Reading a sentence today, “Photographs connect to a life as experienced, to ‘images, feelings, sentiments, desires and meanings,’” I thought of this crazy lady story. Some people might define photography by its referential power: its suggestion of a life behind its depiciton. I don’t know. Other mediums might do this, but in confined to a documentary genre (field recording, for example: sound art but from something really real). I’m not so sure. And I thought of this story of this woman, because it was real in my mind but also comic, so cartoonish, so unbelievable in a way.
When Barthes, the big photo theorist that people like to believe, was writing things, saying photography = “IT WAS THERE,” he did not have an iPhone in his pocket. Photography was a process. If people talk about the “materiality” of photography, and if that is a trendy thing to talk about today, it is only because photography used to, in fact, seem much more “material” than it is now: film was blank and mysterious, and somehow had an image etched on it, that somehow corresponded to a moment that a photographer “captured.” Or a print was a blank sheet that somehow took on the forms of the film (the film took on the forms of “the world” in front of it), and so, yes, despite the fact that the darkroom paper was blank and empty to begin with, the moment it depicts, through the development process of the darkroom, “WAS THERE.” The more we could mess with it, the more its own fabrication appeared in front of our eyes, the more people doubled-down on its reality. So people asserted.
Now we have iPhones in our pockets, and this relationship between photo and reality is so blatantly natural to us (while also being contested by AI, but nobody I know likes AI). Barthes’ era is gone, and I think that he’s stopped being useful. Maybe I’m too critical, but I’m reading a paper that, holding onto Barthes’ assertion, denies the status of digital photography as “photography.” So I’m not sure: Barthes’ “WAS THERE” is a problem that should have been dealt with already. (I told my darkroom friends that Walter Benjamin, through some extrapolation, suggests that if we see the materiality of photography, we lose the illusion that photography’s reality is really-real. Enough talk about reality).
One way to talk about photography is a medium that has a visual-indexical relationship to an empirical world, I guess. The visual world, in this sense, literally presses-onto a photographic receptical. The world marks a photograph. Then, expanding the senses, there are things that have an auditory-indexical relationship to the world, or an olfactory-indexical relationship to the world, or whatever, and I think, one day, a sort of comparison like that would be good. But the indexical constructs the world as empircal, and honestly, I tell you that story that really did happen, but lacks a sort of indexical quality (it is writing!), and is full of affective qualities, to suggest (this is not controversial) that reality takes different forms. To represent it well: the quote above, with a bit of a “phenomenological” slant, finds value in a life as experienced, and I think this might be photography’s job more than some scientific instrument.
One paper by Jared Ragland, who is a photographer I am sort-of obsessed with, suggests, in an anthropology essay somewhere, that photography constructs identity. So much for photography being this purel empirical object. He worked with addicts, and the addicts used printed-out photography to remind themselves of who they were. Elizabeth Edwards, who writes an article about photography, suggests that other anthropological authors say the same thing. What “was there” for Barthes is “here now” for these viewers: “Photographs are...powerful actants in the social space ‘intertwined with a larger process of maintaining different forms of sociality and personhood.’” Instead of a life behind the photo, “photographs connect to a life” in front of it, somehow: not exclusively through memory of the past, but through the construction of a world in the present.
Finally: photography will always look cartoonish in relationship to the past and the present. It flattens the world and rips time from its course. But a photo might serve an “iconographic” purpose, like an object constructing its on hagiography, “as a relic held in the hand,” but maybe we are so used to the phones in our pockets that photos seems so real (the world appears on the screen!). As long as photos are real, life becomes its own relic.
I think I will buy some drugs to do with Tommy because this is a bit heady for me today.
Moon
Doty, describing, calls focus to the word “attention,”
So does Dlugos. I’m no poet like them, so attention is not a word for me.
Driving, looking, yesterday I noticed piles filling the roadside,
stacks of chairs lopped onto cardboard and wooden beams,
multiple piles of metal scraps, and
they recurred, over and over they recurred,
punctuating the road across miles,
monuments of junk, as if arranged.
Sometimes, forgetfully, the days pass as daydreams,
as plans, as days and events collected,
captured and pocketed.
I missed the blood moon at 3:00 AM last night. Julie did not miss it.
I spent my time dreaming. I have seen a lunar eclipse many times before.
I wonder about those who stays awake.
I wonder about Julie, watching, losing sleep,
for a moon turned red in a moment, then back.
My roadside sculptures have been hauled.
My commute looks clean.
What will I do when these monuments do not last,
but conjur a little dream?
Update
I have not been writing much, because I feel like I’ve needed to spend time “getting my life together,” which has meant working more hours and staying in bed more, determining my life by what I can afford or not afford. A lot of my little goals (learn lap steel, play music more, do another photo project) are clouded by a bigger project: “afford to live well.” I think of Mary Oliver foraging for her living, writing poetry, and held up as a model for a life-well-lived.
So I woke up to the sound of the rain today. I stayed in bed because my blanket is too big. I pretended to be depressed, although I do not think that I am. I am just a bit lacking in motivation, which is frustrating (although an essay by Felix Gonzalez Torres motivated me, and so I know where to find motivation). I need to print, to get something printed, to work on a project: I need to do something to get started, and I bought a roll of paper to feed into a printer, and plan to buy another. I wonder more than I think now and have lost the focus of a long-term project. I work at a church and get to decide my hours (how many and when, as long as I can justify them, although the service times are not flexible), and so it’s a good gig except that I need to wake up early on Sunday mornings, and it does not pay as much as photography.
I woke up and drove the Geo Tracker today, which, after almost a year of being in the shop, has passed smog and only has some minor work. I drove down the street, as the rain cleared up. The morning light turned sharp and a blue car drove next to me. I thought of how we were both driving blue cars, and inside of the car window I saw my old priest from when I went to Episcopal church. I work at a church now and cannot spend time with the Episcopalians. But I looked over briefly, and he slowed his car down right behind me, and stayed in that position so we could not look at each other, until we both stopped at the stoplight. I looked over. He looked intensely at me, in an ambiguous recognition. And I smiled at him. I wonder if he has his life figured out.
A few years ago, before I worked at a church, I grabbed coffee (him: hot chocolate) with the priest. We wandered around the block, talking about the holocaust. He made it clear that he had no agenda; just an open-ended walk to dream a bit. We were just on a walk talking about the different literature we read, and I think he suggested a graduate school for me to go to, that the Episcopalians would fund. Maybe I would be religious one day, or at least religious like that. Once in a while I open his email newsletters, which quote Annie Dillard or an announcement of a church member dying, or a celebration of the season. I know the priest and his husband watch reality television; I saw them at Orange County Pride last October.
In many ways, I am doing better than I was doing last year. I read and write less, and I think I’m taking life a bit slower now, or closer to heart. I have a lap steel guitar shipping to my house hopefully soon, although I do not know when. Now that I can fit a guitar in my trunk, I want to play ambient music on the dobro for Tommy.
Felix Gonzalez Torres writes an essay that I talked about with the office admin at church. I realized I was out of her depth. He writes about a work titled by Roni Horn entitled Gold Field: a sheet of gold laid onto the floor in an art gallery. It is not a formal exercise, it is not merely “pure formalism,” not some empty purity, a reference to minimalist sculpture, but “A place to dream, to regain energy, to dare.” And I stood talking to the office admin at church, after the pastor mentioned the sociopolitical situation we are in, and how he is becoming more bold talking about “living love” in a world that seems to be full of so much hate. I told the admin that, quoting Gonzalez-Torres, “the act of looking at an object, any object, is transfigured by gender, race, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation,” and all of these categories sort of held a tension with a religious sensibility. The minimalists, who aimed for some abstract objectness, or a “pure object” that could not be conceptualized, seemed to have religious goals to me, by mystifying objects into ineffability. And the categories of gender, race, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation become the opposite of ineffable, because they are often very clear conditions that articulate and determine people’s lives. And the practitioners at church, some of whom are reluctant to face the sociopolitcal landscape we are in, also aim for the divine; the pastor is trying to bring them down to earth when he quotes from their Bible.
I asked the admin what it would mean to make a sheet of gold foil and lay it on the ground, borrowing from a heritage of purity, abstraction, and minimalism, but does the opposite: for Gonzales-Torrez, his lover, and Horn, provides a bit of rest and possibility in a world of despair. She said, “huh,” and I said, “maybe the pastor would like to think about this,” and we said, “oh well,” and I left.
If I have no motivation, it is because that sort of project, a minimalism engaged with a very historicized act of looking, is so ambitious to engage with. An act of looking that is a motivation that is not mine yet: it is a long-held commitment, a religion for the non-religious. Maybe I will be religious one day.
Queer Movie List 101
not all of these are “about” gay people but they are “queer” cinema.
Probably included too many here.
Listed in order of what I would show my straight brother to get him familiar with gay male culture.
Weekend (2011)
Paris is Burning (1990)
The Doom Generation (1995)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Happy Together (1997)
The Birdcage (1996)
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
BPM (2017)
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)
The Phanton Thread (2017)
Carol (2015)
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
God’s Own Country (2017)
Sauvage (2018)
Pain and Glory (2019)
End of the Century (2019)
Mathias y Maxime (2019)
Titane (2021)
Close (2022)
Moonlight (2016)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Mysterious Skin (2004)
To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)
Queer (2024)
All of Us Strangers (2023)
Soap Box
On Monday I worked from a coffee shop, sitting next to someone I worked at Christian Camp with ten years ago. (It was a place I have scrubbed from my memory as best I can, except telling people that I lived in a “Blaire Witch Project Cabin” for a few months before quitting the camp entirely.) He is getting a masters degree in clinical psychology from a Christian school. We talked for too long and today I am looking at graduate school options.
“I have three roommates,” he said, “and I enjoy the diversity of perspective, because diversity of perspective teaches us more about God.” One of my professors used to say this, as a sort-of way of destabilizing fundamentalist approaches. It’s good, but this person continued talking, which was not so good. “One of my roommates,” he said, “is as conservative as you can get. He listens to Joe Rogan.” And I thought, “oh no,” as he blinked and blinked.
“I’m a centrist,” he said, adding, “I’m the most moderate you can get,” as he described his second roommate. “My next roommate,” he said, “is a celibate gay man,” and I thought, “oh god,” and the third, he said, “is a liberal. I thought he was gay, but he’s just liberal,” he said. “It’s a really diverse group of people.” A celibate gay man, somehow, representing diversity is not what I had anticipated for my morning.
Do you, and I am truly honest to God asking if you can relate to me right now: do you ever sit down and buckle up and wonder where people have put their thinking caps?
He continued. “I think my goal is connection,” he said, “and there are so many ideological differences between people that get in the way of connection that I do not like to tell people who I voted for. Because that gets in the way.” (In a book, Moving Beyond Sectarianism, the author identifies this as a classic upper-middle-class belief, if that means anything.)
The barista called out my cortado at the coffee bar, but it sat for a moment as this man continued.
“I think there are so many ideological connotations that get in the way of connection that it’s more important to just connect with people,” he said, bragging about his centrism. “I want to get as many different perspectives as possible, and not have anyone assume anything about me, and I do not tell people my own beliefs,” and he started to talk about church, saying, “I’ve got a soap box.”
“I used to have a mentor,” he said, “that said that churches are too intellectual. Too much about belief, and studying things to get to that belief, and it’s important to figure out the reasons why people believe something. Because every theology can be pinned down to beliefs” and I said, “do you mean that it’s as if people have to go to seminary before they can actually feel like they’re Christian?” and he said, “exactly,” and I said, “interesting,” because I was talking now. And I said, “you know, there are two things I’m thinking: one is that there’s a reaction to that intellectualism that you notice, or that it’s not exactly the case, or that it’s a popular dichotomy. Because you see these Bethel-type anti-intellectual churches, sort of using that intellectualism as a thing to rally against; and you see the intellectual churches pointing their fingers at the more charismatic or Pentecostal churches, which are comprised of working class people, and both are sort-of demonizing each other as a legitimation of their own church. So it might be a dichotomy to think about rather than to take part of.” And I added my second thing. “Plus,” I said, “I’m interested in this sort of displacement of belief. I guess I learned about it in my religious studies degree, that belief isn’t all that’s happening in a religion. And so here’s an example.”
“I work part time at a Lutheran church. And sometimes I like to take this sort of anthropological lens. So the church had a potluck once during Lent, and someone brought Casserole. Lutheran Casserole, it was called, and I walked up to three older women puzzled. ‘What makes Lutheran Casserole Lutheran?’ I asked, and they said, ‘We have no idea. It’s just Lutheran Casserole.’ And everyone else answered the same way—that Lutheran Casserole is something they’ve just been making for a while, that they did not know why it was what it was, but they know the ingredients and can reproduce it, as if they’ve been habituated into casserole rather than reasoned into casserole. So I’m not sure that churches are intellectual, or rational all the time, as you suggest.” And he said, “well, there are reasons, but people don’t know the reasons,” (apparently he knows the reasons) and that approach seemed to exemplify a clinical psychology perspective, a certain psychological “hermeneutic of suspicion,” at least from a Christian school.
Which, all of a sudden, seemed to ground the conversation. Soap box kicked down, you know, even though he continued to talk about ideological differences. That his celibate gay roommate had ideological differences that were just ideological, and not so important, he even said, and that “affirming/non-affirming” (aka pro/anti-gay relationship) theologies were just ideological. They did not matter; human connection did. What a stupid thing to think so I spoke up.
I looked out the window, feeling myself sweat a bit, because it had been a good, long time since I’ve ever had to engage someone in a conversation about pro-gay theology. I tend to not really care that much anymore: people can either get on board with the LGBTQs or not. And I said, “I think I might have a different perspective,” feeling myself sweat a bit more through my Tin Lizzie shirt. “Because some of the issues you say are not-valuable, or ‘just ideological’ are actually very material and real issues for people. Those people just are not you. Like the celibate gay roommate probably experiences issues that make connection with other gays difficult, and that’s not just ideological: it informs his everyday life.” He saw where I was going.
My friend countered, “well I’ve had difficulties in my life as well. I’m Asian from immigrant parents,” and all of a sudden I got the sense that this was a very strange comparison he was making: that because he’s experienced some material problems, he had the ability to categorize (in his mind, and by his definition) others’ problems as merely ideological. “It seems like ideology is a way for you to abstract other people’s problems,” I said, “like you do not actually have to live them. But they do. And so you’re devaluating people’s problems as ‘ideological,’ in favor of connection, but sometimes I think maybe if you talk about material problems as real life problems that people encounter, instead of avoiding them, then that’s a new area for connection.”
I truly, I am honest to God just bluffing at this point. I don’t know if I believe what I say because I have not had to believe what I say in this area of life for a few years. I just want, as a life goal, to go to gay bar and get a drink, and never have to deal with straight Christians having an opinion on ideology. I came here to write emails for photography clients, and the person next to me is proclaiming “centrism” through his celibate gay roommate as Donald Trump is in office right now sending ICE to be his own little personal Gestapo.
“I think the real issue,” he said, instead of ‘ideology’ apparently, “is loneliness.” I thought of his celibate gay roommate (a particular loneliness issue with ideological or religious roots). “None of the other issues matter as long as people learn to connect.” I thought of how my friend might be lonely because he is actively building a façade to hear about other people’s problems, but never really giving anything of himself. He’s studying clinical psychology. Maybe he was actively distancing himself from authenticity. I’m not sure. But I am sure that if I had sat there and listened and pretended that I did not have any opinions at all, or did not say a thing, then I would not have really put myself out there to either connect or disconnect with this person, and as I think about it more and more, that I’m not sure what he thinks “connection” is.
But I kept going, “you might be interested in what I call the ‘pluralism problem,’” I said. I needed to give him something. He is in grad school. “The pluralism problem is, well, it’s a problem. In order to hear all those different perspectives that, for you, point to God, you know, you have to get everyone in the same room to negotiate their perspectives. At least hypothetically.
So the theoretical problem becomes: how do you set a framework for conversation that does not diminish each perspective, or reduce it to some other thing? Practically, imagine trying to get a trans person in a room with a Trump supporter to talk on the same terms. How could they try to speak to one another rather than speaking past each other? There’s a problem in deciding on the terms of their discussion, trying to understand each other, without scaring the trans person away, or without the Christian feeling disqualified from the conversation entirely. Without the trans person trying to convert the Trump supporter to a different, more inclusive perspective, and without the Trump supporter trying to convert the trans person to their perspective. Because the trans person might believe in a secular Human Rights framework for their conversation, but the Christian might only believe in the Ten Commandments, and so if you try to mediate what they’re saying, or find a common ground between them, or even terms for discussion, you have to decide on something first: are you going to use Human Rights as a way of viewing someone’s full humanity, the Ten Commandments as a way of viewing someone’s full humanity, or some other framework? How would you decide?” And this all went over his head, like the casserole, I think, until I said, “I need to grab my cortado,” and he said, “eat your burrito it’s cold,” while quickly turning towards his laptop, putting his headphones in, and typing quickly. I imagine he was embarrassed. I do not think people normally kick down his soap box.
But if someone is going to interrupt my little day of replying to photography emails, with a long-winded speech, then I will reply back. That’s it.
Some AI Articles:
I am taking a photo class at a community college so that I can use their expensive printers and film scanners. Most of the class is here to utilize this opportunity. But there is one student who is 20 years old, studying to transfer and earn a bachelor’s degree, who sits in the corner of the computer lab. She talks about using Chat GPT, like many young students. “I do not use it for much,” she says, “I just use it to edit my essays to make them sound better. It tells me what to do.” I do not think she knows that that is what her professor is for: to make suggestions for her to improve her writing. I do not think she knows that AI does not “sound” good, honestly. I sit at a computer that is turned off, listening, with a poetry book open. I read.
Yesterday, at church, Julie, the office administrator walked up to me. She knows that I am loudly opposed to using AI for church tasks. And she agrees with me. “AI Music,” she says, “cannot conjure the Holy Spirit.” I told her, “I do not know about that.” I imagined something like the event when Bethel, a megachurch in Redding, California, used Binaural Beats to induce a spiritual experience in its followers. If “AI” could reproduce this technique, then I think it could induce a similar spiritual experience. We could name this reproduction, this copy/pasting (no need to call it intelligence), the Holy Spirit. The divine is what we name it.
My brother clapped his hands in the kitchen when Chat GPT rose in popularity. “We’re encountering the Mind/Body problem again,” he said. I’ve heard over and over that Artificial Intelligence is “soulless,” or “not human:” it is all algorithmic probability from a dataset, and not caused by something uniquely human.
The articles I’ve linked below do not really deal with the issue of AI reproducing a sort of soul, or humanity, or agency. They deal with problems of classification, problems with interpretation, problems with the labor involved in Artificial Intelligence, and other ways of demystifying Artificial Intelligence. If there is not something soulful and ineffable at the core of these algorithms, then these works are a little beginning to make “AI” a bit clearer.
Refugees power Artificial Intelligence through “clickwork”:
https://restofworld.org/2021/refugees-machine-learning-big-tech/
Another article on Clickwork, or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which powers AI training databases:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/15/nyregion/amazon-mechanical-turk.html
A Trevor Paglen interview from Aperture:
https://aperture.org/editorial/trevor-paglen-on-artificial-intelligence-ufos-and-mind-control/
Some quotes:
“The theory of perception underlying so much of AI and computer vision is shockingly bad from a humanities perspective. It’s crucial for people with backgrounds outside the tech industry to look at these systems critically.”
“’Aritificial Intelligence’ doesn’t really mean anything, and it has a lot of ideological associations. It’s a term that lends itself to mystification.”
“We are subject to vastly powerful systems built by people who never seem to question the relationship between representation and reality, pictures and meaning.”
Trevor Paglen’s project “Excavating AI,” focusing on machine learning and classification in databases, rather than the generative stuff:
https://excavating.ai
He pokes at ImageNet and some problems with classification, like physiognomy (it’s back!), problems of interpretation in images (he cites W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Paperback ed, while also noting that there are “HUNDREDS OF SCHOLARLY BOOKS IN THIS CATEGORY.” I think of Paul Ricoeur for imagination and interpretation in general.), and other things.
AI and the American Smile:
https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf
“It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had.”
On some “dangers” of Large Language Models
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922
“We have identified a wide variety of costs and risks...environmental costs...financial costs...opportunity costs...and substantial harms, including stereotyping, denigration, increases in extremist ideology, and wrongful arrest.”
Anyways, this is a list of links, mostly for me to keep track of. I will update as I find more.
October Update
It’s a busy few months. Hello, world, again: hello photography.
I scrolled through my Instagram today. A black and white blurry picture appeared on my feed. A man leaning against a rail, backdropped by a city skyline, bare-chested and relaxed, stood posed, looking down to the left. I swiped right and the next photo showed the exact same moment, unblurred. No change in body, no change in facial expression, no change in framing at all: a man frozen in two of the same photos. A post-processing blur, or the fact of a photo re-fabricated, crossed my mind and stuck, like an offense. I think, now, about photography.
I’ve been taking pictures along the lines of a documentary project. One is a picture from a point and shoot camera designed to hang off a keychain. The image quality from keychain camera is nearly unintelligible in good conditions; entirely abstract in bad conditions; and in many cases its photos do not, without knowing what they are beforehand, easily refer to the world. So, one picture for the project, in the sequence of three pictures, is a cluster of pixels from the keychain camera. And that’s all it is. That’s all it reads to be: squares printed too large. The next two images, arranged in sequence, are the “same,” with progressively higher quality from different cameras, so that you can see that the form of pixels from the first keychain camera image resemble the others. That this is all a similar moment reaching different technologies, and even the boxy picture of ambiguous pixel-art forms is still a photograph.
The blurry photo of a posed man from Instagram offended me because it is a violation of the “indexical” quality of photography, or its ability to point to a world. Although it maintains its reference to reality, the physical “impression” that it carries, the medium’s mark from being a photograph, is misconstrued. The photo was not blurry; the light did not hit the sensor that way; the look was achieved in post-production. The picture showed its manipulated hand. But the blurry pixel art from the keychain camera does not perform the same action, despite not resembling a photograph, because its “indexical” quality is intact: it looks like a photo from a particular camera. The world reaches it, and we, through the photograph, somehow have access to that world.
As I drove, I began to think of this sort of sanctity or purity in photography. That by maintaining integrity of the light-as-it-hit-the-sensor; or the light-as-it-hit-the-film; we are allowing the world to reach the photo. We allow the world out-there to reach our own. To take that and distort it is a difficult thing to bear: one man, I heard once, called it “insincere.” Whether something (without other photos to compare it to) is truly a photograph may be out of our reach, but I am beginning to believe that a photo’s indexicality is what makes it so precious: indexicality is, for me right now, the most photographic quality of photography.
I just watched a video on Rinko Kawauichi. She wants to find something beautiful in the world. As a way of thinking about what she wants to see, or why she’s living, she takes up photography. Photography has to do with existence; photography has to do with life.
I like to imagine that life reaches her through the camera. She edits her photos expressively, for color (I imagine). But her editing is only in order to express the life that reaches her.
I am reading more or less these days; I am looking at photos. I am taking either more or less photos: life has been a bit of a haze. If I want to work with photos, I must let them speak for themselves (I told someone the other day that I must become a photographic minimalist, like Uta Barth). “The best thinking about the medium comes from photographers taking photographs,” someone said once, somewhere, I paraphrase (probably from a Queer Photography book). I am reading Mark Sealy’s Decolonizing the Camera, which I should have read years ago. I should attach some images.
Two Pieces I Wish I Had Run Into Earlier:
Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture by Rosemary Hennessy:
https://www-jstor-org.occ.idm.oclc.org/stable/pdf/1354421.pdf
Queer Spirits by AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs
(I ordered it here: https://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=2079&menu=0)
The first piece, an article from the 90s, critiques queerness as a commodified identity. A fetishized identity (a stable identity, unaffected by power/class relationships), for Hennessy, is one that is aestheticized, and then commodified. Queer identity becomes one that “retains the structure of commodity exchange.” Queer identity, therefore, can become aestheticized through consumer choices. Hennessy would not like “rainbow capitalism:” an “artful life” would exclude the working class, she says, and calls for a view of lesbians, gays, and queers “who are manual workers, sex workers, unemployed, and imprisoned.” By calling for this, Hennessy complicates queer identity: not merely constituted by desire and its object, but by the socio/cultural/class relationships that determine “lifestyle” in the first place.
I believe that queer photography in the late 90s and 2000s answered Hennessy’s article quite well. Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley, Dash Snow. Although not necessarily queer, I think of Gillian Wearing, Boris Mikhalov, or Santiago Sierra, who photograph people on the margins. Or, turning back to the queers, think of Catherine Opie, Jess T. Dugan, or Lorenzo Triburgo.
The second book, published in June 2011, follows five “Invocations” to conjur queer and marginalized spirits, and enact a secret group ritual. The book is esoteric, with belated (or completely absent) documentation of these rituals. An invocation is performed. A vow is performed. The rituals, Bronson says elsewhere, heal.
I have not finished the book; I am in the middle of it. But here, we find a construction of queer identity that (while aestheticized, especially presented in an Art Book, which Hennessy seems to mistrust) escapes a commodity-capitalism determination (a true Marxist might suggest that this spiritual practice conceals class and labor relationships, but no one is a true Marxist). No shopping malls here, nor forms of literal and photographic representation of the rituals (keeping them esoteric, and thus, uncommodifiable): just a “declaration of the brotherhood of the anus.” An attempt for that community to bond, and reach towards its own fragmented ancestry...a queerness expanding its identity beyond a commodity culture.
More to come...I need to finish the Queer Spirits book. But it is giving me joy for now, and I thought it might be worth noting these two pieces, and putting them in a sort of conversation.
Labyrinth
I sit in a library with three photobooks next to me. It’s always a gamble to read photo books at the library, especially with pages unpaginated, because some people like to slip a page into their pocket. You never know if you’ve got a gap toothed book (the same goes for whatever makes up history…oh well).
The first, Royal Road Test. The classic from 1971. Three men work their way to the desert to throw a typewriter out of a car. This was art back then. Edward Ruscha, Mason Williams, and Patrick Blackwell set this all up, and there’s not much to it. The book is short. You could read it if you could find it.
Anyways, the first photograph is one of the typewriter (“Royal (Model ‘X’) Typewriter,” it says). I believe this is the main character. And afterwards, we get introductions to the men, and then the window from which the typewriter was thrown, and then, finally (this must have been profound in 1970), documentary-ish images of the wreck of a typewriter smashed against the ground. The final image is cute: the wreck of the typewriter on the ground, next to the shadows of the three men. One man’s shadow shows him holding the camera.
Short and sweet: we never see the event of throwing the typewriter out of the car. We only see its evidence. So the book might be making a statement about an event and its trace, or it might also be making a statement about evidence and documentary photography (asking us to take something so silly seriously).
Next book in front of me: A Close Brush With Reality by Bart Parker. I skim it. I think he’s making a statement about photographs being not quite real. I like an image of a claw demolishing a building because it reminds me of the Mark Doty poem “Demolition.”
Finally, David Hockney’s book Cameraworks contains sort of panoramic-printed photography. Instead of a single image constituting a portrait of a person, Hockney takes many images close-up, and collages them into one large portrait. It is pleasing to look at, reminding me, too, of panorama mode on my iPhone, especially when my iPhone’s algorithm becomes choppy.
A while ago, Kathy mentioned an approach to photography that was outdated (“photography is different now,” she said, “than it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s”) . And I have books in front of me with images from the 1970s and 1980s, so I see, in front of me, this “outdated” approach, which, in my mind, is not so outdated at all. In front of me are challenges to what some may call “straight” photography: that an image transparently depicts reality, with little-to-no bias that cannot be accounted for (ironically, in a different meaning of this word, I wanted my queer exhibition to be all “straight” photography to leave the question of representation intact). In front of me, however: photography is poked at through sequence and an almost parody of documentary styles (Royal Road Test), through (pretty didactically) its questioning of itself and reality, with accompanying text (A Close Brush with Reality), and, finally, through an attention to the material through which an image is shown (Cameraworks). If these techniques feel dated, it is only because our perception of the medium has shifted (we no longer see documentary photography like Royal Road Test; we no longer see the styles used by A Close Brush with Reality; we no longer see prints or polaroids to the extent that Cameraworks displays them). If our perception of the medium has shifted, it is only because representation—this capacity for photography (the image depicted, its material, its style) to correspond to and say something about our world—is sort of unstable. The world shifts; technology, with its figurative power, does too.
I wanted to put these all down as bullet points, because this is nothing too crazy (walking through this knowledge like a preset labyrinth), but here we be.
Life in Art
There’s a crisis I have when I meet someone new sometimes, laying in bed and close together. I see my life slipping away, thinking that I could be making something instead, or reading and writing and critiquing, or working on a project, or anything else: let’s go outside and make something real. My heart rate speeds up, and I start to squirm, not with an anxiety but with a dissatisfaction, a desire for a bigger world than one falling asleep to trash television. If I am going to be with someone, let us build a world bigger than ourselves…
In her article “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture,” written in the 90s, Rosemary Hennessy takes issue with the commodification of LGBTQ identities. Somehow, for her, the commodification of the subject corresponds with the stylization of a life, which, ultimately, becomes a stylization taking place in consumer choices. (“Buy more and better clothes! Become a stylish gay!” epitomizes this issue). And yet this stylization has an intellectual lineage (according to Hennessy): Foucault tells us “we have to create ourselves as a work of art,” and Nietzche tells us to “give style to one’s character—a great and rare art.” I’m not sure two people is enough to establish a lineage, but nonetheless, for Hennessy, this attitude is similar to queer theory’s “notion of identity as self-fashioning.” Queer theory is her territory, so she takes up critique. An attitude of stylizing one’s character is an attitude that formed from the Baudrillardian “regime of the simulation;” an aestheticization that conceals social relations, allowing us to only see life that is also “artful or stylish.” Consumer choices, rather than moral codes or rules (which is, in my mind, a naïve way for her to put it) dictate an individual’s subjectivity. A postmodern self emerges in, for Hennessy, the conflation of art and life. And the conflation of art and life, again, for Hennessy, leads to a subjectivity determined by consumer choices.
Well I do not think Hennessy knows much about the stylization of a life. Hennessy’s stylization is one of mere consumption (has she ever produced style?).
The other day, I walked around with someone I had known, and we flirted with the idea of building something consistent, and I walked along, thinking. Staying up late laying in bed doing nothing but watching music videos is not a sort of life I enjoy, and I do not think my brain is broken for stating this. It’s a consumption of media that creates the postmodern consumer of the screen (think of you: reading this on the screen!). I continued to think, walking. And I thought of my camera in the car, and the world began to align and make some sense: if anything, I could make this sort of life with another person into a bit of an art, and then it would be worth it in any sort of scheme of things.
It's an art practice that might almost be religious: totalizing, consuming, demanding as a god, but it is also, unlike commodification or consumer choices, what makes me me. Maybe I am a too postmodern of a subject: art instead of religion. But I believe that to make something of a life in front of me is not totally to commodify it with style, but instead to primarily give life a sort of coherence and articulation. This is where my sense of agency lies. Maybe life risks becoming part of the “regime of simulation,” but this is the problem (or a feature) of all mediums with any sort of figuration.
Anyways, to end: Mojave 3’s “My Life in Art” is on the playlist today.
Gen Z Stare
I drove, today, alone and starving, into the In N Out Drive through (I am not yet vegan). And as I played Typhoon’s Daytrotter session, I waited for a person to take my order (normally: this In N Out splits lanes, and the workers come to you), looking around, until I heard, a muffled and muted “what can I get for you today?” from the right side of the car. The employee stood outside my closed window, talking to me across the car, and I slowly rolled down the window. A body stood outside, looking over the pancaked car. She was twice as tall. She almost bent down to make eye contact, as I flopped my body horizontally across the car to face her. But she straightened back up, looking past me. She said nothing. Her eyes contained (I’m sure you have seen this slowly populating, like an infection, in a larger and larger amount of younger people these days) nothing. Eyes empty and disconnected, as she stared above the car, and I told her, “double double with no onions, fr—” and she said, looking above the car, avoiding eye contact effortlessly without hesitation, “would you like fries?” and I said, “fries and a vanilla shake,” (I am trying to gain weight) and she said the price, and said, “you’ll be after the truck.” There were four trucks in the lane next to me. I would be, in my mind, before and after a truck: normally the workers specify.
Yesterday, I went to a gay beach party, where hot men wore speedos on the beach, and I knew without a doubt that I would run into kickballers. I did. But I brought Patrick with me (“I was going to have a moody, woe-is-me day,” he told my friend as he explained who he was, “but Blake all of a sudden showed up and said, ‘let’s get burgers,’ and then ‘we’re going to the beach!’ out of the blue and spontaneously”), who was not a kickballer, and wanted to know about kickball drama.
But enough with the beach, filled with gay men drinking themselves silly: I went back to Patrick’s place, and we had dinner, while he played the game on the phone. And when I left, he said, “I’m just going to play Xbox,” and I wonder what sorts of lives we all live and how the in n out person ended up like the in n out person.
I have been trying to be more “physical” with media, which is not physical at all. I bought an iPod. It gets reactions. But at the moment I bought an iPod my listening habits changed instantly. I’m debating unsubscribing from streaming services entirely. I just do not need them. I’ve got all this music that I’ve purchased over the past couple years and do not really care for anything else.
I read the descriptions for Daytrotter albums, trying to find where I put my files, and find some new ones. And the descriptions flourish with decór. I’ve been listening to folky bands from Daytrotter as well, with 9 members, playing loud and energetic shouty songs, and suddenly, deep inside me, shifting and stirred and planted like a seed thrust into the ground, is a burning hatred of bedroom pop: the calm, soothing, easy-listening music made by, sometimes, an individual in their bedroom. Bedroom pop and its aftermath, obviously taken up during the pandemic: traumatized zombies saying “how are you” to the empty passenger seat with the window rolled up, gazing up at the series of trucks behind my car, lifting themselves onto the curb, into the plants decorating the building, and ignoring everyone.
Stars
Years ago, I took Amanda to Yosemite to see the stars.
Days ago, I watched her marry a man under two tall trees.
And I offered, hours before the wedding, to drive us to Yosemite;
Or the night before, to see the stars, and she barely said, “no.”
I wanted to see what had become of ourselves, ten years, under the same sky,
Falling, like the sky coming into dawn,
Into two separate lives.
Image-Processing-1
As I shoot with an old camera, with low-resolution type on top of the images, I think about image-processing algorithms, especially noise-reduction, sharpening, resolution-enhancers, and those we might, in ambiguous shorthand, call “AI.” I’ve been sending low-quality images (from this earlier post) through some algorithms to see what might happen.
First: an original image: low resolution with low-resolution text. I think that placing it on the web has decreased its resolution somehow. The image has been darkened, with lower contrast, in the top, so that the text is a bit more legible. This will be the basis, or the control, for the algorithms.
Second. I’ve changed the font of this piece (normally I use Arizona Regular) to Georgia, which is the font I used in the low-resolution image. This will provide a basis for comparison.
I’ve been working with screenshots, not of the whole image even (so much for scientificity), just to get a quick sense of what an algorithm looks like. I’m beginning to believe that the translation in imagery from an analogue “world” to a digital image is less defined by limits of resolution and pixelation (which would look square or cubic, with a uniform, predictable loss in quality) and more by the certian type of algorithm. How we perceive the digital world, carried by biases baked into images, is shifting.
First: Topaz Gigapixel, using a variety of basic models (here: “Standard,” and “Text & Shapes”).
In the absense of data, the algorithm modernizes the font. It slurs the words too. In the first image, no two letters look the same. In the second image,the fonts is more standardized (as you’d expect from an algorithm expecting “texts and shapes”). But the font is also shifted, with some distortion. There is little detail to adapt from the background of the image, which is a dog. The colors are more saturated, especially the red. And yet, especially in the second, the pixelated edges are both “smoothed” and renderred with higher contrast: more “sharp.” It’s as if the pixelation still exists, but has become slightly less square.
Next: Photoshop’s “Superzoom” feature, which is a resolution enhancer.
To be honest, I have no words for this sort of resolution enhancer. The first image is sized up to 16x; the second is sized up to 6x. And we can see that the first did more to try to guess the detail of the dog’s fur. And the text is what I might call “biomorphic.” It is more legible, but it does not contain a uniform consistencty of a font. It also does not look much like Georgia. The second image is so crunchy and renders, the negative space in ‘o,’ ‘p’, ‘u,’ ‘a,’ ‘e,’ ‘c,’ ‘d,’ in ways that seem triangulated, or geometrically crunched like foil. The dog remains an entire blur, unlike the last image. As I raise the resolution of the images, the quality that changes is the blurriness of the text: it smooths over details.
If I were you, I would go back and compare all of these fonts to this one in the blog.
Next, I’ve taken images with my phone. The first series is through Instagram; the second series is from my iPhone’s camera roll. Both of these, in my mind, and especially the iPhone images, represent standards in mobile imaging. What people see on Instagram is often what they expect from trends in photography (I am asserting this).
These are the images I’ve taken through Instagram’s camera. For both of these images, I’ve zoomed in as much as my camera would allow, ideally to the edge of the camera’s resolution. Notice the font is already processed, especially on the bags of coffee (F.TA KORO, F.R.W. GAS, etc.). There is little-to-no artifacting from what we might normally call “pixelation” (although an image is still made of pixels), but instead, the algorithm smooths objects according to their shapes.
Notice the inconsistent artifacting of ‘06’ in the center bags. The algorithm, rather than retaining the data, blurs it, similar to how Photoshop enhanced resolution of images. The bags all look wobbly as well. Notice the line on the beige box, next to the “YPIC” bottle, is nearly erased. In an effort to de-pixelate images, while also allowing the user to zoom more, the Instagram algorithm has destroyed detail, while presenting an image that, without clear pixelation, maintains, in some general sense, shapes.
Additionally, all most of the lines are gone in the image of the banner. These are vertical lines; the ones that remain are horizintal. Both are, however, renderred diagonally, given the angle of the camera. Compare to the iPhone image.
And finally, images from my iPhone’s camera roll.
Strangely, my iPhone would not allow me to zoom in as much as Instagram did, so the third is a crop of the second. Notice there’s more pixelated artifacting; there is lower contrast from the objects in the bags. Yet the text is not wobbly except where it is visible that the bag is slanted as well (the Instagram algorithm exaggerates this). The type is uniformly renderred (notice the YPIC and PIC bottles: where the Instagram algorithm thins and widens the length of the line, the line remains consistent, although pixelated, in the iPhone image).
This is not to say that the iPhone image hs NO artifacting: look at the rendering of the first image in the sequence. There is clear sharpening around the type in the “PLAY” sign; there is contrast to enhance the textural shadows in the wall especially. Where Instagram destroyed these details, the iPhone raised the clarity, or microcontrast, of them.
I have provided no “unprocessed” “DSLR” photos for a single reason: that while the world becomes more processed, we will often have no reference point to an image that “precedes” an algorithm. All digital imagery requires some translation, some processing, and some interpolation of data. These new (ish), mobile algorithms are just (“JUST!!!” Think of the scale of data it took to train these algorithms: JUST is an understatement) one further step in processing the world, attempting to escape a “pixelation” that declares the opposite of detail. It’s important, I think, to begin to be aware of these ways of processing data, especially with algorithms that prioritize blobby shapes and are allergic to pixelation.
It makes me wonder, finally, whether these ways of interpretting data for us, and renderring some things more or less intelligible (at the expense of style), will raise questions of “photographicity,” “reality,” and other sorts of questions that pop up around image-based representation. Who knows.
Series: Remi
Shot on the bad camera, knowing that every image online is now feeding “AI,” and hoping these will be unhelpful to the algorithm.
Algorithm Pt. 1
The trick of lenticular film is that an image (appearing holographic, or appearing to move as you move with it) filters through a prismic sheet laid on top of a print, dividing each pixel, syncopated by twos, threes, or fours, into a different viewing-angle. I knew the trick; I wanted to reproduce the trick (but the lenticular sheets I ordered never arrived); I had seen it before. Lenticular images have little to do with “true” or “straight” photography, but I still showed up to Heeso Kwon’s exhibition of spirit photography at Orange County Museum of Art’s Biennial all the same.
Spirit photography--which had its heyday when a consuming public did not know how photography worked and Spiritualism (a cultural obsession with communicating with the dead, among other things) rose to a trend--relies on photography’s credibility: its stable relationship between representation and reality. Photography must be true; photography (in scientific applications) reveals the truth that we cannot see...
The genre of spirit photography, which showed an individual with their deceased ancestor, worked through a sort of double exposure. An individual sat for a portrait. The photographer took the photo, and then ran back to the darkroom. He superimposed another image onto the photo, which was double exposed in a way that looked ghastly. “That’s your cousin!” the photographer would say, and the sitter would, probably, gasp. According to the books I have read, spirit photography took off, until, over and over, many people revealed the magic through rationalizing accounts of spirit photography’s mechanism. “It’s a double exposure!” they said. I like to imagine, at the expense of historical “accuracy,” that a mob of “rational” people with torches and pitchforks threatened to burn down the spirit studios if they did not all get refunds. But the reality, more importantly, is that when the mechanism of the trend was revealed, spirit photography vanished. (It’s worth noting here that spirit photography did not completely vanish, but morphed into “ectoplasm” photography, which featured frame-by-frame depictions of people vomiting, lactating, or leaking, somehow, became depictions of a more material trace of a supernatural reality.)
Importantly: spirit photography was primarily perceived indexically (think of your finger pointing to an event). But, so many thought, if you were able to show the fabrication of this “indexicality,” of photography’s ability to point to something real, then people might lose their belief in the photograph’s truth. (Thinking of Walter Benjamin, Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Section XI, where he notices that a depiction of a reality immediate and free-from-technology relies on the “thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment.”)
So when Kathy and I walked through the rest of the exhibition (described by one man as “the last generation of material culture”), we noticed that Kwon’s exhibit contained not just lenticularly updated spirit photography, but a note on the artist’s didactic. Adobe Firefly (Adobe’s generative “AI” software) was labelled as a “collaborator” on all of the works. “UGH,” I said. “UGH,” Kathy said. I did not come here for this. So I pointed Kathy over to the lenticular spirit “photographs,” telling her about issues of credibility, and how Kwon’s work seemed to be playful.
If you walked up to the glowing lightbox containing the spirit photo, you would not initially see the image of a ghoulish monster, until you walked to the right. Some groups of people, also walking through the exhibit, needed to tell those in their group to look again: by the time they had passed the image, they could look back and see a creepy, green figure in the middle of an ordinary family photo. Spooky! The photographic work must have been doing something other than straightforward depiction of a spirit (or green alien monster) that, magically and somehow captured lenticularly, was in Kwon’s childhood home.
Lenticular photos, in my mind, are always sort of playful, because the medium, to me, seems somewhat kitschy. It’s such a commercial gimmick (every advertisement for lenticular film that I’ve seen describes its commercial applications) that the disappearance and appearance of an object in a photo, based on the viewer’s position, is difficult to take seriously. The magic of it is thin. But there is one thing that makes these photographs, with silly monsters that appear and disappear, more interesting. Because Kwon is playing in a spirit photography genre that is already-discredited, it is worth noting that the images are old-family photos, shot on film, with that nostalgic on-camera-flash, and, most importantly, a date-stamp imprinted (probably from the original negative) onto the bottom right corner of the images. The photos drip with “authenticity.” Kwon showed these nostalgic, date-stamped photos in a way that felt fabricated: the filmic, amateur, flash-forward style that feels so self-evidently “real” and “authentic” has been altered and produced (lenticularly imaged, with the addition of an AI-monster). Kwon, through play, shows the signifiers of credibility against a genre (which she updates with Adobe’s algorithmic generation) that has already been discredited. Nostalgia is credible, especially with a date-stamp for veracity; the scene that we see is not. The exhibition dealt with credibility.
The room around us contained two spirit photos. The rest, filling the walls, were just “normal” family snapshots scattered up and down the walls. These were supposedly Kwon’s own family photos, and given the hint by the didactic, Kathy and I scrutinized each odd thing for hints of algorithmic generation. Some objects looked odd (a refrigerator should not be wrinkled like that; a ceiling should not be blurry and light like that; that stuffed animal is a monstrous blob animal), but don’t odd things exist in the real world as well? Aren’t there odd artifacts of lenses, lighting, film development, or whatever? (Does AI play on this ambiguity—of your brain trying to make a coherent image, in spite of your own visual doubt?). In spite of the ambiguity of uncanny generation, one element of each image consistently stood out of place. I turned to Kathy, pointing. “Why is the date-stamp in the middle of the photo?” Looking back, we stood in a room full of images where the date-stamp, the signifier of veracity, revealed the borders of fake-and-real.
Some images contained duplicated-and-distorted date imprints, including one with fragments of unintelligible text overlaying a woman’s Adobe-generated butt. If AI were a collaborator, it was a sloppy one. Kwon left the AI slop in. She revealed AI’s mechanism, its algorithmic hand. Kathy and I laughed. “Look,” we said, pointing at the boundaries of real-and-fake (why are these categories so simplistic now? Photos—especially film photos—are real; Photoshop, now, is sort-of real; and AI is definitely fake, apparently). “Ha ha ha,” we said, I think scaring the people around us, outlining the borders of the “original” photo by pointing. Kwon seemed to be making fun of the didactic, parodying the “imaginative” capacity of Adobe’s software, and condemning it to the same fate as spirit photography. Maybe, once the software’s mechanism is revealed, AI will vanish too, and Kwon seemed to be revealing the mechanism (which, if it were done in a more robust, systematic way, would be against Adobe’s terms of use: keep the magic alive).
And there was a bit more trick. The curtains, featured in some of the photos, hung from the walls of the exhibition. Two large, meaty curtains stood in front of us. They were strange. But they were also in the images. The curtains were “real,” the photos were probably “real,” and so the generated part of images extended from photos, well, those must feel “real” as well. But we had seen the trick: there’s no going back. We were told and shown the fabrication of this reality; we had lost our belief in its “truth;” we no longer believed in its depiction of the facts of memory. Adobe’s Firefly algorithm, as a collaborator, seemed unreliable and sloppy, and Kwon, in my mind, seemed to be making fun of it.
(It’s worth noting that some of my favorite photos have little, or a lot, to do with “truth;” and that truth has always been very squirmy in photography; and that just because something is fake and “not true” does not mean it is obselete and bad. We are not fundamentalists here. But photography is good site for thinking through representation, reality, authenticity, veracity, credibility, and all those other things that start to turn religious: belief. It’s also worth noting that Kwon used Adobe’s Firefly generation not for veracity, but for “imagination,” but a few people I talked to did not notice that AI was involved, so, naturally, believed the images to be true. More complicatedly: there’s a difference between believing in the intentionality of an algorithm and believing in the truth of the algorithm’s work, but that is too much to get into here.)
As we left the room, wandering through the artifacts of the “last generation of material culture,” (a form of youth culture, here), the stark contrast between the AI family photos and the punk-rock, independent, zine-like displays presented itself forcefully. DIY zine publications populated the walls; film photography documented “rebellious” youth cultures; a 16mm video displayed youth exploring California; a collection of older painted artworks, from the twentieth century, was curated by high school students; all of these, including the Lime-mp3 player embedded into a bench, leaned towards a more “material” culture than one digitally generated. So when we passed by glass cases of objects from people’s bedrooms, Kathy, who is older than I am, said that the lives displayed in the objects behind the glass cases paralleled her own. Kathy was more “indie,” these kids were more “punk,” but the objects, according to Kathy, pointed to a time when subcultures could exist; when subcultures were “actually underground,” and more specific.
I think, if the AI exhibit says anything, it is this: the Adobe software’s capacity to “imagine” and extend our memory will erode the material cultures that give us a particular, yet somehow culturally unified identity (Kathy, who is indie, identifying both with and against the punk kids). Ominously, the faith in machine learning and generative algorithms contrasts the material DIY culture (REAL LIFE) displayed in the rest of the exhibit.
Although I could not attend the full biennial, I arrived, beforehand, without Kathy, to see the final participants in a workshop of DIY printmakers. Do It Yourself is what the museum seems to be promoting. “Artificial intelligence” is all of the former and none of the latter: Kwon revealed it to be a sham, so please do it yourself.
Unfortunately, there is “going back” to belief after seeing the algorithmic trick played out, according to Trevor Paglen. And he writes that when people see language performed, even in the case of Artificial Intelligence, many people automatically assume an intentionality behind it (Barthes’ influence here: both everywhere and simultaneously non-existent). If something uses words in a way that a user can understand, Paglen explains, then people will believe that thing must have intended to communicate those meanings (intention is often a matter of belief...). Belief in intelligence, belief in intention, belief in the agency of a program is what sticks.
The “founder” of “AI,” Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote a program called ELIZA in the 1950s, thought he could dispel the belief of an intentionality behind his program. He showed people his computer program, and they talked to it for hours and hours, as if it were something intelligent and intentional. The time was up, though, he decided! He’d reveal what the program was: just a bundle of source code, with no intelligence of its own. Clearly his program was fake, he explained: that it was a machine with no intentions; that it had no agency; that it was just an algorithm. And so he explained his fabrication to people. And they did not believe him. ELIZA was sentient, they maintained. Weizenbaum was wrong, they thought.
(This whole situation reminds me of a doomsday group in Japan. The founder told his followers that he was clearly mistaken: he had gotten the apocalypse wrong and that the religion was bunk. His followers disagreed. The leader killed himself. The rest of the community carried on his movement.)
Even if Heeso Kwon’s work parodied “artificial intelligence,” a museum curator, in Kwon’s didactic, continued to describe AI “acting” as a “collaborator,” with the capacity for imagination. Duchamp described art as religious and here is the evidence: that Kwon’s artistic didactic believes in agency where there is none; and that, according to Weizenbaum’s finding, it will be a belief difficult to dispel, even against Kwon’s parody.