Conference Presentations by Laurence Counihan
1st Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland (DigiArt22), 2022
In our contemporary reality the reorganisation of institutional and epistemological fields have b... more In our contemporary reality the reorganisation of institutional and epistemological fields have become increasingly conditioned by the prevalence, and continued acceleration, of large-scale computational systems and networks. The planetary breadth of these algorithmic operations progressively employ advanced models and simulations that are utilised to map
the trajectories of everything from ecological change, the volatility of economic markets, predictive patterns of political ideologies, and the spread of viruses. Correspondingly, this rise — which ostensibly seeks to give order to complexity — has also been accompanied by a general obfuscation of the technical mechanisms that govern these increasingly abstract systems. All is hidden within the innards of impenetrable black-boxes whose emergent properties recede from view.
Philosopher Manuel Delanda has identified the middle of the 19th-century as the origin for “the modern concept of emergence” (Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, Continuum Publishing, 2011), with this idea eventually developing into theories of simulation and computational modelling that are used today. Incidentally, the same time period also saw the initial development of various photographic techniques, with the technology itself eventually ascending to the apex of mimetic representation.
These distinct, but still interconnected, genealogies can be said to exert a significant influence over the work of Irish artist John Gerrard. For the past 15 years, the artist’s practice has involved the construction of meticulous, photorealistic virtual environments which delicately play with the concepts of representation and simulation. These artificial worlds are rendered — with the help of a team of programmers — using software designed for the development of three-dimensional video game environments, and are depicted with an intense level of realism which suggests a cool, austere, clinical, and almost detached, illusionistic model. For despite their outwardly natural appearance (situated along the historical continuum of figurative representation), Gerrard’s worlds are virtual simulations whose operations accord with the cold logic of algorithmic procedures.
Exploring this tension, and transition, between epistemological and aesthetic models of representation versus simulation, is a central theme of Vilém Flusser’s theories on photography. For Flusser, a technical image — any image made by an apparatus — is never, foundationally, a causal representation of the mimetic reality that it depicts, but is instead linked, in the first instance, to the calculatory thought of the machine which produced it. Accordingly, whilst initially grounded in an elaboration on photography, Flusser’s writings on technology and the universe of technical images proves to be especially amenable to an analysis of computer based visualisations.
Drawing upon this formalisation of the technical image, this paper proposes a reading of Gerrard’s work which expands particularly upon Flusser’s concepts on models and calculatory processes. Herein, the intention is to probe the distinction between representation and simulation, and the potentialities (and inherent limitations) of aesthetic attempts to depict the invisible mechanisms of algorithmic structures.
ELO2019: Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival, Programme and Book of Abstracts, 2019
Since the emergence of photography in the 19th-century, ‘technical images’—which media philosophe... more Since the emergence of photography in the 19th-century, ‘technical images’—which media philosopher Vilém Flusser defines as images constructed through the use of an ‘apparatus’— have replaced traditional images (sketching, drawing, painting, etc...) as the principal mode of objective documentation for mapping and representing reality. In fact it is this perceived objective character of the medium that has historically problematised its classification as an accepted artform. As a reaction, artists have long explored methods for circumventing the overriding social status of photography, by developing practices that operate to undermine its primary existence as strict documentation. Historical examples of this include, the photomontage of the early 20th-century by Dada artists (eg. Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield), who spliced together images from mass media in order to construct new aesthetic scenes, and The Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 80s (eg. Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince), who utilised methods such as staged and found photography in order to question the long embedded interpretation of the medium as that which is simply a transparent window overlaying the world.
In more recent years we have seen the appearance of many artists deploying glitch techniques as a means of probing the limits of digital objectivity in contemporary image culture. Technically referring to an unexpected error that occurs within a machinic system, encounters with glitches have become much more prominent due to the increasing prevalence of computerised technologies. Caleb Kelly has argued that artistic practices that explicitly attempt to exploit and utilise glitches for aesthetic purposes, ‘became popular in the late twentieth century’ and are ‘a key marker in the development of digital arts practices.’ This turn towards harnessing the artistic potentiality of the glitch has been described by Kim Cascone as part of the ‘post- digital aesthetic,’ which developed from immersion within ‘environments suffused with digital technology’. Constant envelopment within these spaces has made us more attuned to the ‘“failure” of digital technology’, resulting in a growing awareness of the presence of errors that exist within all computational systems.
This paper will explore what happens when technologies of representation break down, through an analysis of the concept of the glitch as utilised within photographic artworks. The central aim is to highlight how the dominant social construction of the technical image—and its historically indelible relationship to the real—is undermined by instances of glitch art, by problematising its claim as objective document of reality, and via an extension of the aesthetic possibilities of machinic agency through its foregrounding of (non-human) noise and error. Through an articulation of the inherent presence of randomness and non-objectivity in the technical image, the indeterminate and speculative dimension of the medium will be discussed as that which is not simply a trait that should be ignored, but instead one which forms a necessary condition of its perceptual existence.
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Conference Presentations by Laurence Counihan
the trajectories of everything from ecological change, the volatility of economic markets, predictive patterns of political ideologies, and the spread of viruses. Correspondingly, this rise — which ostensibly seeks to give order to complexity — has also been accompanied by a general obfuscation of the technical mechanisms that govern these increasingly abstract systems. All is hidden within the innards of impenetrable black-boxes whose emergent properties recede from view.
Philosopher Manuel Delanda has identified the middle of the 19th-century as the origin for “the modern concept of emergence” (Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, Continuum Publishing, 2011), with this idea eventually developing into theories of simulation and computational modelling that are used today. Incidentally, the same time period also saw the initial development of various photographic techniques, with the technology itself eventually ascending to the apex of mimetic representation.
These distinct, but still interconnected, genealogies can be said to exert a significant influence over the work of Irish artist John Gerrard. For the past 15 years, the artist’s practice has involved the construction of meticulous, photorealistic virtual environments which delicately play with the concepts of representation and simulation. These artificial worlds are rendered — with the help of a team of programmers — using software designed for the development of three-dimensional video game environments, and are depicted with an intense level of realism which suggests a cool, austere, clinical, and almost detached, illusionistic model. For despite their outwardly natural appearance (situated along the historical continuum of figurative representation), Gerrard’s worlds are virtual simulations whose operations accord with the cold logic of algorithmic procedures.
Exploring this tension, and transition, between epistemological and aesthetic models of representation versus simulation, is a central theme of Vilém Flusser’s theories on photography. For Flusser, a technical image — any image made by an apparatus — is never, foundationally, a causal representation of the mimetic reality that it depicts, but is instead linked, in the first instance, to the calculatory thought of the machine which produced it. Accordingly, whilst initially grounded in an elaboration on photography, Flusser’s writings on technology and the universe of technical images proves to be especially amenable to an analysis of computer based visualisations.
Drawing upon this formalisation of the technical image, this paper proposes a reading of Gerrard’s work which expands particularly upon Flusser’s concepts on models and calculatory processes. Herein, the intention is to probe the distinction between representation and simulation, and the potentialities (and inherent limitations) of aesthetic attempts to depict the invisible mechanisms of algorithmic structures.
In more recent years we have seen the appearance of many artists deploying glitch techniques as a means of probing the limits of digital objectivity in contemporary image culture. Technically referring to an unexpected error that occurs within a machinic system, encounters with glitches have become much more prominent due to the increasing prevalence of computerised technologies. Caleb Kelly has argued that artistic practices that explicitly attempt to exploit and utilise glitches for aesthetic purposes, ‘became popular in the late twentieth century’ and are ‘a key marker in the development of digital arts practices.’ This turn towards harnessing the artistic potentiality of the glitch has been described by Kim Cascone as part of the ‘post- digital aesthetic,’ which developed from immersion within ‘environments suffused with digital technology’. Constant envelopment within these spaces has made us more attuned to the ‘“failure” of digital technology’, resulting in a growing awareness of the presence of errors that exist within all computational systems.
This paper will explore what happens when technologies of representation break down, through an analysis of the concept of the glitch as utilised within photographic artworks. The central aim is to highlight how the dominant social construction of the technical image—and its historically indelible relationship to the real—is undermined by instances of glitch art, by problematising its claim as objective document of reality, and via an extension of the aesthetic possibilities of machinic agency through its foregrounding of (non-human) noise and error. Through an articulation of the inherent presence of randomness and non-objectivity in the technical image, the indeterminate and speculative dimension of the medium will be discussed as that which is not simply a trait that should be ignored, but instead one which forms a necessary condition of its perceptual existence.