After the artefact: Post-digital photography in our post-media era

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After the artefact: Post-digital photography inour post-media eraGreg Shapleya

a University of Technology, SydneyPublished online: 03 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Greg Shapley (2011) After the artefact: Post-digital photography in our post-media era, Journalof Visual Art Practice, 10:1, 5-20

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JVAP 10 (1) pp. 5–20 Intellect Limited 2011

Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 10 Number 1

© 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.10.1.5_1

GREG SHAPLEYUniversity of Technology, Sydney

After the artefact:

Post-digital photography

in our post-media era

ABSTRACT

For the past decade or so there has been some talk about the end of the digital as we know it. So soon? we might be inclined to respond. Have not we only just gotten used to these newfangled devices with their distinct space-age terminologies? The concept of a post-digital offers the possibility of a profound, critical reflexivity that disrupts the myth of uninterrupted teleological progress and the slick, impenetrable digital surface. But what does this mean for photography, already consigned to the dustbin of history by theorists such as Lev Manovich who insist that, thanks to digital technology, we live in a post-media era? This article searches for the soul of photogra-phy in the murky world that lies just beneath the shiny facade of the digital.

For the past decade or so there has been some talk about the end of the digital as we know it. So soon? we might be inclined to respond. Have not we only just gotten used to these newfangled devices with their distinct space-age terminolo-gies? After all, high-definition TV and video are still on much of the middle class’ Christmas wish lists, our Internet speeds are still never fast enough and digital cameras are still getting smaller while the mega-pixel quantity hurtles ever closer to infinity. Surely we have a long way to go before we can pronounce the digital to be dodo dead (in the words of the Carpenters,

KEYWORDS

digitalpost-digitalpost-mediaFluxusWarholphotographyphotomediaglitchmedia artsnew media

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have not we only just begun)? But, like postmodernism and most ‘post’ move-ments, it is not about succession. The post-digital is about the emergence of a profound, critical reflexivity that disrupts the myth of uninterrupted teleologi-cal progress. It is about finding holes in the positivist propaganda and using them as an alternative way forward – doing what successive generations of artists have always done, creating the new from the rearrangement (distor-tion, corruption, extension) of the old (or the newer from the new, in this case, perhaps rendering concepts of newness redundant in doing so).

Post-digital is most theorized, it seems, in new media studies (and in particular, sound). Sound theorist and practitioner Kim Cascone (2004) has famously described post-digital audio aesthetics as being

developed in part as a result of the immersive experience of working in environments suffused with digital technology: computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out documents, the sonification of user-interfaces, and the muffled noise of hard drives. But more specifically, it is from the ‘failure’ of digital technology that this new work has emerged.

He goes on to say that ‘failure reminds us that our control of technology is an illusion, and revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them’ (Cascone 2004: 392–393). The post-digital picks holes in the propaganda of the digital, at the same time as it adds to its canon. As Ian Andrews says, ‘post-digital refers to works that reject the hype of the so-called digital revolution but it also refers to the continuation or completion of that trajectory’ (Andrews 2000).

But why sound and visual new media? Surely with the prevalence of both consumer and professional digital photographic equipment, a strong post-digital theory and practice should have arisen within photomedia. The answer may lie in Lev Manovich’s assertion that ‘In the last third of the twen-tieth century, various cultural and technological developments have together rendered meaningless one of the key concepts of modern art – that of a medium’ (2008: 1). In other words, we are not only in a post-digital era, we are in a post-media era as well, where digital technology has erased bound-aries between all mediums, effectively making the notion of photography redundant. New media is to step into this brave new world and act as a sort of ringmaster, making a coherent act of archaic categorizations. Sound has survived as a category of, or partner to, new media, but it is also distinctive (while it is possible to skip effortlessly between all types of visual media and between all types of sound media to the extent of the erasure of media, it is less easy to integrate sound and the visual while erasing both sound and the visual, and thus we are left with two meta-media that combine to create new media). This article intends to discuss the notion of a post-digital photogra-phy, but in order to do so we have to concurrently deal with the perception that photography is dead. If the digital indiscriminately consumes, perhaps the post-digital (in smashing the illusion) releases these poor historic souls of media past.

While the body of photography can be subsumed into a post-media colossus, one cannot so easily be rid of its soul, created alongside its technological development over the last century and a half. By its soul I am referring to its cultural, social and linguistic development. From early photography that knew nothing beyond the language of painting, through the media-specific work of Man Ray, to Robert Frank’s everyday images, to the digital post-photographic


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1. Darren Tofts (2005: 12–13) refers broadly to the influence of 1960s arts movements on new media art, while Owen F. Smith (2006: 136) writes that ‘even though much of Fluxus existed prior to the age of the computer, the Internet, the World Wide Web, hypermedia and hypertext, Fluxus’s activities and attitudes present many of the most important realizations of network culture, many of which we are only now rediscovering’. Johanna Drucker (2006: 35) writes that ‘The terms new media and digital technology became current in the context of the “information society” of the 1960s’. She goes on to say that counterculture sensibility promoting independent alternatives to the monopolized control of mass media also provided an impetus for art committed to intervention in telecommunications [in which there were] not only new materials and media to be engaged […] but a serious rethinking of the very idea of ‘art’ appeared on the edge of radical transformation. This shift is clearly evident in […] the writings of artists central to the Fluxus movement […].

(2006: 38–39)

manipulations of Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill; from the early debates over the legitimacy as photography as art, through Walter Benjamin’s writings about film as an anti-fascist tool, Roland Barthes’ endearing essays in Camera Lucida and Rosalind Krauss’ ponderings over the future of the photograph in a post-photographic era, photography has gone from being a mere mechanical tool for documentation to a highly flexible set of creative processes, all with diverse and sophisticated histories that have added an enormous amount to the visual vocabulary available to the artist.

If indeed all of the (post-)digital is post-media, then what happens to the photographic references within? Do they just become hollow signifiers to a disappeared referent, a mere pointer to a historical curiosity; or does the refer-ent indeed live on imbued with its history, engaged in a dialectical conversa-tion with the present in order to project a photographic future?

For decades there have been photographers who have cited cinema as an influence. From Cindy Sherman to Gregory Crewdson, photographers have mirrored, critiqued and satirized the Hollywood movie-making machine, and devised their own surreal piece of it, dramatic scenes and characters from epics that have never existed and never will exist. Producing cinematic photo-graphs is not a new phenomenon. Using the moving image to invoke the still, however, has a more recent, more experimental, history.

Up until the 1960s (with, perhaps, the exception of the Dadaists) photog-raphers could have been considered the economists of image production. They wanted bang for their buck, trying to fit as much symbolic imagery into the frame as possible and then some by implication. The Fluxus artists, in their attempt to critique and decommodify all art (beginning with music and performance, then moving on to film) were one of the first art (or anti-art) movements to reverse the relationship, demanding sparseness not only within a given frame, but across multiple frames, undoing what Andrea Thoma has called ‘photogra-phy’s capacity to condense’ (2006: 86). Sparseness, through a sort of stretching of two-dimensional and three-dimensional material, thwarts the narrative that one can often read into photos and films, and disorients the viewer with regard to expected signifiers and visual resolution. Cited as a direct descendant of new media (if not its first stages – see, for instance, Tofts 2005: 12–13; Drucker 2006: 35, 38–39; Smith 2006: 1361), primarily New York-based Fluxus artists created a large number of short movies in which very little (if anything) happened in terms of narrative, and movement was confined to the playing out of an obvious, visible process.

John Cale’s work Police Car (1966) is a black and white film comprising two sections of approximately equal length (Figure 1). The first is simply a flashing light in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. The second is just two small lights flashing in and out of phase (in neither of these can a police car even be made out). It is reductive and minimal, but strangely hypnotic and compelling. Its simplicity and lack of narrative (or any structural devices aside from the timing of the lights and the placing of one of these bits of film after the other) mean that each of these two sections ends as it began. This stasis gives it an almost hyper-photographic quality. That is, it looks more photo-graphic than most photos that imply movement, narrative etc.

Another one of these short movies is Yoko Ono’s Eyeblink (1966) (Figure 2). Again black and white, this movie is a portrait of half a face. It lasts for about 25 seconds, during which time Yoko Ono’s eye moves from being three-quarters closed to open (the footage itself was shot by a high-speed camera at 2000 frames per second and is a view of part of an Eyeblink


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Figure 1: Police Car, John Cale (1966).

Figure 2: Eyeblink, Yoko Ono (1966).


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[MacDonald 1989: 3]). Unlike the Cale film, the emphasis is not on stasis, but on very slow, almost unnoticeable movement. It is equally process orien-tated, but it ends somewhere ever so slightly different from where it began. It thwarts both our anticipated notions of portrait photography and the motion picture; it contains motion, but it barely moves (like the slo-mo newspa-per that signals an impending splattering of an oblivious fly or the smooth-tracking eyeballs of paintings in scary movies, the brilliance of this work is in its ability to be able to feign stillness while being in the throws of intense motion). According to Hannah Higgins, Eyeblink renders an almost invisible experience (the blink of an eye) visible through the ‘protracted representation of a space between normative visual experiences [an open eye and a closed eye]’ (2002: 22). But this protraction creates another invisibility, that depend-ent on prolonged attentiveness. It is not so much a matter of ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ any more, but ‘lose concentration and you’ll miss it’.

Around the same time, Warhol was experimenting with ‘anti-film’ (as he called it), beginning with ‘Sleep’ (1963), a five-hour movie of one person, asleep (Figure 3). He followed this up with Empire (1964), an eight-hour epic of the Empire State Building from a single point of view (Figure 4). These movies were about the minimization of movement within a format that demanded action. They are photos that go for hours, movies that should exist in single moments. They employ movie trickery (a ‘running time’) to make you endure an image for more than just a few minutes. They take the requirement for prolonged attentiveness to extremes.

According to Stephen Koch, Sleep ‘consolidates its quiet, implosive strengths by numbing itself in paradoxes of movement and stillness […] One

©2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

Figure 3: Sleep, Andy Warhol (1963). Sleep, 1963 Andy Warhol, 16mm film, black & white, silent, 8 hours and 5 minutes at 16 frames per second.


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can understand movement as stillness, stillness as movement’. He goes on to talk about Duchamp’s influence on Warhol, stating that Duchamp’s (and, by association, Warhol’s) ‘whole polemic seems dominated by a wry, tightly controlled, but very deep thirst for silence. For stillness’ (Koch 1973: 37). On Empire, Koch refers to Baudelaire, who:

spoke of preferring to look at the chandelier hanging from the theater ceiling rather than the play. It is easy to imagine that tilt-up of the Warholvian camera from stage to chandelier as the actors drone on […] Empire is a massive, absurd act of attention, attention that nobody could possibly want to give or sit through […] Indeed, nothing could possibly tolerate it – and here’s the point – but a machine, something that sees but cannot possibly care. The film completes Warhol’s Duchampian dehumanization of the cinematic eye.

(1973: 61)

In film it is usually not only the subjects that move. Movie film allows for the camera to have agency, to assert its subjectivity and to focus on what it wants to focus on, and when it wishes that focus to occur. Warhol removes this func-tion (or at least reduces it to a bare minimum) by treating each take as a still photo. In Empire this means one gruelling eight-hour shot (even though there are different takes due to the technological limitations of film, he treats them with continuity). In Sleep the camera does move with each new roll of film, but stays static within each roll. In this way he further invokes, not just the still of the photographic, but an early misconception of photography – that of

©2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

Figure 4: Empire, Andy Warhol (1964). Empire, 1964 Andy Warhol, 16mm film, black & white, silent, 8 hours and 5 minutes at 16 frames per second.


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it being nothing more than a mechanical eye. It ‘reinstates the camera in its condition of being a dead machine’ (Koch 1973: 32).

Both the Fluxus and Warhol movies intentionally use low-end stock (16mm) for two reasons that I can think of. The first is as an anti-elitist statement – a dare to young artists (and ‘anti-artists’) to indeed try this at home – to challenge the Hollywood machine. It is an attempt (in line with Fluxus decommodification) to devalue the image to a point of worthless-ness. By the end of eight hours of watching the Empire State Building on scratchy, badly developed, low-resolution stock would you really be pining to see it again? Could it (the film or the building) ever be seen again as something out of the ordinary, something with value beyond that of scrap paper? Every second that these movies continue on beyond a few minutes surely devalues the currency of the moving image, but perhaps in doing so a photographic soul is instilled into the experience, an appreciation for the still of the moment.

If there is a link between Warhol and Fluxus (noting that the rhetoric of the time would have them worlds apart: Warhol supposedly embracing commer-cialism and popularism while Fluxus did the reverse), it is the ‘then emerging aesthetic of minimalism’ (Verevis 2002). Artists like Cale moved freely between Fluxus and Warhol’s Factory scene via the music minimalism of composer La Monte Young, amongst others (Cale was in Young’s ensemble, The Theater of Eternal Music and the iconic Factory house band, the Velvet Underground). This early music minimalism can be described in many of the same terms as both the Warhol and Fluxus movies. Although a temporal medium (like film), it attempts stasis (Strickland 1993: 122–123), the content is stripped back to a bare structural essence, and the works are often long. Appreciation (or enlightenment, even) is not attained through following a narrative or through the resolution of a climax. Like a photograph, the whole is to be consumed at once, and this consumption is (somewhat paradoxically) of the moment. While a more in-depth exploration of music minimalism and photography is definitely warranted, this would be too much of a digression for this article. I merely note the significance of it in relation to the two visual arts movements I have so far looked at.

The second reason they used low-end stock was to bring the audience closer to the medium. Perhaps the static imagery serves only as a backdrop to the real performance – that of the deeply flawed (and thus idiosyncratic and interesting) photographic material and material processes. With small-format films you begin with the inconsistencies in grain (enhanced by the slow running speed of these films – sixteen or eighteen frames per second). Add in the dust and scratches that inevitably accumulate with each playing, and filming and processing anomalies (such as the ghostly images that appear in Empire as a result of a lighting error at the start of some reels), and you have new experience where the image itself acts as but a sounding board for a possibly more interesting performance of media. Adding weight to this idea that artists were beginning to think of the media as the message (an idea articulated most strongly by media theorist Marshall McLuhan [1964: 8]) is another Fluxus movie, Zen for Film (1965) by Nam June Paik. This film is 23 minutes of imageless film leader. Dispensing with the image altogether, Paik created a work that relied solely on the deterioration of the media for its content. Each time this leader is played it accumulates dust and scratches that are only seen in future ‘performances’. This revelation of media antici-pates the post-digital by three decades. In post-digital forms, such as glitch


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and databent art, the obvious, intended output is subverted; the shiny CD is scratched, the Photoshop computer file is opened into a sound program. Just as Paik was not really interested in the look of perfect leader film, neither are post-digital artists interested in the ‘surface’ sound or look of the digital media. It is the fallibility and changeability of the underlying media make-up (and consequential endless possibilities) that have intrigued both (see Cascone 2004: 292–293 and Thompson 2004: 212).

Ina Blom uses Zen for Film as an obvious example of what she calls bore-dom and oblivion:

Boredom appears when a fixed form – with its ‘individuality’ or ‘Eigenschaft’ – is subjected to endless repetition. But this repetition, which necessarily entails oblivion, the forgetting from one moment to the next, also exposes the form to a process of wear and tear. The form gets dissolved in repetition […] It demonstrates how something must be transformed or lose its boundaries in immersion.

(1998: 83)

The obvious question to ask is, if something repeats at high speed giving the illusion of stasis (a term that implies both a lack of meaningful, directed movement and an absence of narrative), to what extent can we claim that it is actually repetition? If the answer is that we cannot, then repetition is only possible through replaying of the entire work. This way of looking at this type of work can only strengthen the photographic element.

If the media is the message, as the Paik piece would suggest, then surely that contradicts the importance of the photographic in these types of experi-mental works (and by extension, post-digital art). But Zen for Film (like simi-lar works in other media, such as the ‘silent’ musical composition 4’33” by John Cage) can really only be done once before the extremities are reached. To try and duplicate them (that is, works based on notions of ‘boredom and oblivion’) and the adrenaline rush they can initially create may induce real boredom without the redemption of oblivion.

The photographic imagery (whether that of the Empire State Building or someone sleeping) mixes with the raw media to create an experience in which your mind jolts back and forth between evidence of media (grain, scratch, dust etc.) and the near-static imagery. In effect we have two different, conflicting time frames occurring concurrently: the stillness (or at least slowness) of the intended imagery whose changes can be measured in hours, and the erratic fervour of the media, whose changes are measurable up to eighteen times per second. This transcendence, this teetering between media and matter, perhaps, becomes a dominant point of interest, thus reinstating the photo-graphic presence (or soul) as an important part of these works.

So far we have discussed the photographic soul and the foregrounding of media in terms of the pre-digital (or more accurately from where we stand, the proto-post-digital). While I am keen to talk about the photographic soul in terms of the post-digital (significantly, our era), I will just mention an example of this phenomenon in the digital (that is, works that still attempt to maintain the myth of the slick digital surface) in order to demonstrate its robustness in the face of technological revolution.

Robert Wilson is best known as an experimental theatre director and designer, but in 2004 he was commissioned by high-definition broad-caster Voom HD to create a series of video portraits of celebrities including


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Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, Marianne Faithful, Brad Pitt and Winona Ryder (Figure 5). Highly theatrical, and surreal, these video loops playfully juggle notions of photographic portraiture with the motion and sound expected of the video medium. They ‘pulse with movement that ranges from languid to barely perceptible’, according to an article in Millimeter magazine: ‘In some cases, the pixels seem to move more than the subjects do’ (McAuliffe and Wisehart 2007). The clip of William Pope. L is indicative of Wilson’s sense of style and humour. An article in the Miami New Times describes it as follows:

The writer and performance artist lies prone on a manicured lawn, sporting skivvies and combat boots. His body is covered in pancake makeup and a crown jauntily rests on his dome. He regally holds up an egg in one hand as a plush toy lamb [barely recognizable as such] sits on the grass near his crotch. As one waits for some movement, the lamb suddenly puckers up and bleats, ‘Mary had a little me[eee]’, in the subject’s own voice.

(De Jesus 2008)

The crux of all of the works is this contrast between the motionless photo-graphic (or ‘still life’) and the banal filmic (or ‘real life’). According to the media release for the Sao Paulo leg of the exhibition, ‘Initially, the final result may look like a still photograph. But then, the sitters perform a simple act – a small movement, a blink, a tap of the foot – and the experience of watching them changes entirely’ (Art for The World 2008). Enhancing this contrast (both the stillness and precious motion) is the seamlessness with which all of these loops repeat. They have ‘undergone meticulous editing, and are looped so there is

Figure 5: Robert Wilson Video Portrait: William Pope. L, Robert Wilson (2005).


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2. Exhibited at Don’t Look Gallery, Dulwich Hill, 25 March–4 April 2009.

no discernible beginning or ending, creating an endless framed work of art’ (Art for The World 2008). This lack of a break in the loop (a jerk that would make the viewer acutely aware they are watching a motion picture) reinforces the intent of the artist to (for much of the time) invoke the history of photo-graphic portraiture and the soul of the photographic. A feature of the photo is its continued existence – its ability to (although perhaps representing a fleeting moment) be as permanent as a block of marble. To tap into photography’s soul, the artist feigns, not only stillness, but permanency of the medium as well.

Andrew Newman is a young Australian new media artist who has only ever used digital technological processes in his student and professional work. It is perhaps typical of a younger generation of artists who have grown up with the digital that they do not see it as being extraordinary or as a ‘better’ of the analogue (or non-digital) equivalent as older new media artists may (nor do they sentimentalize the good ol’ days). They are therefore more likely to attempt to transgress the shiny facade of the technology and look for some-thing deeper. Like the Fluxus artists and Warhol, this often leads to an explo-ration of the media itself. Scrutiny of the digital media is different from that of non-digital in one major way – the digital also contains its opposite, that is, the digital code is embedded unrecognizably within a physical media that is non-digital. It is the exploration of this transgressive, abject, liminal world that forms the basis of post-digital art, and that which differentiates it from the more transparent processes of the previous Fluxus and Warhol examples that I have labelled the proto-post-digital.

Newman uses a variety of media, although mainly centred around video technologies. His subject matter is often himself, through which he interrogates notions of existence and communication – his work is an attempt to under-stand the world and his place in it. This very notion of a focal point, where he places himself at the centre of the universe, is inherently a photographic one. His video portraits (in such works as ‘How are you, Hotel Waterloo?’ and ‘Revolution Project No. 2 (Call to Arms)’ [both 2006]) are attempts to flesh out facets of his character (or the characters he is playing – there is often no differ-ence). They are a dive into the psyche. We stare at them in the same way we stare at a still image – we look for enlightenment, not through narrative but through the hope that whatever has been there all along, brooding between the literal image and the technology of the media, will hit us – that we will understand. It is not through motion that this occurs, it is through stasis, through a contemplative investigation. This is also where the photographic soul and the post-digital intersect. The point where the aesthetic beauty of the image reveals its constitution to be an ugly proletarian medium.

Newman’s work Comings and Goings: the entrances and exits of Andrew Newman (2009)2 began as a way to document his working life as an artist as one would might as an office or factory worker (Figure 6). Using a webcam instead of a Bundy clock, Newman programmed his computer to take a single shot of him each time he entered and left his studio. On a blog especially set up for this project (http://comingsandgoings.net), he displayed these photos along with a commentary about what work he was intending to do (when he entered), and what he had actually gotten done (upon leaving). The images, these crude traces of his artistic labouring, are not just about Newman, however. Following Oscar Wilde’s witticism that ‘criticism is the sincerest form of autobiography’, these images reveal just as much about the process of documentation as they do about their intended subject through the revelation of flawed media (and related technologies).


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Figure 6: Comings and Goings: the entrances and exits of Andrew Newman, Andrew Newman (2009).

The first thing we notice about these images is the varying levels of blurring. All are ‘soft’ but a number of them are nearing abstraction. The webcam is a cheap lo-res video camera and as such is not so great at taking one-off snaps. The focusing takes a moment to respond. If it is being used for a video this is not a problem; you simply notice that the image comes into focus, forgiving the initial, momentary blur. In this case, the camera is in the process of focusing when the one-and-only image is taken. This process is dependent on lighting, distance, previous focal point and what else the computer happens to be doing at the time. Also dependent on light is the motion blur you see in some of the photos (in one image Newman appears almost transparent, indicating that he may have been moving fast, but also that the light must have been low enough to warrant a slow shutter speed). Other points of interest in these images are more natively (post-)digital, like the coloured cast (an orange ghosting) that appears behind Andrew in one image, and the camera’s or computer’s rough attempts to normalize the white balance (leading to different casts across each image, from blue to green to yellow).

In a way, this is a very subtle use of the post-digital (and arguably not even that digital – for instance although the focusing is controlled by soft-ware, it is, after all, still a mechanical task). It is not a harsh and heady ride into the depths of pixilation or compression artefacts, but it does demonstrate


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3. Exhibited at In Flight Gallery, Hobart as part of the ‘Map/Ground/Grain’ exhibition, 1–22 August 2009.

the capability of artists to extract the photographic soul from the post-media soup bowl, creating something new (something post-digital) in the process. Newman’s images of him performing a mundane, pedestrian task are given new meaning when we are forced to consider the processes of documenta-tion, which, thanks to technological flaws, are rendered visible.

The last example I will briefly offer is an indulgent one, being one of my own works: In My Frontyard (2009)3 (Figure 7). This piece comprises six 10.5-inch digital picture frames, each one showing a ten-minute clip of a person standing in their front yard. It is a textbook example of video being used to capture photographic portraiture, and began after I saw a short video that was supposed to be still. Without going into too much detail, a 30-second clip was rendered after the reluctant photographer had used their cheap consumer-model digital camera on the wrong setting (video instead of still). I found these results to be compelling so I set about doing a number of these. I approached strangers in their front yards and asked whether I could take ‘a few snaps’, during which time I would take a short video instead. For this to work I needed to use a similarly cheap consumer-model camera. This, combined with the formatting restrictions of consumer-model digital picture frames, inevitably invokes the post-digital (in the same way that the 16mm Warhol films bring us closer to the media).

The final aesthetic has all the ‘worst’ hallmarks of impenetrable digital technology, made fallible by the need for cost-cutting and portability. Although all movement is slight (as the subjects are all trying to ‘hold a pose’), the compression artefacts dance to their own beat, demanding their presence be felt as legitimate graphic elements. The colour is highly distorted, the camera sensors unable to deal with harsh contrasting afternoon light. In at least two of these videos violet streaks inexplicably run down the screens from blown out areas of the imagery (we can only hazard a guess as to why this is – more

Figure 7: In My Frontyard, Greg Shapley (2009).


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sensor-related distortion, bizarre compression artefacts or something else?). Both of these examples are definitely on the more representational (and subtle) side of the post-digital spectrum. But they do reveal this gestalt, this hinge, between the post-digital and the photographic soul (not lost to the post-media Leviathan as is sometimes thought).

Time in these clips only serves to prolong the sense of agony showing up faults in both the media and the ability of the subjects to strike, and hold, a perfect photographic pose. As in the Warhol examples, there is a conflict between concepts of time: the static pose versus both media and subject imperfections, through which the soul escapes.

This article cannot conclude without a quick explanation as to why the concept of post-photography is not particularly relevant here (a postscript, or perhaps even a post-mortem, on post-photography). The material conditions for post-photography came about in the late 1980s as a result of the digital (although it had been a long time coming through the montaged and mashed up works of such artists as Man Ray, John Heartfield and Barbara Kruger). The digital has allowed for the image to be severed from its referent – re-contextualized and re-presented. The theory goes that notions of representational truth in photog-raphy have well and truly been destroyed in light of technology that recasts the image as a fluid entity (French 2000: 85). This theory is a particularly digital one, in that it still leaves the concept of a perfect or pure image unaffected by its underlying media (in fact, the image in the post-photographic, in some ways, is even more unadulterated than any other, as it is the aesthetic that has been freed).

To untangle this primarily 1990s phenomenon, it was not the digital camera that gave birth to the post-photographic, it was the scanner (digital cameras have only become sophisticated enough to be taken seriously in the last decade). Scanners were generally used to digitize portions of chemically processed images that were then manipulated and assembled in Photoshop. The combination of this hardware and software meant that artists were almost forced to supplement montage for photography. It is this (and not digital photography per se) that became the post-photographic. In the last decade a case could be made reasserting the dominance of the ‘untampered’ (and thus pre-post-photographic or neo-photographic) photo. Digital cameras, from ‘snap happys’ to Single Lens Reflex (SLR) and medium-format profes-sional models, now capture images quickly and in high resolution with noth-ing more than the press of a button. With little more than the press of another button these images can then be published online with no alteration to social networking websites and online photographic repositories. Rightly or wrongly, amateur and professional photographers alike are now beginning to reclaim the authenticity of their works.

The history of modern (non-digital) technology has been the history of the proto-digital, a teleological yearning for a perfection only possible in a world in which the media on which data is stored, and the associated technologies are rendered invisible. Like the mythical quest for the fountain of youth, once reached we discover that it is not all it is made out to be.

First, perfection is in the eye of the beholder. We have all learnt to be wary of automated processes on computers and other digital equip-ment. Whether noise reduction in sound programs or auto levels in imag-ing software, their suitability often comes down to individual taste, which cannot be based on one perfect model (even if a certain flexibility is built in). Second, the digital, despite promises to the contrary, still occasionally


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reveals its ugly underbelly. ‘Glitches’, from interruption of data flow and physical imperfections in physical media, jerk us violently between digital perfection and the harsh binary garble of digital storage. These result in CDs and DVDs skipping, digital television pixilating (accompanied by disrup-tive audio blips), and computer graphics being abstracted and distorted. We can also add to these the artefacts produced in sound and image as a result of compression and other compromises that consumer technologies incorporate in order to keep gadgets and formats small and cheap. Third, now that we are here (more or less), we are getting bored. There was (at first) nothing native about the digital. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s it was used to model the ‘real world’ (minus all the imperfections). By the mid-1990s artists wanted more, which resulted in two outcomes. The first was to become nostalgic and put the imperfections (or digital inter-pretations of them) back in. Thus we had a sort of reactionary analogue revival with familiar noise re-entering imagery and sound. The second was to recognize that the glitch could become a source of creative material. This took a profound re-interpretation of the place of the digital in history. No longer the end of the road, the digital is now melding with a sort of in-between area (neither analogue nor digital) forming the post-digital. What was thought to be the end of a long load – a search for perfection, may only turn out to be a milestone in this road.

Likewise, the notion of convergence (whose ultimate goal is reached in Manovich’s post-media world) is met with other reactions (perhaps equal and opposite). The photographic body, which for so long has had the soul of photography to itself in all but the most experimental of works, may have been subsumed by post-media, but in doing so has had to release its soul, which is now free to wander assuming a variety of forms (from film and video to cyber-spatial incarnations). It is perhaps most powerful, though, when it is able to hold up a mirror as it goes, interrogating its own constituency, and revealing a disjuncture between what it is representing and its ‘datafied’ underbelly.

REFERENCES

Andrews, Ian (2002), ‘Post-digital aesthetics and the return to modernism’, http://www.ian-andrews.org/texts/postdig.html. Accessed 20 May 2008.

Art for The World (2008), ‘VOOM Portraits: Robert Wilson’ (press release for the Sao Paulo leg of the exhibition: SESC Pinheiros, Sao Paulo), http://www.artfortheworld.net/wwd/2008/voom_portraits/VOOM_PORTRAITS_press_release_sesc.doc. Accessed 15 October 2009.

Blom, Ina (1998), ‘Boredom and Oblivion’, in Ken Friedman (ed.), The Fluxus Reader, Chichester: Academy Editions.

Cascone, Kim (2004), ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’, in Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (eds), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, New York: Continuum.

Drucker, Johanna (2006), ‘Interactive, Algorithmic, Networked: Aesthetics of New Media Art’, in Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (eds), At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, Cambridge: MIT Press.

De Jesus, Carlos Suarez (2008), ‘Moving Pictures: Robert Wilson’s cutting-edge portraits bring something new to the frame’, Miami New Times, 29 May 2008, http://miaminewtimes.com/content/printVersion/1019356. Accessed 1 November 2009.


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French, Blair (2000), ‘The End of Photography as We Know it?’, in McDonald Ewen and Judy Annear (eds), What is this Thing called Photography?, Sydney: Pluto Press.

Higgins, Hannah (2002), Fluxus Experience, Berkley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Koch, Stephen (1973), Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films, London: Calder and Boyars.

Mcauliffe, Tom and Wisehart, Cynthia (2007), ‘Plasma Portraiture’, 1 May 2007, http://digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/depth/plasma_portraiture. Accessed 1 November 2009.

Macdonald, Scott (1989), ‘Yoko Ono: Ideas on Film: Interview/Scripts’, Film Quarterly, 43: 1, pp. 2–23.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, NY: McGraw Hill.

Manovich, Lev (2008), ‘Post-media Aesthetics’, What is Info-Aesthetics?, (an online ‘open source’ publication, to be published by MIT Press in 2009–2010), http://manovich.net/DOCS/Post_media_aesthetics1.doc. Accessed 5 November 2009.

Thompson, P. (2004), ‘Atoms and Errors: Towards a history and aesthetics of microsound’ Organised Sound 9: 2, pp. 207–218.

Smith, Owen F. (2006), ‘Fluxus Praxis: An Exploration of Connections, Creativity, and Community’, in Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (eds), At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Strickland, Edward (1993), Minimalism: Origins, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Thoma, Andrea (2006), ‘The making of “place” to enable memory’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 5: 1, 2, pp. 83–93.

Tofts, Darren (2005), Interzone: Media Arts in Australia, Fishermans Bend VIC: Craftsman House.

Verevis, Constantine (2002), ‘Andy Warhol, Senses of Cinema’, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/warhol.html. Accessed 10 November 2009.

Whitelaw, M. (2003), ‘Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism’, Contemporary Music Review, 22: 4, pp. 93–100.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Shapley, G. (2011), ‘After the artefact: Post-digital photography in our post-media era’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 10: 1, pp. 5–20, doi: 10.1386/jvap.10.1.5_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Greg Shapley teaches in Media Arts and Production at the University of Technology, Sydney and in Photomedia at Sydney College of the Arts. He was Director and Curator of Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery, Dulwich Hill, and a practicing artist.

E-mail: [email protected]


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IMAGE CREDITS

Figure 1:Police Car, 1966John Cale©Jonas Mekas/Re:Voir Photo by Jeff Guess.

Figure 2:Eyeblink, 1966Yoko Ono©Jonas Mekas/Re:Voir Photo by Jeff Guess.

Figure 3:Sleep, 1963Andy Warhol, 16mm film, black & white, silent, 8 hours and 5 minutes at

16 frames per second©2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie

Institute. All rights reserved.Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

Figure 4:Empire, 1964Andy Warhol, 16mm film, black & white, silent, 8 hours and 5 minutes at

16 frames per second©2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie

Institute. All rights reserved.Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

Figure 5:Robert Wilson Video Portrait:William Pope. LWriter and Performer, 2005Music by Xavier Naudascher. Voice by William Pope. LProduced by Dissident Industries, Inc.Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Figure 6:Comings and Goings: The entrances and exits of Andrew Newman, 2009Andrew Newman

Figure 7:In My Frontyard, 2009Greg Shapley


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Documents

After the artefact: Post-digital photography in our post-media era