This image plays with the break-up of time and space. The common organization of several images on the same screen would be a left to right or a top to bottom type arrangement. The narrow strip on the bottom of each image records time and date. The images come from the same day. The next logical organization method would be with time. This image came first. That image came next. But in this case, the lower left image shows the earliest time, which doesn't follow the traditional time-hierarchical organization. None of the other images, with the exception of the bottom right, follow the traditional time-hierarchical organization. The exception could merely be a coincidence, since three images out of the four are this way. This image 1. dispenses with the traditional hierarchical organization based on time 2. creates new ideas of the distribution of time and space 3. introduces a new kind of organization or dis-organization
Also, this image is inhumane. The seeing is that of a machine, a machine that has its own inherent organization and categorization. Presumably, humans or narrow objects are encased in black squares. Cars or wider objects are encased in white squares. Either the requirement for such encasement is for the object to be moving, or the object needs to be in the general center of the machine's visual or sensory reach.
This image surveys surveillance. Possible points of interest are highlighted by frames within the image, the frame targets them. The camera, as Panopticon, quantifies movement, cataloging everything the camera sees and timestamping it. This image implies responsibility for one's actions, it is the threat of punishment.
There are several arguments being made by this image. In each frame, either people, cars, or people and cars are highlighted by different colored boxes. It appears that people are boxed in black and cars are boxed in white, but the color is less important than the distinction between their interior and their exterior.
In some sense, it is really one's understanding which is boxed. The viewer's interpretive agency is hampered because it receives the message "Look here, this is what is important." from the boxes themselves. I wonder whether it really is what is in the boxes that is most important, or whether somewhere else in these photos there is something far more fascinating.
The movement of this image is the movement of tracking movement. But, this tracking movement is a tracking of human movement. This image, in its tracking of human movement, harbors a concept of anti-humanist humanism. This concept appeals to little more than the fact of human movement; as a work that stands on its own, its viewer takes up this conceptual humanism in his participation with the image. To participate in the seeing of this image is to take up this concept of anti-humanist humanism (human strictly as movement), and to deploy it in a twofold manner. In the first, the viewer-participant’s seeing privileges what comes to presence out of the surveillance boxes that capture the movement in a multi-temporal polyptych. White box, black box; human doing, human moving. In the second, as the viewer-participant moves from box to box, this seeing turns the concept toward him. The human as movement comes to presence out of the boxes; so too does the viewer-participant come to presence according to this anti-humanist humanist concept of the image. The image, in the discourse between it and its viewer, sees back in the sense of seeing this seeing move from box to box, from frame to frame. A seeing that is captivated, captured, and reduced or constrained to ocular movements that are seemingly indexed according to the movement of the image which is the tracking movement of human movement, a conceptual anti-humanist humanism arranged across a multi-temporal polyptych.
An image of an image, a frame within a frame. This image keeps people and things in boxes, keeps them distinct from their surroundings. Black boxes and white boxes, everything seems to be in order, classified and defined. But what about the things not boxed, the things de-classified? While this image closes certain things in, it provides others with their freedom. This juxtaposition is not hierarchical but seemingly random, giving the viewer the opportunity to find its own answers and live its own experience through the contrariness of this image.
This image privileges time and movement. Each frame evinces a point in time, while each box within the frames evinces movement. This evidentiary purpose is a function of the camera's seeing, which includes temporal data and a type of movement auto-focus.
As a piece of evidence, this image lends itself to certain interpretive narratives. Perhaps it counters an alibi, or perhaps it documents a robbery.
Yet, as a piece of evidence, this image ostensibly detracts from its own imagery. It is not generous because it does not offer anything new. It may matter for some purposes, but it does not matter in its own right. Or does it?
As soon as the audience for this image is one that does not use it as evidence, it undergoes change. The malleability of this image depends on its reception. The other responses to the image on this blog attest to its malleability. Stella Chen sees this image as inhumane; Clay Turner watches this image hamper the viewer's interpretive agency. I would like to argue that this image reinvents itself by enduring its different uses and interpretations. By reinventing itself, this image tests every other image. It challenges every other image to stand up to seeingseeing.blogspot.com.
The perspectives of man and machine are visibly intertwined into one within the image. The view of a camera absorbs everything while privileging nothing, as everything within the camera's gaze shares equal importance. The view of man is a view of privilege, in which certain aspects of a visual field are highlighted due to internal thoughts and predispositions. The boxes around certain objects in the image portrays the intelligence of man and man's filter of privilege interacting with the thoughtless uptake of image by a camera.
The image plays with multiple frames situated within frames within even larger frames. Every white and black rectangle forms a frame within which there is a separate image. Each smaller image is embedded within a larger image. Four of those larget images seems to form the entirety of the image. However, the background of my browser is also white, and it can form a new white rectangular frame around the entire image. The entire broser has become an image with the images within images within it. The image nudges the viewer to see things outside of it as images and frames and images within frames.
When is this image taking place and what is the image for that matter? The numbers displayed at the lower left corners are an attempt to give these images a sense of temporality, but much like the frames with in the frames, they are just another image among images. They are not separate from the image-event. On the contrary, they are just as much a part of it as any other aspect of the image.
These groupings of images are distinctly separate from one another, yet they all interact together to produce a seeing that is novel, that breaks the boundries of time and space. Multiple existences within the same location, extant simultaneously. The camera captures these images but it is the conglomeration of camera and eye that allow for this seeing to occur. The two are splayed on the same plane and what is created is an invisible space of becoming image.
It's becoming. It's movement. It's time. The frames don't need to force a type of importance onto what is inside of them. The main frame is already cut into four and then within each are more frames making it explicit that the "frame" doesn't hold much warrant here. I don't see anything forming because of the time stamps and the frames but maybe I'm just dumb...and I don't know what to say about it that is intelligent and interesting right now.
Originally, these images were recording events. That's the purpose of a surveillance camera. However, taken out of their original context and altered slightly, these 4 camera stills become different images that now stand on their own. They have become a new event. 4 ways a parking lot can go.
Are there four images or just one? Regardless, there are frames within frames. There is no focal point in these images. The boxes on the respective objects/subjects within the four frames do not make these subjects any more significant that all the other objects outside these white and black boxes. These boxes are just there, just part of the image, part of the becoming. They are simply just frames within a frame.
The power of the frame. Something is so familiar about these boxes instructing my focus to the action. At first sight I don't even registrar how strange it actually is. "This is what matters, only the stuff inside here" the frame commands. The frame never gets everything by definition it can't. This image frames the frame, and in this moment (via another bigger frame) the material outside of the smaller frame is held together. I'm not sure what that makes possible.
How are these images separated? Are these all simply different images, or is it the same image repeated? The image repeats. Time is always happening, and the image is affected by this. Time is essential to becoming. If time were stopped, the image's becoming would cease as well. The image is interesting because its repetition means that it is always becoming. The image is constantly proffering itself, but never in the same way twice due to time.
Within the image, the boxes serve as frames, isolating particular people and objects and distinguishing them from their immediate environments. The frames, in making a distinction between what lies within their borders and what is external to them, are a means for adding significance to those people and objects. In other words, the frame highlights them as a point of focus in the image. Given that the images are different in no other respect, the frames seem to argue that this is what each of the images is "about."
These images in their entirety remove time from the equation. According to their time stamps, the sequence of these images moves back and forth in time. The background of cars, trees and buildings hardly changes but the foreground of rectangles, cars and people does. This image does not depict time travel, it refuses the significance of time in image-making completely. This camera is always on, it is always creating images, whether it be at 13:32:04 on 1/26/2003 or 12:55:37 on 1/26/2003. This camera is not submissive to time, it dominates time.
It's an image selected, carved out as a piece of the world, and served to the sight. Yet within it, the servings proliferate. Little squares carve out further pieces of the world to further interrogate with the eyes.
Without any given context, the juxtaposition of frames here marks a strange, almost arbitrary nature of the image. Without context, the event being photographed dissolves into the present event of the multiple framings. The event taking place is that of all these frames tracing a path for the eyes to take along the image. Machine...human body...human body...human body...machine...sprinkled upon a part of the world, becoming visual seasonings to taste with the eyes.
Surveillance - a most obvious information gleaning technique.
However, what information can a viewer obtain from this, other than those figures in the white and black boxes are some how significant?
Upon looking at this, we are just as informed as the image. It only knows those worth surveying, just as we do.
This image is very... detatched? It tracks cars and people moving, yet the camera stays completely still. movement can only be tracked within this rigid frame.
It feels as if to be caught in it's frame, in it's gaze, is to be rendered immobile. As if those boxes would somehow trap anything that moves. The cars that are parked remain free, while those leaving, escaping the gaze, are frozen forever in a box, in a photograph.
In separating the linear sequence of time through the reorganization of the images, the image submits time to its own will. No longer images to record linear temporal events, the image fashions its own conception of time. Frames focus upon movement, of people and vehicles, while the rest of the environment is seemingly unchanged. Though the frames are not temporally linear, they do signify time whether it is regressing backwards or progressing forwards. Time becomes motion, a time and motion that have no direction. The focus upon humans whether walking or driving, initially appears to be depicting a human presence, however it becomes apparent that they are simply variables in the camera's specific sense of time. The viewer is given a very inhuman look at the temporal "space" of human movement.
This is a mechanical seeing. There is no, nor need there be any “who” behind it. The “what” that sees seems to choose what it will frame based on motion combined with mass (would a pigeon get its own frame within the frame?). From that machine’s perspective, this entire image is authored by chance. The machine cares not if the buildings disappear, if cars blow up, or if it’s Godzilla that walks through the parking lot. All that matters is movement of a certain or greater size..
This image revels in its inherent frailty, its inability to capture. Shapes, seemingly so rigid, patrol the premises, constantly molding and mutating to grasp the figures they chase. These rectangles are slaves to the ooze of time. Time presents itself as a continuous flow, and although numbers with numbers and more numbers attempt to bridle a chunk of time's movement and preserve it as is, the figures escaping from their prescribed shapes show time is not, in fact, stopped at all. This wallowing in life's perpetual electricity mocks its purpose of surveillance as it fails to achieve it. Time cannot be somehow frozen outside of time, images cannot be somehow captured outside of images. This image is an attempt to document the flow of the universe; it yearns to sweetly tease and joyously fail.
This image wrests the linear movement of time to posit its own temporality in its own stilling-movement. "'Movement,'" Coffeen tells us via Deleuze "via Bergson, 'is distinct from the space covered.' Movement is more or less continuous while the space covered is divisible. Hence, 'you cannot reconsitute movement with positions in spaces or instants in time: that is, with immobile sections.'" Divided spaces of instants of time is exactly what this image offers. There is no sequence--all are presented at once; thus no linear movement. Shall it then be said that this image has no movement at all, that it is a capturing, or a freezing, of time-movement into space?
The question contains the answer. It is that act of capturing or freezing. The image performs this arrest of motion. It is not the representation of instants; it is the movement to instantiation, stillness in motion.
Boxes within Boxes These images become this image as soon as they are postured next to one another. The boxes within boxes are one box, but a multitude of boxes as well. This image explores self contained areas of box. From the entire box shape, to the four separated boxes down to the small boxes around the time /date stamp – this image still retains its box shape. As if to display some sort of surveillance, these boxes don’t resemble much other than their boxes, and the nature of its postured. Indeed, if you look closely to the posture, one can see that there is a white line separating the four boxes. However, this white line ‘separating’ does not necessarily need to be. Rather, this white line can be looked at as the glue, holding this image together, not separating it apart.
This image dictates its own seeing. The boxes within the boxes instruct the viewer as to where to look and what to focus on. The white boxes within the surveillance images tantilize in that they pose a tension between affect and concept. Is there a reason behind these particular boxes around these particular objects and people? Does it matter? Do they lend to a more pleasurable aesthetic viewing of the image? Maybe. They certainly lend to its mystery.
This image is imposing. Did each boxed figure or vehicle asked to be looked at? It intrudes upon itself, as it intrudes upon our willingness to see everything equally.
On the other hand, the boxes within the images are shapes and figures themselves. To see them as a sort of boxy highlighter, is to disregard their own significance and importance in favor of utilizing them to see a "true" or "meaningful" image.
Also interesting to talk about is the fact that these four split images occupy the same space--or do they? If we agree that they do, their simultaneity in presentation transcends the space-time continuum, one space seen at once in four places in four different times.
Yet if we agree that they are not the same space, the argument could be that, none are exactly the same--though it is the same lava lamp, the innards never mold the SAME.
In the image, boxes categorize objects according to their particular forms; people are grouped within black boxes and cars within white ones. The boxes call the viewer's attention to one way she can see the world: seeing based on classification. Upon realizing that she subscribes to this approach to seeing, the viewer recognizes its limitations. For instance, fixating on the boxed objects prevents the viewer from taking in the image as a whole.
This surveillance is not the collection of narration and evidence but it is the collection of the images and images within the image becoming an art piece. Randomly taken images are no longer capturing of an event but breaking the linear time line by placing boxes upon the image. Each motion within the images is stopped by the boxes, making the image move as a whole, not as an individual image.
This image offers a tendency of seeing in isolation. The white space between the four frames, the white and black boxes within each of the four frames, and the time stamp in the lower right of each frame isolate certain pieces of the image that bring in different aspects of seeing. One indicates a difference in time while another shows a difference in movement. Time and motion seem to be the focal points of the image, as dictated by the various framing. And so the image seems to encourage a type of seeing that keeps these separations intact.
This notion of seeing in isolation is complicated, however, with the surveillance camera’s way of seeing the world by combining a human and non-human seeing. Not only is this image a mechanistic seeing that captures everything, but it also provides a human kind of seeing as certain points in the image are highlighted over others, thereby mimicking the way one’s eye tends to move over an image. What this image offers, then, is another way of seeing that overcomes, or, at least, challenges, notions of separation, opposition, and distinction.
In Coffeen’s essay “This is Photography: The Alien Vision of Andreas Gursky,” he points out the Gursky’s “photos share such an affiliation with surveillance photos, photos without a photographer, without consideration, an anonymous visual sweep” (70). It is true that the camera continues even after the human is removed and outside of spatial temporal agency and manipulation of what it captures, but it is spatially confined to a visual location and at that spatial location determined at some point by the photographer. It is also predetermined to take shots in corresponds to a mechanical and temporal framework that has somewhere been set up by the photographer. What is not considered is the future actions that by chance enter and exit its frame. Not only a surveillance photograph, but every photograph lacks absolute control of the photographer: the world is never a still life. The surveillance camera differs only in the level or degree of control and manipulation. As Bergson would say, it is a difference in type, not kind. The photographer merely has a much more detached and distant control of the temporal order and the movements that are going to occur in the surveillance camera’s ever-rolling non-discriminatory frame. As the first poster pointed out, the four images of the surveillance camera are organized outside of standard temporal linearity; or at least in a new mapping of temporal narrative. It is obvious that the surveillance camera itself, once it is put up and powered, can record a sequence of events in continuous duration without any selectivity or preference. It is lobotomized voyeurism pre-programmed by a human agent. But it cannot print those photographs or select four freeze frames without some mechanical command and human instrument at play (as far as I know, technology has yet to acquire free-will). The human element and hand is vividly palpable in the jumbled order of the four frames taken on 1/26/03: the bottom left at 12:55, the top right at 13:12, the top left at 13:32, and the bottom right at 15:49. I know that some cultures read right to lift, some up and down, but a narrative or organization in circular loops defies cultural norms. Perhaps this image is innovating a new map for narrative. The temporal figure 8: a new narrative advancing in the symbolic loop of infinity.
This image is movement. This image is control. This image is compartmentalizing. And finally this image is the last one I will have to comment on so it is also the end.
The image plays with time. Each quadrant is similar enough that the lines at first could be drawing focus to different locations. In fact it is one camers in the same place at different times. The change and not he specifics in each quadrant are important. The squares while they seem to be significant actually mitigate the dignifcance of the object they surround. Leaving not fisical object but change over time at the forefront.
As Natasha said, this image surveys surveillance. The camera surveys the parking lot, the cars, the trees, the people. The image is composed of shots of different times of day of this scene. It privileges a view of this parking lot scene, from a building that is unseen. As others said, the ordering of the different times of the photo shots and the frames and their direction suggest a certain way of reading them. As hirsh said, the frame highlights the objects as points of focus in the image, and the whole frame highlights each area of the image as a point of focus.
If the world is always already recorded by beings that percieve and transmutate it, an orwellian future may have been upon us since we began seeing. privacy is never and option because, as ginsberg said, we are 'spied on by our eyes' and the myriad mechanical seers that create the world. the image takes slivers of a time and place, cuts them up, and rearranges them in order to disrupt the linearity of an image, exposing the possibility of wresting any 'document' from its evidentiary purpose
Image is now. Memory is now. Here it is made explicitly obvious, the past in the present, right now, becoming. We have four different "past" times happening all at once. And so as these four times of the past become in the present, these are not memories of the past, not monuments looking backward, but a monument of present becoming that looks backward and forward at the same time.
It is the seeing of a mchine. Squares and rectangles highlight what is important in the image just as a human brain does. It is the explicit visual execution of what unconsciously happens in human seeing. But now no choice is left. Unconscious or not the viewer is not left the personal highlighting prerogative. It forces the viewer to see what it highlights- what the camera has chosen. It actually takes action against the viewer. The image is self owning. It owns the wayit will be viewed.
The picture is of what appears to be the gradual surveillance of two men and a jeep. It is in four squares. The surveillees are put in various boxes. It seems almost like a statement against surveillance, but it could be for. It gives a feeling of constriction and severity, a common reaction against constant modern surveillance.
What is time in this image? Is the eye of the viewer supposed to see in any one particular order: left top frame to right top to down right frame, etc. as in a clock-ward motion? If so, then is time orderly? But this is not the one and only way of reading this image. Indeed, the image may not have any order at all. It may be a battle between various methods. This image's time may be the shifting from one frame to the next is an experience of momentary time; every moment and the multiple moments within it.
looking back, i see that my comment didnt post! here it is, copy/pasted:
"this image performs the robotic structuring of time- not only is it Surveillance, zoning in, chopping off, and highlighting pre-existing objects, but it also re-orders these mundane objects and places them into arbitrary relation with one another, all the while embodying a panoptic gaze from afar. The viewer is all at once thrown into the interior mechanics of a security surveillance machine, becoming part of this re-structuring and seemingly random highlighting of events. The image is also the passage of time, as the background buildings stay the same in each shot, but the cars are the most obvious changes. This setup performs TIME, rather than represents it, as there is no order, just scattered movement from frame to frame."
The camera is framing the action. Or is it? It ALL looks still to me, equally still. But if the frame captures action, then all frames would follow; and since it’s a frame within a series of embedded frames, then EVERYTHING is constantly always and already in action. The arrangement of images in accordance to universal time renders moot. This image operates on a different time, one that does not follow on a linear path of only before and after. Each frame is a distinct moment and memory and image of its own, and yet also intimately interconnected with every other frame. In the seeing of focused-seeing, an unfocussed and decentralized seeing unravels, rippling on a flat plane. The frame shatters as border into new borders of frames interlinking, interlocking into other frames, frames of all different shapes and sizes, people frames, car frames, roads framing roads wynding. Frames-a-go-go.
Each week, we will consider an image. This image may come from anywhere—from a painting, the news, an art photograph, a picture of my child.
Your job is to read this image. You need write only four lines; you may write more. Inflect the image. Give it a spin. Make us see what we may not be seeing. Take up the image, do something with it, then give it back to us—in words.
The goal is multifold. It is to learn to reckon a diversity of images. It is to learn the art of the riff, the spin, the take. And, in the end, I hope we have created an exquisite symphony, a chorus of voices, each distinct, each singing an image in its own register.
ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED. You may miss 3 classes during the semester. For each class missed after that, your grade will be lowered a full grade—from an A to a B.
EVERY weekend, I will post an image on this blog. By Thursday's class, you must write a response to that image as a comment on this blog. -You will have to create a Google account. -Please use your name in your identity so I know who you are when you post your comment. If you already have a Google identity but it does not reflect your name, please create a new one. -Your comment can be brief; in fact, it should be—anywhere from 3-10 lines. Try to make it pithy, astute, sharp. -These are not optional: each one you miss will translate into the loss of a full grade for your class participation grade.
There will be three papers scattered through the semester; they will be @ two pages long. These are not optional. If you fail to do one, you will fail the class.
Grading -Class participation: 30% -Paper 1: 20% -Paper 2: 20% -Paper 3: 30% -I WILL NOT GRANT INCOMPLETES.
This image plays with the break-up of time and space. The common organization of several images on the same screen would be a left to right or a top to bottom type arrangement. The narrow strip on the bottom of each image records time and date. The images come from the same day. The next logical organization method would be with time. This image came first. That image came next. But in this case, the lower left image shows the earliest time, which doesn't follow the traditional time-hierarchical organization. None of the other images, with the exception of the bottom right, follow the traditional time-hierarchical organization. The exception could merely be a coincidence, since three images out of the four are this way. This image
ReplyDelete1. dispenses with the traditional hierarchical organization based on time
2. creates new ideas of the distribution of time and space
3. introduces a new kind of organization or dis-organization
Also, this image is inhumane. The seeing is that of a machine, a machine that has its own inherent organization and categorization. Presumably, humans or narrow objects are encased in black squares. Cars or wider objects are encased in white squares. Either the requirement for such encasement is for the object to be moving, or the object needs to be in the general center of the machine's visual or sensory reach.
This image surveys surveillance. Possible points of interest are highlighted by frames within the image, the frame targets them. The camera, as Panopticon, quantifies movement, cataloging everything the camera sees and timestamping it.
ReplyDeleteThis image implies responsibility for one's actions, it is the threat of punishment.
There are several arguments being made by this image. In each frame, either people, cars, or people and cars are highlighted by different colored boxes. It appears that people are boxed in black and cars are boxed in white, but the color is less important than the distinction between their interior and their exterior.
ReplyDeleteIn some sense, it is really one's understanding which is boxed. The viewer's interpretive agency is hampered because it receives the message "Look here, this is what is important." from the boxes themselves. I wonder whether it really is what is in the boxes that is most important, or whether somewhere else in these photos there is something far more fascinating.
The movement of this image is the movement of tracking movement. But, this tracking movement is a tracking of human movement. This image, in its tracking of human movement, harbors a concept of anti-humanist humanism. This concept appeals to little more than the fact of human movement; as a work that stands on its own, its viewer takes up this conceptual humanism in his participation with the image. To participate in the seeing of this image is to take up this concept of anti-humanist humanism (human strictly as movement), and to deploy it in a twofold manner. In the first, the viewer-participant’s seeing privileges what comes to presence out of the surveillance boxes that capture the movement in a multi-temporal polyptych. White box, black box; human doing, human moving. In the second, as the viewer-participant moves from box to box, this seeing turns the concept toward him. The human as movement comes to presence out of the boxes; so too does the viewer-participant come to presence according to this anti-humanist humanist concept of the image. The image, in the discourse between it and its viewer, sees back in the sense of seeing this seeing move from box to box, from frame to frame. A seeing that is captivated, captured, and reduced or constrained to ocular movements that are seemingly indexed according to the movement of the image which is the tracking movement of human movement, a conceptual anti-humanist humanism arranged across a multi-temporal polyptych.
ReplyDeleteAn image of an image, a frame within a frame. This image keeps people and things in boxes, keeps them distinct from their surroundings. Black boxes and white boxes, everything seems to be in order, classified and defined. But what about the things not boxed, the things de-classified? While this image closes certain things in, it provides others with their freedom. This juxtaposition is not hierarchical but seemingly random, giving the viewer the opportunity to find its own answers and live its own experience through the contrariness of this image.
ReplyDeleteThis image privileges time and movement. Each frame evinces a point in time, while each box within the frames evinces movement. This evidentiary purpose is a function of the camera's seeing, which includes temporal data and a type of movement auto-focus.
ReplyDeleteAs a piece of evidence, this image lends itself to certain interpretive narratives. Perhaps it counters an alibi, or perhaps it documents a robbery.
Yet, as a piece of evidence, this image ostensibly detracts from its own imagery. It is not generous because it does not offer anything new. It may matter for some purposes, but it does not matter in its own right. Or does it?
As soon as the audience for this image is one that does not use it as evidence, it undergoes change. The malleability of this image depends on its reception. The other responses to the image on this blog attest to its malleability. Stella Chen sees this image as inhumane; Clay Turner watches this image hamper the viewer's interpretive agency. I would like to argue that this image reinvents itself by enduring its different uses and interpretations. By reinventing itself, this image tests every other image. It challenges every other image to stand up to seeingseeing.blogspot.com.
The perspectives of man and machine are visibly intertwined into one within the image. The view of a camera absorbs everything while privileging nothing, as everything within the camera's gaze shares equal importance. The view of man is a view of privilege, in which certain aspects of a visual field are highlighted due to internal thoughts and predispositions. The boxes around certain objects in the image portrays the intelligence of man and man's filter of privilege interacting with the thoughtless uptake of image by a camera.
ReplyDeleteThe image plays with multiple frames situated within frames within even larger frames. Every white and black rectangle forms a frame within which there is a separate image. Each smaller image is embedded within a larger image. Four of those larget images seems to form the entirety of the image. However, the background of my browser is also white, and it can form a new white rectangular frame around the entire image. The entire broser has become an image with the images within images within it. The image nudges the viewer to see things outside of it as images and frames and images within frames.
ReplyDeleteWhen is this image taking place and what is the image for that matter? The numbers displayed at the lower left corners are an attempt to give these images a sense of temporality, but much like the frames with in the frames, they are just another image among images. They are not separate from the image-event. On the contrary, they are just as much a part of it as any other aspect of the image.
ReplyDeleteThese groupings of images are distinctly separate from one another, yet they all interact together to produce a seeing that is novel, that breaks the boundries of time and space. Multiple existences within the same location, extant simultaneously. The camera captures these images but it is the conglomeration of camera and eye that allow for this seeing to occur. The two are splayed on the same plane and what is created is an invisible space of becoming image.
It's becoming.
ReplyDeleteIt's movement.
It's time.
The frames don't need to force a type of importance onto what is inside of them. The main frame is already cut into four and then within each are more frames making it explicit that the "frame" doesn't hold much warrant here. I don't see anything forming because of the time stamps and the frames but maybe I'm just dumb...and I don't know what to say about it that is intelligent and interesting right now.
Originally, these images were recording events. That's the purpose of a surveillance camera. However, taken out of their original context and altered slightly, these 4 camera stills become different images that now stand on their own. They have become a new event. 4 ways a parking lot can go.
ReplyDeleteAre there four images or just one? Regardless, there are frames within frames. There is no focal point in these images. The boxes on the respective objects/subjects within the four frames do not make these subjects any more significant that all the other objects outside these white and black boxes. These boxes are just there, just part of the image, part of the becoming. They are simply just frames within a frame.
ReplyDeleteThe power of the frame. Something is so familiar about these boxes instructing my focus to the action. At first sight I don't even registrar how strange it actually is. "This is what matters, only the stuff inside here" the frame commands. The frame never gets everything by definition it can't. This image frames the frame, and in this moment (via another bigger frame) the material outside of the smaller frame is held together. I'm not sure what that makes possible.
ReplyDeleteHow are these images separated? Are these all simply different images, or is it the same image repeated? The image repeats. Time is always happening, and the image is affected by this. Time is essential to becoming. If time were stopped, the image's becoming would cease as well. The image is interesting because its repetition means that it is always becoming. The image is constantly proffering itself, but never in the same way twice due to time.
ReplyDeleteWithin the image, the boxes serve as frames, isolating particular people and objects and distinguishing them from their immediate environments. The frames, in making a distinction between what lies within their borders and what is external to them, are a means for adding significance to those people and objects. In other words, the frame highlights them as a point of focus in the image. Given that the images are different in no other respect, the frames seem to argue that this is what each of the images is "about."
ReplyDeleteThese images in their entirety remove time from the equation. According to their time stamps, the sequence of these images moves back and forth in time. The background of cars, trees and buildings hardly changes but the foreground of rectangles, cars and people does. This image does not depict time travel, it refuses the significance of time in image-making completely. This camera is always on, it is always creating images, whether it be at 13:32:04 on 1/26/2003 or 12:55:37 on 1/26/2003. This camera is not submissive to time, it dominates time.
ReplyDeleteIt's an image selected, carved out as a piece of the world, and served to the sight. Yet within it, the servings proliferate. Little squares carve out further pieces of the world to further interrogate with the eyes.
ReplyDeleteWithout any given context, the juxtaposition of frames here marks a strange, almost arbitrary nature of the image. Without context, the event being photographed dissolves into the present event of the multiple framings. The event taking place is that of all these frames tracing a path for the eyes to take along the image. Machine...human body...human body...human body...machine...sprinkled upon a part of the world, becoming visual seasonings to taste with the eyes.
Surveillance - a most obvious information gleaning technique.
ReplyDeleteHowever, what information can a viewer obtain from this, other than those figures in the white and black boxes are some how significant?
Upon looking at this, we are just as informed as the image. It only knows those worth surveying, just as we do.
This image is very... detatched? It tracks cars and people moving, yet the camera stays completely still. movement can only be tracked within this rigid frame.
It feels as if to be caught in it's frame, in it's gaze, is to be rendered immobile. As if those boxes would somehow trap anything that moves. The cars that are parked remain free, while those leaving, escaping the gaze, are frozen forever in a box, in a photograph.
In separating the linear sequence of time through the reorganization of the images, the image submits time to its own will. No longer images to record linear temporal events, the image fashions its own conception of time. Frames focus upon movement, of people and vehicles, while the rest of the environment is seemingly unchanged. Though the frames are not temporally linear, they do signify time whether it is regressing backwards or progressing forwards. Time becomes motion, a time and motion that have no direction. The focus upon humans whether walking or driving, initially appears to be depicting a human presence, however it becomes apparent that they are simply variables in the camera's specific sense of time. The viewer is given a very inhuman look at the temporal "space" of human movement.
ReplyDeleteThis is a mechanical seeing. There is no, nor need there be any “who” behind it. The “what” that sees seems to choose what it will frame based on motion combined with mass (would a pigeon get its own frame within the frame?). From that machine’s perspective, this entire image is authored by chance. The machine cares not if the buildings disappear, if cars blow up, or if it’s Godzilla that walks through the parking lot. All that matters is movement of a certain or greater size..
ReplyDeleteThis image revels in its inherent frailty, its inability to capture. Shapes, seemingly so rigid, patrol the premises, constantly molding and mutating to grasp the figures they chase. These rectangles are slaves to the ooze of time. Time presents itself as a continuous flow, and although numbers with numbers and more numbers attempt to bridle a chunk of time's movement and preserve it as is, the figures escaping from their prescribed shapes show time is not, in fact, stopped at all. This wallowing in life's perpetual electricity mocks its purpose of surveillance as it fails to achieve it. Time cannot be somehow frozen outside of time, images cannot be somehow captured outside of images. This image is an attempt to document the flow of the universe; it yearns to sweetly tease and joyously fail.
ReplyDeleteThis image wrests the linear movement of time to posit its own temporality in its own stilling-movement. "'Movement,'" Coffeen tells us via Deleuze "via Bergson, 'is distinct from the space covered.' Movement is more or less continuous while the space covered is divisible. Hence, 'you cannot reconsitute movement with positions in spaces or instants in time: that is, with immobile sections.'" Divided spaces of instants of time is exactly what this image offers. There is no sequence--all are presented at once; thus no linear movement. Shall it then be said that this image has no movement at all, that it is a capturing, or a freezing, of time-movement into space?
ReplyDeleteThe question contains the answer. It is that act of capturing or freezing. The image performs this arrest of motion. It is not the representation of instants; it is the movement to instantiation, stillness in motion.
Boxes within Boxes
ReplyDeleteThese images become this image as soon as they are postured next to one another. The boxes within boxes are one box, but a multitude of boxes as well. This image explores self contained areas of box. From the entire box shape, to the four separated boxes down to the small boxes around the time /date stamp – this image still retains its box shape. As if to display some sort of surveillance, these boxes don’t resemble much other than their boxes, and the nature of its postured. Indeed, if you look closely to the posture, one can see that there is a white line separating the four boxes. However, this white line ‘separating’ does not necessarily need to be. Rather, this white line can be looked at as the glue, holding this image together, not separating it apart.
This image dictates its own seeing. The boxes within the boxes instruct the viewer as to where to look and what to focus on. The white boxes within the surveillance images tantilize in that they pose a tension between affect and concept. Is there a reason behind these particular boxes around these particular objects and people? Does it matter? Do they lend to a more pleasurable aesthetic viewing of the image? Maybe. They certainly lend to its mystery.
ReplyDeleteThis image is imposing. Did each boxed figure or vehicle asked to be looked at? It intrudes upon itself, as it intrudes upon our willingness to see everything equally.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the boxes within the images are shapes and figures themselves. To see them as a sort of boxy highlighter, is to disregard their own significance and importance in favor of utilizing them to see a "true" or "meaningful" image.
Also interesting to talk about is the fact that these four split images occupy the same space--or do they? If we agree that they do, their simultaneity in presentation transcends the space-time continuum, one space seen at once in four places in four different times.
Yet if we agree that they are not the same space, the argument could be that, none are exactly the same--though it is the same lava lamp, the innards never mold the SAME.
In the image, boxes categorize objects according to their particular forms; people are grouped within black boxes and cars within white ones. The boxes call the viewer's attention to one way she can see the world: seeing based on classification. Upon realizing that she subscribes to this approach to seeing, the viewer recognizes its limitations. For instance, fixating on the boxed objects prevents the viewer from taking in the image as a whole.
ReplyDeleteThis surveillance is not the collection of narration and evidence but it is the collection of the images and images within the image becoming an art piece. Randomly taken images are no longer capturing of an event but breaking the linear time line by placing boxes upon the image. Each motion within the images is stopped by the boxes, making the image move as a whole, not as an individual image.
ReplyDeleteThis image offers a tendency of seeing in isolation. The white space between the four frames, the white and black boxes within each of the four frames, and the time stamp in the lower right of each frame isolate certain pieces of the image that bring in different aspects of seeing. One indicates a difference in time while another shows a difference in movement. Time and motion seem to be the focal points of the image, as dictated by the various framing. And so the image seems to encourage a type of seeing that keeps these separations intact.
ReplyDeleteThis notion of seeing in isolation is complicated, however, with the surveillance camera’s way of seeing the world by combining a human and non-human seeing. Not only is this image a mechanistic seeing that captures everything, but it also provides a human kind of seeing as certain points in the image are highlighted over others, thereby mimicking the way one’s eye tends to move over an image. What this image offers, then, is another way of seeing that overcomes, or, at least, challenges, notions of separation, opposition, and distinction.
In Coffeen’s essay “This is Photography: The Alien Vision of Andreas Gursky,” he points out the Gursky’s “photos share such an affiliation with surveillance photos, photos without a photographer, without consideration, an anonymous visual sweep” (70). It is true that the camera continues even after the human is removed and outside of spatial temporal agency and manipulation of what it captures, but it is spatially confined to a visual location and at that spatial location determined at some point by the photographer. It is also predetermined to take shots in corresponds to a mechanical and temporal framework that has somewhere been set up by the photographer. What is not considered is the future actions that by chance enter and exit its frame. Not only a surveillance photograph, but every photograph lacks absolute control of the photographer: the world is never a still life. The surveillance camera differs only in the level or degree of control and manipulation. As Bergson would say, it is a difference in type, not kind. The photographer merely has a much more detached and distant control of the temporal order and the movements that are going to occur in the surveillance camera’s ever-rolling non-discriminatory frame.
ReplyDeleteAs the first poster pointed out, the four images of the surveillance camera are organized outside of standard temporal linearity; or at least in a new mapping of temporal narrative. It is obvious that the surveillance camera itself, once it is put up and powered, can record a sequence of events in continuous duration without any selectivity or preference. It is lobotomized voyeurism pre-programmed by a human agent. But it cannot print those photographs or select four freeze frames without some mechanical command and human instrument at play (as far as I know, technology has yet to acquire free-will). The human element and hand is vividly palpable in the jumbled order of the four frames taken on 1/26/03: the bottom left at 12:55, the top right at 13:12, the top left at 13:32, and the bottom right at 15:49. I know that some cultures read right to lift, some up and down, but a narrative or organization in circular loops defies cultural norms. Perhaps this image is innovating a new map for narrative. The temporal figure 8: a new narrative advancing in the symbolic loop of infinity.
This image is movement. This image is control. This image is compartmentalizing. And finally this image is the last one I will have to comment on so it is also the end.
ReplyDeleteThe image plays with time. Each quadrant is similar enough that the lines at first could be drawing focus to different locations. In fact it is one camers in the same place at different times. The change and not he specifics in each quadrant are important. The squares while they seem to be significant actually mitigate the dignifcance of the object they surround. Leaving not fisical object but change over time at the forefront.
ReplyDeleteSorry my comment was late. won't happen again.
ReplyDeleteAs Natasha said, this image surveys surveillance. The camera surveys the parking lot, the cars, the trees, the people. The image is composed of shots of different times of day of this scene. It privileges a view of this parking lot scene, from a building that is unseen. As others said, the ordering of the different times of the photo shots and the frames and their direction suggest a certain way of reading them. As hirsh said, the frame highlights the objects as points of focus in the image, and the whole frame highlights each area of the image as a point of focus.
ReplyDeleteIf the world is always already recorded by beings that percieve and transmutate it, an orwellian future may have been upon us since we began seeing. privacy is never and option because, as ginsberg said, we are 'spied on by our eyes' and the myriad mechanical seers that create the world. the image takes slivers of a time and place, cuts them up, and rearranges them in order to disrupt the linearity of an image, exposing the possibility of wresting any 'document' from its evidentiary purpose
ReplyDeleteImage is now. Memory is now. Here it is made explicitly obvious, the past in the present, right now, becoming. We have four different "past" times happening all at once. And so as these four times of the past become in the present, these are not memories of the past, not monuments looking backward, but a monument of present becoming that looks backward and forward at the same time.
ReplyDeleteIt is the seeing of a mchine. Squares and rectangles highlight what is important in the image just as a human brain does. It is the explicit visual execution of what unconsciously happens in human seeing. But now no choice is left. Unconscious or not the viewer is not left the personal highlighting prerogative. It forces the viewer to see what it highlights- what the camera has chosen. It actually takes action against the viewer. The image is self owning. It owns the wayit will be viewed.
ReplyDeleteThe picture is of what appears to be the gradual surveillance of two men and a jeep. It is in four squares. The surveillees are put in various boxes. It seems almost like a statement against surveillance, but it could be for. It gives a feeling of constriction and severity, a common reaction against constant modern surveillance.
ReplyDeleteWhat is time in this image? Is the eye of the viewer supposed to see in any one particular order: left top frame to right top to down right frame, etc. as in a clock-ward motion? If so, then is time orderly? But this is not the one and only way of reading this image. Indeed, the image may not have any order at all. It may be a battle between various methods. This image's time may be the shifting from one frame to the next is an experience of momentary time; every moment and the multiple moments within it.
ReplyDeletelooking back, i see that my comment didnt post! here it is, copy/pasted:
ReplyDelete"this image performs the robotic structuring of time- not only is it Surveillance, zoning in, chopping off, and highlighting pre-existing objects, but it also re-orders these mundane objects and places them into arbitrary relation with one another, all the while embodying a panoptic gaze from afar. The viewer is all at once thrown into the interior mechanics of a security surveillance machine, becoming part of this re-structuring and seemingly random highlighting of events. The image is also the passage of time, as the background buildings stay the same in each shot, but the cars are the most obvious changes. This setup performs TIME, rather than represents it, as there is no order, just scattered movement from frame to frame."
The camera is framing the action. Or is it? It ALL looks still to me, equally still. But if the frame captures action, then all frames would follow; and since it’s a frame within a series of embedded frames, then EVERYTHING is constantly always and already in action. The arrangement of images in accordance to universal time renders moot. This image operates on a different time, one that does not follow on a linear path of only before and after. Each frame is a distinct moment and memory and image of its own, and yet also intimately interconnected with every other frame. In the seeing of focused-seeing, an unfocussed and decentralized seeing unravels, rippling on a flat plane. The frame shatters as border into new borders of frames interlinking, interlocking into other frames, frames of all different shapes and sizes, people frames, car frames, roads framing roads wynding. Frames-a-go-go.
ReplyDelete