Original at
04/17/2000

 

ART POST-HISTORY: DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY & ELECTRONIC SEMIOTICS by Peter Lunenfeld

 

The idea of a universal language that will code and encode everything, the idea of free accessibility of gigantic libraries is Leibniz' idea. So finally we are doing what Leibniz has proposed.

I.      The Alexandrine Dream


From King Ptolemy I's idea of Library at Alexandria (3th Century) to Michel Foucault 's book La Croix du Main(1538) based on collecting all the information in the world under the one roof.   

 

The word, once written down, has always been subject to reproduction,  and the fact that there could be more than one copy of a book has encouraged such totalizing fantasies in the realm of language.  Although the fabled Library at Alexandria was burned to ashes, yet the desire to spatialize and totalize knowledge within a repository has thrived through the millennia.


The technologies change but the dream remains. Again, as the word has been digitized, the Alexandrine dreams have shifted from architectural space to hyperspace. See the TIMELINE for examples in History.
       

Through most of human history, reproducing the image has been more problematic than replicating the word. With the advent of photography, it became possible to gather the images as (represented) subject.

II.     Photography, Art History, Semiotics

 

A critique of digital photography, therefore, must account for this subsumption of the "photo" to the computer "graphic." With this subsumption comes a shift in the very way that we conceptualize the image: both in terms of the way that we read its position within a semiotic, and the way that we consider it within contexts, that is to say in terms of its place within art history.

 

I contend that the development of electronic imaging technologies, of which digital photography is but one part, has posed a challenge to both the conception of semiotics and the discipline of art history. We are only just now getting around to theorizing the impact that the computer has had
on the discourse developed around the photographic object. Paramount to this project is the posing of certain categorical questions.

 



III. Digital Photography?

     
What is digital photography?

Roland Barthes observed that "the photograph is not simply a product or a channel but also an object endowed with a structural autonomy."       

Digital Photography Photograph
computer image, whether originally photographic or not encoded digitally by uniformly subdividing the picture plane into a finite Cartesian grid of cells (known as pixels) and specifying the intensity or color of each cell by means of an integer drawn from some limited range analog representation of the differentiation of space in a scene: it varies continuously, both spatially and tonally
use new electronic imaging technologies use photochemical processes
once blown up to reveal its pixelated structure, it will look like nothing more than bigger and bigger portraits of the same pixels. The photochemical image continues to
reveal detail as it is enlarged, though it will show grain, and fuzz out
eventually.
re-production. re-presentation
nothing is lost with digital transfers, can be copied exactly. With every copy of an analog picture, detail is lost
input from analog cameras, digital still cameras, video, scanners, camcorders, and can be displayed on monitors or in hardcopy outputs including thermal wax, dye transfer, inkjet, laser printing, filmcameras, imagesetters  


IV.     Semiotics, Photography & Truth Value of the electronic Image
       

The inherent mutability of the digital image poses a challenge to those who have striven to create a semiotic of the photographic. In addition to Saussure's model, his American contemporary, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) offers an even more precise semiotic for the analysis of the visual image. Pierce created three classifications of signs: icon, symbol, and index.

 

The icon is a "sign determined by its dynamic object by virtue of its own internal nature." This is akin to the painted or sculpted image, a relationship of likeness.

 

 A symbol is a linkage based on convention, like language, an arbitrary relationship between a dog and the word "dog."

 

The index, "a sign determined by its Dynamic object by virtue of being in a real relation to
it." With the index, there is a causal link between the object and the sign, like smoke indicating a fire.

 

In regards to photography, Peirce was quite explicit: "Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that in certain respects that they are exactly like the objects that they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point with nature. In that respect then, they belong to the... class of signs" known as the index.
       

The digital photograph must now be treated as having the same truth value as a written text. We have thus returned, in some sense, to the aesthetic of the pre-photographic era, to a signscape that is once again reduced to the dichotomy between the word and the image, but this time unified in that both the word and the image are amalgamations of binary code.

 

The breakdown of the indexical relationship between the photograph and its referent, and the concurrent obliteration of the truth value of photography has had the same impact as the destruction of the aura occasioned by the advent of photography itself.