The program of exhibition and cinéclub on filmmakers Straub and Huillet. (design by Jack Fisher and me)

Program: 'Of a people who are missing'

exhibition Extracity

Together with Jack Henrie Fisher (also researcher design at the JVE) I have designed the program and some posters for the exhibition and ciné-club on films by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

12 November to 20 December 2009
Extra City Antwerp

OF A PEOPLE WHO ARE MISSING is a ciné-club to discuss the aesthetical and political significance of the films by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub for contemporary image production. Huillet/Straub are among the most controversial, uncompromised and yet widely unknown filmmakers of both the presence and the history of cinema. Their films span over five decades and cover a wide range of topics, references and materials from arts, literature, theatre, and music. From November 12 to December 21 2009 OF A PEOPLE WHO ARE MISSING will open as a platform for both, the viewing and making of films. The exhibtion space in Extra City, Antwerp, is structured by five studios which will act as showrooms as well as independent production spaces. Each studio is used in a different configuration of archive material, film excerpts, actual footage and the critical discourse around it. Every Thursday to Saturday one studio will host invited guests and contributors for a series of screenings, lectures and debates.

Among the contributors are: Chantal Akerman, Pietro Bianchi, Manon de Boer, Robert Bramkamp, Giulio Bursi, Barton Byg, Rinaldo Censi, Merel Cladder, Anna Fiacciarini, Jack Henrie Fisher, Peter Friedl, Kim de Groot, Romano Guelfi, Tim Liebe, Armin Linke, Laura Malacart, Sally Shafto, Ines Schaber, Eyal Sivan, Benoît Turquety, Barbara Ulrich, Klaus Volkmer, Susanne Weirich.

Curated by: Annett Busch and Florian Schneider

http://ofapeoplewhoaremissing.net

This is an experiment with making moving object out of the 3D sculptures that represent the evolution of the image, going from a flat plane to a collection of loose modules.

design utrecht manifest by Metahaven

The overload of thumbnails on the iPhone's interface is not images, it is all applications (apps). Apple claims there is "Apps for Everything"; Apps for Working Out, Apps for Around the House, Apps for Going Out, Apps for Managing Money, Apps for Cooks, Apps for Keeping Current, Apps for the Great Outdoors, Apps for Music, Apps for Students, Apps for Mom and Dads, Apps for Work, Apps for Fun and Games, Apps for Traveling. For now this is where the 'Apps for Everything' range ends although I guess that within a month another segment of life will be ‘apped’ and interfaced.

My Image Map research in the JVE yearbook

I’m examining the relations of the museum with its collection, more specifically focusing on the potential of the digital double for the museum as a unique variant of the original.*1 Studying the digital management of the artwork, I aim to find the museum collection’s potential doubles or even multiple other.

The fact that the artwork is a different image in the context of the museum shop, the museum’s website or in the process of restoration, interests me. These contexts produce different property relations between the museum, the collection, the artwork and its image. Embedded within these relations are multiple representations of an original artwork. One could say, these relations produce an applied and desired image of the artwork. How can these images start to level with the collection's original?

As a follow up on the annotation caps that pre-divide your images, I have designed a cap as a mirror. Taking pictures with this mirror cap would introduce the image of the lens in the image. This work questions the presence of the camera in the image event.

With designing mounting devices for camera lenses I try to reflect on the transformation of the image as a modular and preprogrammed visual object and speculate on how it could affect the tool, a camera in this case.

Instead of annotating the image in a separate web-based context I’m integrating the annotation process into the technique of the camera. In that way, the annotation process returns as a visual gesture within the image. I have designed (conceptual) annotation caps which should be attached to the lens.
The annotation caps also reflect on the concept of preemption in image production. With phone camera's the photographer is aware of the future context and use of the image. An example is the existing digital camera’s that come with You Tube capturing mode. Shoot, easy upload and share! is the advertising slogan. No more DIY digitizing, resizing or encoding, the camera does it all for you. I have reconfigured the tool in such a way that the distributive contexts are already embedded within the tool.

“Reimagining the camera” is one project in which I will trace the camera as ‘the tool in the image’. My two main questions are: How do different technologies such as web-applications and weblogs transform the role of the camera in the image event? Can the camera be reconfigured on the basis of the networked image?

To reimagine the camera allows me to work on the dualistic relation of tool and image. It enables me to move between the transformation of the image through tools and the reconfiguration of the tool departing from the new image.
I will compare images on the level of camera functionality, presence and general usage. Starting with classic photography such as press photo’s in which the presence of the camera and the recording of the image is hidden or invisible. Moving to camera phone imagery in which the camera plays a central role in the image event. Think of happy slapping images in which the presence of a (mobile phone) camera and its future networked live on You Tube is part of the violent act against a person. What is the significance of the camera being part of the image? How does it change the relation between the photographed subject and photographer?

For this project I’m working with a painting by El Lissitzky. On the basis of digital footage of the gaps in the painting, I am reconstructing it according to different methods. All methods are based on the reconfiguration of the painting from the perspective of the digital networked image. The visual decay of the painting could be interpreted as metadata. In visualizing the change of the painting through time I try to show its possible evolution as an 'original'. What multiple images are part of a painting?

The figure/medium relation in the image is a topic I have started to work with in the context of a collaborative .imp project called: The Noise Margin, at the van Abbe museum, Eindhoven. “The image of the medium” is my working title for a project on the decay and restoration of images.
Lissitzky animation, a reconstruction based on the colors of the gaps in the painting. This way the painting itself becomes an image of its decay

When restoring a painting the restorer is constantly managing a noise margin between figure and medium in which the figure gets priority. In a sense through restoration the figure cannot become something else since the medium is constantly being updated by the restorer. While the decay of the medium could potentially lead to its transformation into another object or multiple images. I’m interested in how a disappearing object, the medium, claims visuality. It could be an image…

Startingpoint for the Image Map research is the Add note feature of photo-sharing application Flickr and image recognition software. The remarkable transformation going on here is the introduction of the image metadata as a visual layer on top of the original digital image, a painting in this case.

Image Map diagram +

The image with notes turns into a kind of map, a diagrammatic collection of notes linked to the image; an abstract image. A map of comments but at the same time a map of relations between people, images and camera’s. They map out the network of this particular image, they are organograms, visualizing the organization of the internal image architecture of data as well as social relations of Flickr users through images which the image as data repository is collecting. Both the original data + metadata are in fact in one interface: the image itself.

Image evolutions: from image plane to modules, to globes

Image Evolutions Diagram

My object of study is the production and distribution of different kinds of digital networked images in and by networks. Central to this research is the exchange between the visual and the infrastructural. One of my main questions is, whether the structural and organisational role of images in digital networks has become more important than the visual representation of images?
Through making diagrams I try to include both the findings of my research as well as to speculate on the current status of the (digital/networked) image. For my case studies, the Image Map & Modular image, i'm interested in the way the image body is disintegrating, moving from surface or plane to modules and globes.

The method I’m using for my visual research is to develop concepts in Sketchup, a 3D modeling software. The most interesting and inspiring aspect of the software is that it allows me to walk around an image. collection of notes detached from image plane

playing with notes on the Flickr imageIn many ways it opens up the potential of the image. For example, turning the image in SketchUp into an architectural model, allows me to work with the archival potentials of the digital image.

In translating the notations added to the image (its metadata) into an 3D model, the status of the original image (the painting) is challenged.
SketchUp enabled me to manipulate the Image as Map of interconnected Note objects. A question is how the 3D models in SketchUp could represent the internal networks of the image at the same time to allow for a rescripting of relations and protocols of the Flickr image?
Does the Image as Map allow for a protocological development of this particular image?

Digital image devices, such as camera phones and digital camera’s, with a connection to various networks and being an ever present eye on the world, instigate a performative role of the image; monitoring. The eye of the interconnected camera does not just capture, it observes, evaluates and sometimes predicts.

The resulting imagery is inextricably connected to its productive technology, many times performing preprogrammed network protocols. A camera phone image of her dog’s poop in the metro configures the future of a Korean girl at the moment the image is being recorded and instantly uploaded to the web. Networked images allow for the management of power relations inscribed to it by software. This ‘image utilitarianism’ is a result of the social productivity stimulated by web-applications as well as by the easy access to recording devices. The combination of these tools makes imagination applicable, directly linked to implementation.

While digitizing land new borders arise; borders between images. Is Google Earth a map or is it a political act of imaging land to own its image? Google earth/maps is one example of the indexing image. It illustrates the madness of imaging every bit of reality while finding the opportunity to reconfigure certain political and cultural concepts under the header of the semi-neutral concept of the map. The imaging of land by satellite corporations and Google eventually delivers them a valuable image. An image that contains powerful 'user' information on the basis of which Google updates its software: preferences.

One of my conclusions is that images are no longer created to represent a reality but to manage it. The image existence as data, being described by metadata, makes it readable and therefore manageable by the network. The visual and infrastructural meet on the meta(data) level of files and applications. Within this meta(data) context the image’ utilities and profits are measured and further developed; how useful is it? The image as facilitating entity is being developed by the network consisting of humans and even more of machines. People have become aware of the image as a tool, of its multiple uses and benefits such as indexing, besides its singular aesthetic richness.

Imaginary Property passportThe relation between image and reality is inverted. We are producing reality through the visual and organize it in digital networks. Moving from representation to the performative, from the visual to the infrastructural, images are no longer created to represent a reality but through managing images, a reality is being organized.
What kind of digital networked images are being produced today? Digital images are informational, they are both technical as well as cultural descriptive data objects. What are their production mechanisms? What kind of relations and network protocols are being managed through the image and how? Does the organizational role of images, based on the technical and cultural protocols of digital image production, take over their visual representation?

Image Map

The digital networked image as a technical and political object, moving from the visual to the infrastructural

Imaginary Property incites to reconsider the condition of the digital networked image within the current socio-technical culture. The relation between image and reality is inverted. We are producing reality through the visual and organize it in digital networks, servers, databases. What kind of digital images are being produced today? What are their production mechanisms? What do current images represent, not just in what we see, but in the sense of, what do images stand for? What politics is part of digital image design? I will be researching Imaginary Property as the condition of the production and distribution of the digital networked image.

Killer TV, Imaginary Property and HTV - de ijsberg present:
The 33.000 Issue Launch

Undermining the borders between text and image, between private property and public space through the design of "imaginary" advertisements and (ironically) deconstructing some of the
basic conventions of a magazine, Imaginary Property is curating the 77 issue of HTV-de IJsberg, investigating new fields of image-production beyond the hard-coded notions of the commercial
versus the editorial.

In this post you can read the introduction of my lecture for the january 2009 opening week at the JvE:

The digital networked image and its modes of existence as a technical and political object.

Imaginary Property starts from the idea that the notion of the real is changing.  A change that has a lot to do with the current status of the image. Thousands of images are created everyday to capture different accounts of reality. The image is constantly being copied and manipulated. We live images, to control our reality. Imagination is crucial in this process.