<nettime> FW: [Discuss] The end of photography as evidence for anything...

["Jon Lebkowsky" <jonl@polycot.com>]

(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
sandy@sandystone.com

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