Digital Networked Image

This image shows two parts of my research, one is the diagrams through which I visualize a particular image transformation. Below the diagram is my visual research, including a speculation on how this image evolution of disintegration into modules can continue.

(Click on image to view larger version, then click on original to see even larger version..)

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. 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.
This introduces an interesting transformation of the relation between figure and medium. The figure interfaces the transformation of image body when content is added to it with the Add note feature. Figure and medium are not in an antagonistic relation, they become one. The image or photograph is not about its figurative representation, it is a representation of the image body and the way it is being produced. Visually, figure and medium merge and transform into an abstract image; the diagrammatic collection of notes linked to the image, an Image map.

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?

This is an image that observes, checks and keeps a continueous record of a process. The production of this image is based on the concept of pre-emption. Pre-emption is a technique for taking control over the future, to act on the basis of a possible future event. Pre-emption makes the future, that which is imagined, to become real. It’s protocol; to act to prevent something from happening, is of course one on which surveillance technologies are based. Everything is recorded IN CASE something happens. The recording is not done to memorize something, it is done to see what should not happen.

Managing Openness

On november 28, I joined the symposium, Add Comment: Designing Critique in Public Forums organized by Casco, co-organized with ArtEZ The Arnhem Academy of Art and Design and Vinca Kruk on the (im)possibility of critique within the structures of current web-applications.

During the first talk by Mia Jankowicz (a curator and art critic based in London/Amsterdam), it occurred to me how the perspective of “openness” has shifted because of 2.0 environments, how it is being managed as a scarcity. Mia presented several (art) projects that deal with different ways of opening up information to the public. In these cases it is decided when, how and to whom openness to information is offered. In this case openness is an act of control, openness is managed as an exclusivity.
Instead of making information available as in creating openness, how could one go about producing openness, not designing it preemptively into the software and its associated gestures? Also another question is whether openness is actually a scarce good on the web?

On October 3 the University of Amsterdam organized the first two lectures as a part of Now is the time! a lecture series on art and theory in the 21st century. The topic of this evening was the relation between new media and art.
What is the status of the medium in art production and the discourse in art, in this situation referred to by Rosalind Krauss as the ‘postmedium condition’? How can an artist act critically in this complex cultural field now dominated by multimedia and mass media?
http://www.nowisthetime.nl