Technovisual Formalism: Representation in a Digital Age
Karyl E. Ketchum
Diss call Technovisual Formalism: representation in a digital age
“Technology Gazing”
My digital video, “Technology Gazing” -- along with my larger dissertation project -- explores the changing relationship between form and content within the digital, or “flickering,” sign systems of contemporary visual culture – namely images. I argue that the way in which we make sense of the visual world is changing as our awareness of the ubiquity and instability of digitally mediated images grows. Within this new “technovisuality”, form and content can condition each other in highly political ways, working toward the creation of new ways of shoring up old forms of Othering through visibility.
The new ways of seeing made possible through visual technologies often seem to highlight the limitations of the eye, as they assert the supremacy of technologically mediated forms of vision as “above and beyond” it. Thus, in this new technologically mediated visual world the eye, it would seem, is obsolete. We are reminded of the eye’s obsolete status through the proliferation of new forms of vision and visibility made possible by technology. For example, images generated by way of satellite technologies remind us that the eye alone cannot capture images from the vantage point of space and cannot infinitely “zoom-in” or out to a particular geographic location; electron microscopic images remind that the eye cannot “see” nanostructures, or the seemingly ominously volatile “nanoworlds,” new mega-pixel images and recording devices highlight that the eye cannot on its own detect information embedded in an image in excess of 300dpi; and new conventions utilized in mass media remind that the eye cannot on its own “filter out “ visual information even for the sake of “protection” -- such as the growing use of exaggerated pixels to distort portions of images for the purposes of protecting either the viewer or the viewed (Abu Ghraib).
Technovisuality seems to be offering a superior new form of vision and visibility which -- to some extent -- leaves the eye, and perhaps by extension the body, behind, as a thing of the past. However, simultaneously, technovisual forms reinstate particularly virulent links between vision, objectivity, mastery and science, as the eye can no longer reliably “see” or lay claim to objectivity without the aid of technology… but with the aid technology such claims are renewed and even extended. The ways in which these linkages play out over the surfaces of the body and in the context of current world politics is especially troubling and is one of the central concerns of my project.
As detailed so brilliantly by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other, vision and visibility have played a vital role in the West’s various imperial projects throughout history. Vision, we might even argue, has functioned as the primary modality through which notions of barbarism, the primitive, modernity, progress and otherness have been constructed. And, the global circulation of images has historically both fed and justified colonial projects. New technovisual formalist modes of seeing – modes which signify objectivity and science inherently through their form – are offering this old dynamic of othering through vision and visibility a new pseudo-technoscientific alibi, and by way of this feeding into the paranoid neo-imperialist hubris which seems to be structuring so much of our current cultural and political landscape.
So, technovisual formalism – a phenomenon that inherently challenges the authority of they eye and even vision itself – ultimately ends up being reclaimed in the interests of history, imperialism and whiteness, emphatically supporting what Judith Butler terms the “racial schematization of the visual field” ( in Gooding-Williams 1993:16 )and, I argue that this reaches its most monumental expression within new(OLD) legalistic and governmental rhetorics, practices and policies that are currently playing out on the surfaces of the body and in ways dictated by geopolitical interests.
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In exploring the ways in which new technologies are inflecting what it means to see and to be visible, five general contradictions begin to emerge.
The contradictions:
1. Contradicitons in relation to the eye and its ability to see at all: Through technology we see beyond the limits of the eye to a more fundamental kind of “Truth” (nanostructures, satellite images, digital “mega-pixel” images) AND, through technology vision is unreliable and limiting, filled with “new frontiers,” constantly expanding and imploding, uncontrollable, and offering no access to any empirical “Truth” at all.
2. Contradictions revolving around the quantity of images we are exposed to : Pixels, digital images and flickering systems of signification increasingly saturate and satisfy us with images and information, connecting us to faraway places and people immediately. AND, pixels, digital images and flickering sign systems are unreliable, inasmuch as they are potentially detached from any physical substance. They alienate in proportion to the level at which they saturate our daily lives.
3. Contradictions revolving around the quality and Credibility of the images we are exposed to : The way in which flickering sign systems move instantly and effortlessly from “pier-to-pier” -- through word processors, digital cameras, video recorders, the Internet, satellite systems and cell phones – serves to democratize ideas and information AND, the way in which flickering sign systems move seemingly instantly, effortlessly from “pier-to-pier’ means that all these sign systems are suspect as they are open for manipulation at each iteration -- hence, the digital visual world cannot be trusted to offer reliable information.
4. Contradicitions relating to the concept of the Nation: New global visual technologies move us beyond borders and the fictions of nation states. AND, new global visual technologies create new and dangerous nation-like formations which require a taming, civilizing Western influence (terrorist cells).
5. The Body: The body is obsolete in visual technologies, as we move beyond its physical and sociological limits of race/whiteness, gender, class, nation and other identity markers. AND, representations of the body made possible through new visual technologies rely on an ability to quantify, calculate and organize -- or master -- discourses of the body. Through them the body is understood as a readable, knowable, predictable text which can be relied upon to create particular kinds of meanings.
Viewing Notes:
“Technology Gazing,”
10 minutes 36 seconds
Ideally the image is projected large (too large is not possible!) allowing the footage in the center screen to be accessible and inviting the viewer to relate to the images and sound with the entire body and with a kind of overwhelming sense of scale.
Audio track does not begin until 0.59 counts into track
Audio volume should be set high – again to create a sense of being overwhelmed and enveloped.
The installation is meant to be shown on a looped track and will probably require several passes through in order to fully develop the meanings.
0.14 count of black screen at beginning and end of video sequence is part of the project.
Technology Gazing: an experiment in verse to be read as a component of digital video
History is written through the surfaces of the skin,
past and future meet there
overdetermined violent meters
overdetermined violent measures
as vision implodes and expands the eye can only isolate
unfit for a new century and a technological economy
a new day dawns (I hear its bright tones ringing so I know it is here!)
and so my perceptions cannot be trusted
such is the isolation of the body.
while body disappears in new technologies
the “I’ is accessible only through them
and can be reclaimed and reassured through surfaces
and narrative
and science
and isolation
Isolation.
moves into governmentality becoming . . . form, formalized
familiar.
IMAGE: the overdetermined meters in which the morphemes and sememes forged through the backward logic of meaning-making and language manifest, IMAGE: inseparable from the ideological remnants of that which "came before". . . His-story.
Its signifying trick is in the Intersections of surface and thought and (cultural) memory; edges butting up against edges, textures morphing with an urgency . . . or a reluctance,…
colors congealing into forms (pixels) congealing into signifiers (signs) as the brain attempts to reassure through the drive to make meaning of every impulse;
to Be, and, to Know.
to Own and to Master
to Divide (difference is originary to identity)
The visual always moves unannounced from the external world to the internal. where there are more Intersections;
and more isolations
(bodies remain)
ideological edges butting up against ideological edges, value and narrative congealing into the structures through which naming, separation, and difference are given form
and, bodies remain --
the image calls out to you to recognize it in its completeness, to affirm all that you know through its refracting fragments [form = that which is always inseparable from ideology] and you cannot refuse.
the body is the excess
the most basic unit
it is both the beginning, and the end
of the subject
of the object
of the Truth
saturated with images and sounds
we are more isolated than ever before
saturated with (faulty) images and (misleading) sounds
-- I feel your breath on my shoulder,
warming my neck --
startling underneath
rising “terror”
origin in skins
and hair and
bone
and the renewed Impossibility of the body
and of
“seeing”
at all . . .
the FaceGen manual offers users additional guidance in constructing these reliable meanings under the heading “Tips and Tricks.”
Creating Attractive Faces.
- Everyone has personal preferences, but on average, the most attractive faces are those that are close to the average.
- Psychologists have found that the most attractive female faces are those which look like the average 17 year-old female, in which the degree of femininity is exaggerated by about 25%.
- To achieve this in FaceGen Modeller, select the race you want, slide the age to 17, move the gender just past 'female' and bring the caricature values as close to average as you think necessary.
- The most attractive male faces are those which look like the average 25 year-old male, but with a slight amount (5%) of femininity ! (
LTC Craig Kaucher
Technovisual Formalism: Representation in a Digital Age
CHAPTERS:
- Chapter 1: Envisioning Technology: Critical Theories of Vision, “Technovisual Formalism,” and the Crisis in Vision
- Chapter 2: Techno-visual Formalism, Otherness and the Drive to [Mis]Represent in the Age of the Pixel
- FaceGen: Techno-Visual Formalism Meets the Politics of Embodied Surfaces
- Chapter 4: Technovisual Formalism Goes Global – Or – Technology, Myth and Hydrogen Bonding
5. Technology Gazing: A Multimedia Video Installation
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K. Ketchum