| Jon Lebkowsky on Thu, 27 Sep 2001 22:38:42 +0200 (CEST) |
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| [Nettime-bold] FW: [Discuss] The end of photography as evidence for anything... |
(Forwarded with the author's permission - jonl) -----Original Message----- Subject: The end of photography as evidence for anything... This is one of those things, like where you were when JFK was shot, that you remember for the rest of your life. I was on the toilet at my lover's house in deeper Oakland. There was a commotion outside the door and she yelled and pushed something underneath, hard enough that it skidded across the floor and knocked against my foot. It was the new issue of Whole Earth Review. The front page photo showed flying saucers landing in the Mission district. The caption blared "DIGITAL GRAPHICS -- THE END OF PHOTOGRAPHY AS EVIDENCE FOR ANYTHING". The Mac IIX was state of the art, Bill Gates hadn't yet totally cut off OS2's air supply, and Photoshop didn't exist. The cover image was done with hand-coded utilities. But there it was. And the debates exploded. In fact they'd already been chugging since Walter Benjamin started the Arcades Project, but they were suddenly visible in a new and urgent way. Resources chase capital, so one interesting place to look for debates about the squooshy idea of the original is the RIAA, which has virtually unlimited capital and a bloodlust interest in nailing down a definition of the original for all time. Following the RIAA's journey upriver has been fascinating, both because it reveals so much about the darkness at the heart of multinational capital and because it reveals something of the limits of pursuing the phantom of the copy to its absurdist conclusion. Omitting some steps, the RIAA's goal is to ensure that originals cannot be copied. Every so often we see scary stuff in the press about how they're going to do it. The reality, of course, is that it's an impossible task unless they are eventually able to lock down the entire audio chain from the original CD (at that point it may not be a CD) to the loudspeakers. The RIAA's philosophy is based on the idea that with digital recording and reproduction the original and the copy are indistinguishable. This is a nice reductionist point, convertible into legal and technical practice. It fails utterly as soon as someone reintroduces an element that the RIAA has decided to ignore: Analog. Analog is part of the squishy world of the real, the world of miscommunication and approximation and error. It happens to be the world we live in. Digital is a terrific idea that allows us to do amazing things but bears little relationship to reality. Failure or partial failure of communication is the driving force of life. It's the heart of literature. It makes theatre fascinating. It contributes to the sorrow of breakup and the sweetness of reconciliation. It enables evolution and mutation and survival. Every geek knows the RIAA's copyproof scheme works just as long as the digital chain is unbroken. But until they figure out how to deliver music exclusively via electrodes in our heads, the digital chain is always broken. Sooner or later, whether at an audio output socket or in the air in front of the speaker cones, digital reverts to analog -- and the idea of the digital as guarantor of the real disappears. Once the signal passes through our analog world it becomes imperfect, imprecise, mutable, copyable and, yes, reconvertible into digital form. The RIAA's stakes in the real are about capital. Our stakes in the real are about blood and bone and bodies. For both us and the RIAA, it's about survival. But for us it's also about memory and honor, the squishy analog need to know that the human suffering and triumph with which we invest the mediated world has a grounding in something we can call "genuine". Try this. When we were in New Mexico this summer Cynbe bought a fragment of a meteorite. As we drove across the desert he gazed at it with wonder and said it's the closest he's likely to get to holding a distant star in his hand. The fragment is ostensibly from Siberia, and of course we got to talking about whether it's really from the Sikhote Alin event or just a chunk of slag from a Russian smelter. I pulled out the certificate of authenticity it came with, and we giggled. Late that night we were outside under the incredible velvet high-altitute sky and preternaturally brilliant stars. We looked up, enraptured. Cynbe took out the meteorite, weighed it in his hand, and looked up, his face shining with reflected starlight. After a while he stirred, glanced down, and handed it to me. I looked up into the infinite dark, feeling the warm metal in my hand, filled with the wonder I'd felt as a child when my dad pointed to the stars and said "Someday your children will go there". And my heart leaped with awe and joy and terror, with what we might call in our poor language a perception of the numinous. The warm weight in my hand brought me back to now. Holding the metal tighter, I looked up. The sense of being in the presence of illimitable mystery, of something beyond my comprehension, leaped again in me, as it had when my father had stood by me alive and warm and comforting, pointing upward toward the future. A lump of metal. A xeroxed certificate. The stars. -- Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Ph.D., Founding Director ACTLab/Convergent Media Department of Radio-Television-Film The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712 USA http://sandystone.com http://www.actlab.utexas.edu [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://home.actlab.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list [email protected] http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold