Andreas methods 06-03-19

First Reading: Vilém Flusser – Towards a philosophy of photography

The first chapter The Image describes, that the Image is a reduction of the four dimensions, also known as imagination. Scanning the image is wandering over the surface of the image. The images therefore are ‘connotative (ambiguous) complexes of symbols: they provide space for interpretation.’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 8) Images are mediations between the world and human beings.

The second chapter The Technical Image brings out the difference between Traditional and Technical Images. Traditional Images have symbolic character. Decoding such an image means to decode the encoding of what was happening ‘in the head’ of the painter. Flusser states that Technical images do not have to be decoded the same way, ‘since their significance is automatically reflected on their surface.’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 14) ‘This apparently non-symbolic, objective character of technical images leads whoever looks at them to see them not as images but as windows. Observers thus do not believe them as they do their own eyes. Consequently they do not criticize them as images, but as ways of looking at the world (to the extent that they criticize them at all). Their criticism is not an analysis of their production but an analysis of the world.’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 15) Although this objectivity is an illusion, according to Vilém Flusser, because they are more abstract complexes of symbols. Technical images replace traditional images with reproductions, displace them and distort them by translating scientific statements into images.

The chapter The Apparatus tries to explain the object by which Technical images are being produced. It is important to say that Flusser sees the camera as a prototype of the apparatuses “that have become so decisive for the present and the immediate future” (Flusser, 2000, p. 21). The Latin word apparatus is derived from the verb apparare meaning 'to prepare'. In this sense an apparatus is a thing that is in a state of idling. The photographic apparatus for example is waiting – or being ready for photography. But etymology alone is not sufficient to describe the term. Ontologically apparatuses can be defined as being “(…) pro-duced (brought forward) out of the available natural world.” (Flusser, 2000, p. 22). All those things can then be referred to as culture, with apparatuses being part of them. But then the question arises, whether they are good for consumption (consumer goods) or good for producing consumer goods (tools). Both having in common, that they are �“good” for something: being valuable and produced intentionally. With the camera being a tool, which intention is to produce photographs, can a photograph be seen as a consumer item? Usually tools “tear objects from the natural world to bring it to the place (produce them) where the human being is.” (Flusser, 2000, p. 23) This process, of imprinting a new, intentional form onto them, Flusser calls “informing”. With this new, unnatural form it becomes cultural. But the author makes a difference between two kind objects (that become “a work” with the previous mentioned process): works, that are hardly been informed – such as apples – and works that are strongly informed – like shoes for example. Flusser goes on with explaining that tools became machines with the Industrial Revolution happening. After all, the author argues that a formulation of things based on industry may no longer be competent to deal with apparatuses and misses what they are about. Flusser states that apparatuses do not tear objects from the natural world and inform them, but instead change the meaning of the world. He claims that their intention is symbolic. According to him, photographers lose themselves in the camera in search of possibilities, but nevertheless control the box. They create, process and store symbols. Flusser states, that ‘Photographers do not work in the industrial sense, and there is no point in trying to call them workers or proletarians.’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 25). He thinks they are in search of information. But I strongly disagree. This may have been the case in the uprising of photographers. But on nowadays standards photographers working in the commercial field definitely have reached the status of workers or proletarians. They are struggling with the same issues that industrial workers had and still have to cope.

The Gesture of Photography is pointing out that taking photos is similar to going on a hunt. ‘A hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information.’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 39) The author is trying to convey the idea of it being a post-ideological and post-industrial act. An act for which reality is information, not the significance of this information.

In the chapter The Photograph Flusser works out two intentions of the photographs:

1. photographers are encoding their images ‘to give others information, as to produce models for them and thereby to become immortal in the memory of others’ (Flusser, 2000, p. 48)
   
2. ‘The camera encodes the concepts programmed into it as images in order to program society to act as a feedback mechanism (…)’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 48)
   

The author is stating that social systems are based on abstractions to distinguish good from bad and connects this to the abstraction of black-and-white photographs. ‘They translate a theory of optics into an image and thereby put a magic spell on this theory and re-encode theoretical concepts like ‘black’ and ‘white’ into states of things.’ (Flusser, 2000,, p. 43). He is saying that colour photographs are on a higher level of abstraction than black-and-white photographs since black-and-white photographs are more concrete and in this sense more true. The more ‘genuine’ the colours of the photograph become, the more untruthful they are, the more they conceal their theoretical origin. (Flusser, 2000,, p. 44) He underlines this with his assumption that the colour in a photograph is always just based on the idea of the world. There might be a indirect connection to the real world, but it will always stay an image of the concept of the colour, (…) ‘as it occurs in chemical theory, and the camera (or rather the film inserted to it) is programmed to translate this concept to the image.’ (Flusser, 2000, p. 43) Flusser also argues, that the camera is making use of the photographer – ‘except in borderline cases of total automation (for example, in the case of satellite photographs) (Flusser, 2000,, p. 48) – as a feedback mechanism for its progressive improvement.

In the chapter The Distribution of Photographs the author points out that photography fulfils the urge of massification and that it can be distributed by means of reproduction (contrary to original cave paintings or tomb frescoes, also being attached to the surface). ‘As long as the photograph is not yet electromagnetic, it remains the first of all post-industrial objects’ (Flusser, 2000, p. 51). He states that ‘It is not the person who owns a photograph who has power but the person who created the information it conveys.’ (Flusser, 2000, p. 52) and calls this Neo-imperialism. Here I disagree with his perception, since a photograph that is for example at an art market, inherits a big value, that is being transferred to the highest bidder. Even the photographers who seek for informative pictures he describes as follows: ‘In short: They are not working, they do not want to change the world, but they are in search of information.’ (p. 27) If I understand him correctly he has the general perception of photographers not being workers in the industrial sense at all. (p. 25)

The chapter The Reception of Photographs deals with the fact that everybody can nowadays take photos or so-called snapshots and thereby are received as objects without value. However, the author states that we are being manipulated to act in favour of cameras. Flusser comes up with a magic circle that ‘is being formed by photographs around us in the shape of the photographic universe.’ (Flusser, 2000, p. 52)

In the chapter The Photographic Universe Flusser is stating that we have become accustomed to the photographs. We see photographs as redundant, with being surrounded by them every day in newspapers, posters or advertising. However, the ever-changing gaudiness of it is kind of superficial for Flusser and compares it to the graininess, having a quantum-like structure. ‘The photographic universe is a means of programming society – with absolute necessity but in each individual case by chance (i.e. automatically) – to act as a magic feedback mechanism for the benefit of a combination game, and the automatic reprogramming of society into dice, into pieces in the game, into functionaries.’ (Flusser, 2000, p. 70)

In the chapter Why a Philosophy of Photography Is Necessary Mr. Flusser brings up the Post-historical idea of Cosmology. We see in the cosmos an apparatus that contains an original piece of information in its output (the ‘big bang’) and that is programmed to realise and exhaust this information necessarily through chance (‘heat death’). Flusser supports this idea with his basic concepts of photography: image, containing the magic apparatus, inheriting automation and play program, containing chance and necessity information, representing the symbolic and improbable.
The author makes a good point in saying that a philosophy of photography is necessary for raising photographic practice to the level of consciousness.

Bibliography:

Flusser, V. (2000). Towards a philosophy of photography. 1st ed. London: Reaktion Books

Important for the further reading, see in the chapter The Photographic Universe:

‘The intention behind apparatuses is to liberate the human being from work; apparatuses take over human labour – for example, the camera liberates the human being from the necessity of using a paintbrush. Instead of having to work, the human being is able to play. But apparatuses have come under the control of a number of individual human beings (e.g. capitalists), who have reversed this original intention. Now apparatuses serve the interests of these people; consequently what needs to be done is to unmask the interests behind the apparatuses. According to such an analysis, apparatuses are nothing but peculiar machines, the invention of which has nothing revolutionary about it; there is no point therefore in talking of a “second Industrial Revolution.” Thus photographs also have to be decoded as an expression of the concealed interests of those in power: the interests of Kodak shareholders, of the proprietors of advertising agencies, those pulling the strings behind the US industrial complex, the interests of the entire US ideological, military and industrial complex. If one exposed these interests, every single photograph and the whole photographic universe could be considered as having been decoded.

Unfortunately this traditional kind of criticism with its background in the industrial context is not adequate to deal with the phenomenon. It misses the essential thing about apparatuses, i.e. their automaticity. And this is precisely what needs to be criticized. Apparatuses were invented in order to function automatically, in other words independently of future human involvement. This is the intention with which they were created: that the human being would be ruled out. And this intention has been successful without a doubt. While the human being is being more and more sidelined, the programs of apparatuses, these rigid combination games, are increasingly rich in elements: they make combinations more and more quickly and are going beyond the ability of the human being to see what they are up to and to control them. Anyone who is involved with apparatuses is involved with black boxes where one is unable to see what they are up to. To this extent, one can't talk of an owner of apparatuses either. As apparatuses function automatically and do not obey any human decision, they cannot be owned by anybody. All human decisions are made on the basis of the decisions of apparatuses; they have degenerated into purely ‘functional’ decisions, i.e. human intention has evaporated. If apparatuses were originally produced and programmed to follow human intention, then today, in the ‘second and third generation’ of apparatuses, this intention has disappeared over the horizon of functionality. Apparatuses now function as an end in themselves, ‘automatically’ as it were, with the single aim of maintaining and improving themselves. This rigid, unintentional, functional automaticity is what needs to be made the object of criticism. The 'humanistic' criticism of apparatuses referred to above is in opposition to this portrayal of apparatuses being transformed into superhuman, anthropomorphic Titans and of thus contributing to the obscuring of the human interests behind apparatuses. But this objection is erroneous. Apparatuses are actually Titans, since they were created with this sole intention. This portrayal attempts to show precisely that they are not superhuman but subhuman – bloodless and simplistic simulations of human thought processes which, precisely because they are so rigid, render human decisions superfluous and non-functional. Whereas the ‘humanistic’ criticism of apparatuses, by calling upon the last vestiges of human intention behind apparatuses, obscures the danger lying in wait within them, the criticism of apparatuses proposed here sees its task precisely in uncovering the terrible fact of this unintentional, rigid and uncontrollable functionality of apparatuses, in order to get a hold over them.’ (Flusser, 2000, p. 72-74)

Second Reading: Sean Dorrance Kelly – A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be an artist

The author starts off with the hypothesis that Artificial intelligence can never surpass the creativity of humans, ‘depending on the norms that we allow to govern our culture and our expectations of technology.’ According to Kelly it is up to us humans if we attribute creativity to machines. He separates creativity roughly in three fields: music, games and mathematics. In the case of music he brings up the example of Kurzweil using a pattern recognition system to compose music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. However, the author states that this machine was just copying the style instead of coming up with a original piece of work. Kelly presumes that a computer needs to understand what music is in order to give an output of ‘what is needed now’ . Even if machines reach the human-level of intelligence, or even if it reaches moral implications, it does not become a moral agent: ‘If there is greatness in the product, it is only an accident. We may be able to see a machine’s product as great, but if we know that the output is merely the result of some arbitrary act or algorithmic formalism, we cannot accept it as the expression of a vision for human good.’ Even with all the knowledge and perception a human has, a machine would never be able to be ‘a genuinely creative artist’ , because it is not able to judge the quality of music or understand what music is or is not. He much more sees artificial-intelligence as instruments, like a trumpet for a musician.

In regards of creativity in a game the author claims, that the system can succeed only because it learns to play well within the constraints of the game environment. (I wonder why the author is bringing up this as an example after all if a game is - in his opinion - not a suitable descriptor for creativity.)

In terms of mathematics it becomes more interesting. The writer makes two assumptions: if a machine is able to solve a complicated problem and experts can prove this solution to be right, the machine might be considered to be a creative mathematician. ‘But such a machine would not be evidence of the singularity; it would not so outstrip us in creativity that we couldn’t even understand what it was doing.’ The second assumption is that the machine might be able to solve the problem, but the solution would be too complicated for humans to understand. According to the author this would not count as a proof. ‘Proving something implies that you are proving it to someone.’ Here he connects his example to music again: either it is understandable for humans, meaning AI would not surpass us, or it is not understandable at all, what would not make it creative in the end.

In conclusion Sean Dorrance Kelly thinks that rather humanity is losing creativity instead of artificial intelligence getting hold of it. He warns us not to accept ‘proofs’ just because we cannot grasp them. As long as we cannot understand the underlying methods and reasons to the artificial creativity, it may not be considered as creativity at all. Only if we lose the idea of creativity in the human sense we let machines become superior.

Bibliography:

Kelly, S. (2019). A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be an artist. [online] MIT Technology Review. Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612913/a-philosopher-argues-that-an-ai-can-never-be-an-artist/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2019].

Annotated Reader: BOARD