imaginetic

By: crazykaro

Apr 11 2010

Tags: art, aura, authenticity, Benjamin, Fulgurator, gun, Kuleshov, Manovich, photo

Category: Pictures

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In the week before the Easter break, we had a lecture about motion photography and sound documentation history, series and multiples, instantiation and differentiation. We talked about the emergence of new technologies, and the interrelation of some of those technological advances with the developments in warfare.

Seeing a picture of the chronophotographic gun, I instantly had to think of a young German artist I once read about, who invented the Fulgurator, which looks like the chronophotographic gun and works kind of like a reversed camera:

The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.
(quoted from www.juliusvonbismarck.com)

This technique of secretly manipulating images at the moment when they are taken seems to me to be very powerful. As the authenticity of photographs due to computer processing is long gone, we still seem to trust the photographs we’ve just taken ourselves. To manipulate taken photographs is one thing, but the Fulgurator manipulates the ‘real’: It can place strong cultural symbols everywhere without being noticed, and appear on thousands of photographs of tourists or journalists. One example of a Fulguration on juliusvonbismarck.com includes a photograph of the Mao Zedong portrait at Tiananmen square in Beijing with a white dove on it.

I think the photographs that we take ourselves today, even with digital cameras and infinitely reproducable, still convey a kind of aura, though in a much broader sense than Walter Benjamin’s aura. It still makes a difference if we have a picture of ourselves standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco that we actually took, or if we photoshop ourselves into that picture.   I think its the indexicality of the photographs as signs that still make them special, and that’s why I think the Fulgurator is such an interesting idea, because it intervenes in the authenticity of what we still see as the ‘real’. I also think that there are plenty of other examples where the aura in a Benjaminean sense is still maintained or at least simulated in our reality as well as in our mechanically reproducable media reality. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, a new medium doesn’t replace the old medium, but coexists and changes the reception of the old one. So we still go to live concerts, even when we can listen to the recording. We also broadcast concerts, performances, speeches live on TV – and I think the live element still does have something like an aura, a simulated one though (there are a whole lot of different techniques of making the TV audience think they are right in the middle of the actual event, and simulating an aura of actually being there, see for example Dayan/Katz “Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History.” or Adelmann/Keilbach/Stauff “‘Soviel Gefühle kann’s nicht geben!’ – Typisierung des Feierns und Jubelns im Fernsehsport” (in montage/av  10/02).

Accordingly, the authenticity of non-computer generated images has become by now something special and is a selling argument in commercials  (for example, the ad for the Sony Bravia with the thousands of bouncy balls on the streets of San Francisco – if it would be CGI, the ad wouldn’t be anything special, but what makes it interesting is that they actually poured thousand of bouncy balls onto a street, and that the ad is a recording or an index of that exact same moment).

At the same time, I would like to emphasize that the indexical nature of photographs or films is quite an exception in the history of making images anyway, and (at least in film) only occurred in a very short period of time. Concerning movies, we are already again moving from a kino-eye to a kino-brush (see Lev Manovich’s New Media Language), as CGI is basically making films like making a painting, without the limitations of reality. Which poses the interesting question how our cinema will be like after CGI is done imitating reality – will it move in a more abstract direction, like it happened with paintings after the invention of the photo camera?

One last thing I wanted to write about was the image-sound magnetization we talked about, that the sound that is applied to a certain image is influencing how we perceive that image. I wanted to add that there is also a image-image magnetization: The Kuleshov effect. Kuleshov played the same short film clip of an actor with a neutral facial expression together with different images edited before it (a bowl of soup, a coffin with an old lady, and an attractive woman), and the audience interpreted the same facial expression different every time, seeing hunger, grief or lust in the neutral face.

At last some images I took when we were spontaniously looking for things in our tutorial that represent the analogue/digital dichotomy and instantiation/differentiation: