Beyond any difference – Olga Moskatova on image movements, shifting materiality and (not only) digital cameraless images

What does it mean for images to be mobile? How does the photographic capturing of a radioactive trace help us come into contact with non-human temporality? And what do digital images have in common with Alice in Wonderland? We discussed the co-existence of incommensurable timescales and more-than-human agency in image production, as well as her recently published anthology Images on the Move, with media theorist Olga Moskatova, who recently visited Prague to deliver a talk at the Reconsidering Cameraless Photography conference at FAMU.. While passing through historical and infrastructural contexts of image mobility, we also discussed the relevance and ubiquity of the ’post-’ prefix in theorizing media and explored the peculiar shifting materiality of digital networks.

NP      You recently published an anthology of texts called Images on the Move: Materiality – Networks – Formats. Could you briefly introduce the main idea behind the book?

OM      The anthology deals with a concept that gained prominence in the last few years, namely circulation. In our everyday networked practices, images are mobile and easily spreadable entities. In many contemporary discourses of photography and film, circulation has therefore become a dominant theoretical framework for characterizing digital images. However, I had the impression that circulation was often narrowed down to issues of virality, meme culture and phatic communication. This view tends to treat images as self-replicating, isolated agents that move on their own, while ignoring the material preconditions of circulation. So, I wanted to do three things: first, to discuss the mobility of images as part of material infrastructures and shift the focus from seemingly autonomous processes to material resistances; second, to historicize the whole idea and, thus, to take the circulation in digital networks as a starting point for discussing images’ mobility more broadly, because it is also important for many analog image technologies. And finally, I was interested in discussing ‘formats’ as a middle term between materiality and infrastructure, explaining how compression, size and standardization are operative for the mobilization of images.

NP      I like how you suggest that this new emphasis on movability of images allows us to – also historically – reconsider even still images, such as photographs, as in fact mobile media. Could you briefly elaborate on that?

OM      Yes, it is very interesting how digital images change our understanding of photography. We now realize that photographic images were on the move in many different forms, for example as postcards, post stamps or even passport photos. In the nineteenth century, people already exchanged photos and send cartes-de-visite via mail in order to maintain personal relationships. Also, twentieth century journalism and the press relied on wired photography – another form of mobile and transmissible photo, which is part of the genealogy of the digital networked image. Today, we can even find the idea of photography being a mobile medium in older canonical texts, e.g. by Oliver Wendell Holmes or Vilém Flusser. However, I think Michelle Henning formulated one of the most elaborate and beautifully framed conceptualizations of photography as a mobile image. She basically overthrows the traditional photographic ontology, which is based on the snapshot seen as a ‘still’ and ‘fixed’ image in her book Photography: The Unfettered Image. 

NP      In the book’s introduction, you also mention the historical importance of the frame as something which divided the representational space of the image and the ‘real’ space surrounding it, allowing thus for the image to detach itself from the local context and become autonomous and therefore movable. What do you think is the function of the frame in contemporary digital media, in the age of augmented reality, and so on? What happens to the line between representational and real space now?

OM      Technologies such as augmented or virtual reality are expanding and dissimulating the frame, trying to blend into the environment. You have to lose sight of it. Other contemporary image technologies work differently. We mainly consume images on digital screens such as a smartphone, tablet or computer. In contrast to analog photo, which has a materially fixed shape and thus frame, the screened image is scalable. Digital images circulate across different screen and have to be adapted to varying aspect ratios and screen sizes in the process. On touchscreens, the images are also pinchable and genuinely exhibit a plasticity of size and aesthetics of scale. We can observe how much they have to stretch to fit into a new size, when the image becomes pixelated. On digital screens, thus, we actually have two kinds of  frames – a frame of the screen and the malleable frame of the image. The aesthetics of the digital image are characterized by the tension between them. The image becomes like Alice in Wonderland: it has to shrink and enlarge in order to fill the screen frame.

NP      You already mentioned the material infrastructures of image movements. It seems easy to understand what this means in the case of analog film or photographic material. But how do you understand materiality in digital media? I think that despite the attempts of many theorists, for most people the ‘digital’ still often rhymes with the ‘immaterial’, which is hardly true when we consider the environmental and social impact of digital networks…

OM      Well, digital images are always imbedded in hardware and rely on its materiality, but the actual materialization changes depending on the technical process. Arlid Fetveit called it “shifting materiality" and I think it's quite a suitable term. It draws attention to the fact that images actually ‘travel’ all the time – not only in Internet networks, but also on your smartphone or tablet. Before images are displayed as images on digital screens, they are data and these data are recorded and stored on hard drives and memory sticks. In order to be displayed as visible phenomena, these data need the support of screen technologies – from LEDs to touch screens. By circulating throughout the Internet, these data pass many different material settings because the Internet consists of different technologies and infrastructures, such as wireless networks, optical fibers, transatlantic cables, routers, cloud farms, satellites, ethernet, etc. All of this hardware and infrastructure consumes material resources and energy; they have ecological costs and produce digital waste. So, to think of digital media and images as immaterial is extremely naive.

NP      To shift the topic a little – this issue of the magazine has “post-digital photography” as its underlying theme. One of the key aspects behind this term is the decentering of the human subject taking the photograph – the human in general has less and less direct control over the final visual outcome. You recently had a talk at a conference on cameraless photography at FAMU, which was dealing with a yet different decentering of the human, as it connects to the non-human temporality of radioactive traces in photography. Can you shortly explain your main thesis and maybe focus on the role of the human agent in producing such visual outcomes?

OM      In my talk, I was dealing with autoradiographs – photos made by registering radioactive entities and materials, which are usually put directly on customary photographic material or X-ray film. Like photos conceptualized as itinerant and moving images, autoradiographs also question traditional photographic ontology, which is modelled on snapshots and privileges instantaneity and pastness as temporal registers. In contrast, radioactivity confronts us with vast temporalities of thousands and even billions of years that transcend the human scale and also expand into the future. This kind of scalar decentering breaks with the traditional understanding of photography and allows us to realize that a lot of things have their own temporality and a nonhuman scale, including everyday objects: we don't have to go to the extreme and focus on radioactivity. So, my talk was about observing and questioning a scalar anthropocentrism - an epistemology and an everyday understanding that depends on the ‘naturalized’ anthropomorphic scale of human bodies and lifespans.  

As to the question of agency, for me, it’s always distributed, always more than human. Each picture is formed both by human and nonhuman agents, but this agency is not always symmetrical (although this is one of Bruno Latour’s main ideas). For example, in a picture made by hand, the agency appears to be quite symmetrical: you need the pencil and you need the hand. You have to collaborate, to do something with a tool. In photography and autoradiography, you have different degrees of automatism, so it’s never truly symmetrical and the human agent supports the becoming of the image by selecting, arranging or/and clicking, rather than producing the image. If we take cameraless techniques in computer vision settings such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) – there you don't even have to click anymore; the images are generated automatically. These visual practices range from symmetrical agency between humans and non-humans to basically non-human operations. However, I do not want to imply a historical teleology towards a completely non-human agency. A model of overlapping and co-existing practices is more accurate. 

NP      Since we already mentioned post-digital photography as a concept – what is your opinion on the prefix ‘post-’ itself, in terms of describing the shifts in media? How do you view the notions of ‘post-cinema’, ‘post-photography’, and ‘post-internet’ as also connected to discussions about the broadly proclaimed deaths of all just mentioned? 

OM      Often, ‘post-’ simply means ‘after’ in a temporal sense. But there is also another understanding: ‘post-’ indicating "according to" or even “beyond any difference.” I think terms such as post-cinema, etc., are not as important as the discourses and concepts formed around them. For example, post-photography and post-digitality are addressed differently. Post-photography meant post-analog photography, implying an end or even death. It was a discourse mourning analog photography and the loss of its indexicality and materiality. In a way, the concept of post-digital negates the concept of post-photography, because it postulates that there are no relevant differences between analog and digital any longer. The term emphasizes interconnectedness. Post-cinema is, again, framed somewhat differently. Of course, it also revolves around loss and morning, but the ideas of transformation and convergence are important as well. Post-cinema refers to cinema converging with games, mobile phones, series or television. It is associated with interactivity, streaming and networked moving images. So, it seems that ‘post’ initially signifies a cesura and has negative connotations of loss, but can quickly move towards more nuanced or enriched concepts of overlapping media and histories. 

NP      Speaking of overlapping histories, you also write about analog cameraless photography, a famous example of which could be surrealist photograms or certain experimental structural films. How does the concept of “cameraless photography”, deriving from such analog material practices, help us think images produced through computation, for example by technologies such as generative adversarial networks (GANs)?

OM      For me, the difference between analog or digital is too general and too generalizing. Operative differences in producing an image are more imortant. The term ‘cameraless’ is actually a negation that refers to the operation of recording; it indicates the departure from the standardized optical processes. For example, cameraless film or photography can be produced by painting, drawing or writing directly on the filmstrip. Handmade cameraless pictures are, thus, linked to century-old visual media and artisanal practices, which are traditionally distinguished from mechanical media. In contrast, photograms are closer to conventional photography and its (rather reductive) ontologies of index and trace. In fact, as Christoph Hoffmann has shown, many theorizations of photographical index are modelled on photograms. Therefore, photograms do not challenge the conventional understanding of photography to the same extent as handmade cameraless techniques. As to the term ‘generative’ in GANs, we can connect it to analog cameraless practices that I call ‘autogenerative’. In the analog sphere, the ‘autogenerative’ image production encompasses practices such as burying the film or photographic plate in the earth, plunging them into water, hanging up photographic materials on trees for months, or marinating film strips in food and drinks. This kind of cameraless image results from chemical, thermal, bacteriological, etc. reactions, or mechanical damage, i.e. from nonhuman agency – although it’s difficult to pin down the actual entities involved in the poesis. Maybe it's the water, maybe it's the air, maybe it's gravity, maybe it's the microorganisms living in the earth or water. It's the whole environment generating the image without the human artist. Similarly, in generative adversarial networks the image is generated by a nonhuman assemblage of machinic vision, of pattern recognition and recombination. Thus, autogenerative cameraless photography and GANs both do without a camera, but also without the recording operation in the strict sense of the term, whereas photograms result from recording operations. Therefore, the actual operations (and I am drawing on Kittler’s idea of basic media operations) differentiate the techniques much better and in a more nuanced way than the analog-digital divide.

NP      To conclude, I would like to ask you about your upcoming projects. What are you working on now? Or what are you looking forward to working on? 

OM      At the moment, networked images are my main field of research. I'm preparing two special issues, scheduled for 2022, and a monograph on this topic. One of the special issues is called “messy images” and deals with the aesthetics of networked images. We are interested in shifting the focus from the glossy and polished images circulating on social media to their messy, ugly, disturbing or anti-cute forms. The other project addresses the political economy of image platforms and the aesthetization of digital capitalism, which is currently discussed as platform or surveillance capitalism. My monograph deals with network cinema, digital spectatorship, and the transformation moving images undergo in the process of being relocated onto small screens. One of the chapters I am very much looking forward to is about computers watching films. A lot of research in computer vision goes into photography and still images, so I'm very interested in the implication computer vision and AI have for moving images. Since my project is about spectatorship, it is another example of decentering the human being – one not concentrating on the nonhuman image producer any longer.