacillated between a challenging semiotic complexity and a pleasant, almost banal decorative quality within the large open spaces of the Ludwig. Particularly refreshing was the newly commissioned Tracings series, which carries Lawler’s self-reflexive and intertextual tendencies further but abstracts them, reduces, and contributes to a clear open space. In this series, Lawler’s photos of other people’s art are reproduced again, but now in the simplified form of black contour lines upon a white background, thus transforming the high-resolution photographs and rendering the works more iconic and approachable. These oversized coloring-book pictures, which we survey upon exiting the smaller exhibition rooms in the wide monochromatic space in which we access the stairs, refer, of course, to the images we saw downstairs, but they also seem happy enough to slip into the background and assume a more functional, properly architectural role that does not force any sort of dialogue or commentary. Likewise, Lawler’s new Stretch images, which take Andy Warhol’s famous Brillo boxes as their “subject,” blown up to gigantic proportions to occupy two complete walls with anamorphically stretched photos, emphasize the space of the museum — both as an institution and as a material environment.

All in all, the current showings at the Museum Ludwig offer lots of food for thought — for reflection on the politics, history, and institution of contemporary art, for theoretically guided musings on the relations of art to mass media and our changing media of reproduction, and for thought about our own place within these configurations. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re sure to be happy here. These exhibitions do more, though, as well, and something that many museums fail to do as they aim for more “interactive” forms of engagement (while misunderstanding “interactive” as “overstuffed and preemptively overladen with information”): namely, Lawler’s “Adjusted” and the (quasi-)permanent “Not Yet Titled” grasp the space of their own staging, clear it out for our experience, and remind us that we are bodies moving through space and time. Architectural space becomes affective space, and this affective space collides ambiguously with the content of the artworks displayed. The latter may make us know, on a cognitive and political level, that everything is not OK, but even just registering that in this wonderful space imparts a (not unproblematic) feeling, a not yet titled affect: “Alles in Ordnung” (irgendwie, vielleicht)…