Timothy Druckrey



Two central issues have grounded the development of photography. First, the concept that the production of the image established a fixed relationship to events. Second, the idea that the reception of the image short-circuited the viewer into the temporal space of the original moment. Both are perhaps myths when subjected to critical scrutiny, both perhaps fallacies when the image is placed within the conditions in which it was made. To contemporary eyes, the photograph presents a far more complex set of circumstances than is revealed by simple historical analysis. While rooted in the recording of time, the image is also propelled by an only partially realized, non-dialectic relationship with events. In other words, the relationship between the image and its subject is not merely one of reciprocity or opposition, but one of extension. The discursive moment established at the instant the photograph is taken is not limited to subject and object. Rather, it comprises a process in which subject and object are mediated within a system of meanings with deeply enigmatic implications.


Screen Memories
It is no coincidence that photography, technology, and modernity matured on parallel tracks. The industrial revolution and the "triumph" of the bourgeois economy linked representation with both the marketing of commodities and with mastery of nature, of history, of identity, and, increasingly, of behaviour. More than sheer witness, the fossil record of imaged experiences traversed by photography in the nineteenth century exists as a dynamic archaeology. In a culture inebriated by visual consumption, by "the scopic regime," as Martin Jay asserts, or obsessed with the "the frenzy of the visible," as Jean Louis Comolli suggests, we can identify a rather startling realization concerning the relationship of the visual with the intelligible: in this period, knowledge and identity became fused with representation as a form of experience.1

A recent essay by Regis Debray, "The Three Ages of Looking," outlined a broad framework for distinguishing the social meaning of imagery: logosphere, graphosphere, and videosphere. Each corresponds to a different "regime," represented as "after writing," "after printing," and "after the audiovisual." And while there are problems in such historical characterizations, Debray identifies significant cultural issues concerning the image. "Thus," he writes, "the artificial image would have passed through three different modes of being in the Western brain presence (the saint present through his effigy), representation, and simulation (in the scientific sense) while the figure perceived exercised its intermediary function from three successive, inclusive perspectives the supernatural, the natural, and the virtual."2

This kind of reflexive model conforms with what Debray admits as the work of mediology rather than history. The scope of the issue extends beyond the limitations of these two disciplines into the realms of social epistemology, experiential psychology, and science. Nevertheless, his outline serves to suggest that the virtualization of images has a history rooted in the symbolic even if Debray does not account for the technologies forming these images, nor for the psychological impact of representation itself on the viewer. How the image is perceived must be bound to how the image is produced and to how it is experienced especially considering the trajectory of current image technologies.

Traditional models of representation as having a reflexive and analogical relationship with the material world have lost their efficacy, supplanted by investigation of the digital, the artificial, the engineered, and the virtual. The fact is that photography never could be fully legitimated as the epistemological epicentre of modernist discourses of visuality even as it served as an essential metaphor for a culture subsumed in the gaze. This is so precisely because it denied the aesthetic of the privileged moment, dismissing it as a fallacy of modernist art. Photography could instantly and almost infinitely reproduce any passing view. At the same time, the element of focus gave even the most passing moment its own particular lustre. This paradox burdened the new technology with an extraordinarily complex cultural and psychological status. As a measure of the omnipresence of the gaze, photography became the ideological manifestation of the power of surveillance. As a measure of perception, photography became linked to Enlightenment notions of reason particularly to the developing "moralization of objectivity."3 As a measure of sentiment, photography acted as an index of personal and historical presence, in which time and memory were essential. But as a measure of experience, photography alone could not fulfil the interests of either narrative or transition, but only that of substitution.

Yet, a phenomenological approach to the linking of the image and experience has predominated in the early study of the photograph. With its eradication of critical differences in favour of a normative study of form, this approach found its salvation in the equally functional, yet critically problematic, practice of semiotics. Together they form a ground against which the image finds a coherent methodological position while remaining outside more extensive analyses that incorporate the idea of duration and experience. Susan Buck-Morss has written on this point in terms of the experiential basis of early cinema: "The surface of the cinema screen functions as an artificial organ of cognition. The prosthetic organ of the cinema screen does not merely duplicate human cognitive perception, but changes its nature."4 Though the notion of the screen as an "organ" could too easily fall into quasi-essentialist bio-mystifications of the cinema experience, the vital identification of cognition as a site of processing, assimilation and, more importantly, dynamic consciousness suggests that the issues surrounding reception are more complicated than how to decode signifiers.

The acceleration of the visual now challenges more than just the grounds for an optical epistemology, it initiates a critical phase in which cognition and behaviour, rather than perception and reflection, become the area of interest. Indeed the discourse of the post-photographic is ultimately not much more than a recognition of the transition from the recording of the image to the rendering of the imaginary but this is both no small issue and the subject of another essay. Suffice it to say that the deconstructions of photography as a expression of semiotic intention, as an act implicated not just in signification but in critical psychoanalytic representation, have provided pivotal readings of the symbolic importance of images. The persistent opposition of some presumed "real" to some presumed "unreal" (or, as it is more often and unfortunately put, "true" to "not-true") has perpetuated a pseudo-moral, pseudo-crisis of photographic representation which is as clearly an exaggeration as the materialist approach is an oversimplification. The shift in photography from recording to rendering must be accompanied by a sustained balance, in Lacanian terms, between the symbolic and the imaginary. The growing technological discourse surrounding representation has made this an urgent concern.

In this context, the mind identified as a mere device that processes information is understood within a larger field of connections; distinctions between systems seem less significant in themselves than as metaphors in which digital-logical processes are a form of essentialist communication. In the connectionist model, cognition is a system related to parallel processing. The brain functions as cpu, storage medium, and software to handle information procedurally leading, of course, to the temptation to "prove" algorithmic superiority by, for example, the "defeat" of chess masters by IBM's RS-6000 (more familiarly known as Deep Blue). This kind of dubious "triumph" of information processing over imagination and creativity in a very restricted field of predictive operations highlights the limits of technology more than it does the fallibility of human intelligence. Yet the compulsions of an information ecology reside deep within the history of computing and are becoming more and more pertinent to the understanding of the image.

Indeed, the language<=>image discourse pervades the developing fields of cognitive science (with its most salient metaphor being representation) and connectionism (with its modal concepts of linking and parallelism). Interestingly, throughout the phase of the "virtualization" of representation, the always shaky epistemological foundation of the image has been crumbling. In its place are so-called representations that the cognitive sciences understand in terms of "the cognitive mind as a representational device."5 In this computational system, the virtualization of representation is intimately connected to the techniques of the post-cybernetic agenda of the cognition industry.

Evelyn Fox Keller writes that "even while researchers in molecular biology and cyberscience displayed little interest in each other's epistemological program, information either as metaphor or as material (or technological) inscription could not be contained."6 Traversing disciplines, information has become the primal trope of contemporary culture. In the field of vision, dynamic information has become the essential element for a culture obsessed with data. And considering the trajectory of research on neural computing, one indeed might begin to think of neuro-imaging technologies in which the very term "representation" may require some serious rethinking. More than this, the cultural field in which representation is evolving is enveloped in models of distributed systems. Digital networks, neural networks, even genetic networks have come to serve as references not just into the linkages of cybertechnologies, but into a reconfiguration of the notion of identity (political, biological . . .).

If the notion of the image can be hinged onto the more general concept of representation, then an investigation into the experience it generates (both immediately and historically) is one of the central challenges of electronic media. In this case, what seems so urgent is a reconceptualization of photography beyond the limited terms of aesthetics, memory, sentiment, or phenomenology. Instead, a consideration might be made of the image not only as a signifier, but as an event resounding with psychological and social implications. Retaining photography's crucial link to perception, the idea of the image-as-event extends its legitimacy as mere description by registering it as experiential. Suddenly one might imagine the navigation of the image as more than the scrutiny of its signifiers, as a dynamic process in which the cohesion of the moment analytical and historical is itself extended. With all the hoopla around simulation and the artificial, critical theory has yet to account for the efficacy of the image as an elaborate process. And while immersive technologies often seemed to leapfrog over transition, the fact remains that photography has not exhausted its cultural potential, especially where it is assimilated into the digital. Most interesting in this is the distinction drawn by Paul Virilio between simulation and substitution and, in particular, the recognition of the screen television and computer as "the third window."7


Associative Engines
The "revolution" generated by the shift from analogue to digital media has not brought with it a unified aesthetic theory. However, the accumulating effects of electronic media have transformed and dispersed many of our assumptions about the making of art and its relationship with communication, technology, media, and distribution. Over the past decade, a range of works have matured to the point where some serious re-evaluations are necessary. Computer animation, digital video/sound/imaging, electronic books, hypermedia, interactivity, cyberspace the terms of a new discourse with the electronic need to be integrated with an aesthetic reeling in the aftermath of critical theories of representation and postmodern experience. The merging of technology and art raises some key questions concerning the way in which experiences will be articulated. Encompassing literature, cinema, entertainment, and the arts, technology has become the driving force accelerating the emergence of what we might call telesthetics.

The ramifications of this accelerated shift are difficult to assess. No cultural transformation has occurred without a corresponding technology. Networks, expert systems, artificial intelligence, immersion, interactivity, biogenetics are all forms in which many creative practices of the future will doubtless be grounded. How much this artistic exploration will affect the relationship between computers and representation is pivotal to grappling with the development of hyper, interactive, cyber, virtual, and networked media. Indeed, the new digital media, networks, and technology form much of the basis for social communication. And if the development of technology succeeds in creating a universal digital system of exchange (as seems likely), then a far-reaching critique of communication will be necessary, one that will account for the cultural meaning of technology in aesthetic and political terms. Revamping representation in electronic culture is a key to tracking the complexity and subtlety of the new configurations of communication.

Emerging from digital media there is a kind of transformation of several traditions: montage, narrative, temporality. A rethinking or extension of the issues surrounding the simple semiotic constitution of the image, and a concern with the "space" of electronics become vital. In electronic media, a new range of problems invoke not merely the formal issues of juxtaposition and association, but those of the interplay (or collision) of text, image, and sound in space and time. Instead of resolving as a singular images, the flow of associations emerges as a diversified temporal narrative. In many ways, hypertext has changed from a simple text-based media into a multivalent one. Instead of the textual cross-referencing of hypertext, works engaged in dynamic linking collapse many limits between text, sound, and image and situate the user in the midst of assimilation and feedback. Episodic or arrayed, this information is configured in forms that suggest that the metaphor of the unified image or text cannot serve as a totality, but rather that events are themselves complex configurations of experience, intention, and interpretation. In this sense, the narratives of electronics are non-linear and kinetic rather than linear and potential. They suggest transition and not resolution. Indeed, the language being used to describe these works is telling in its implications: navigation, hyperlinks, archive, database, archaeology.

George Legrady's work along the "passage"8 from photography to so-called post-photography or digital media has challenged many recurring themes of recent art (self-justifying sentiment, indulgent sampling and appropriation, solipsistic immersive environments . . .). Instead, Legrady has developed on-going strategies of reflection and sublation. On the one hand, this approach jettisons the far-too-typical subjectifications of photography in favour of a willingness to unhinge and reorient the issue of representation as a cross between signifier and illusion. On the other hand, Legrady has evolved, along with the technology, a discourse with the seemingly ephemeral border between private and public images. While the frenzy to supply endless database resources (of images, texts, video, data, etc.) burgeons on the internet, distinctions between archive, memory, database, retrieval, and history in the broadest sense are often ignored. Drawing on a considerable collection of materials, Legrady's more recent work is startling in its investigation of the image as a kind of rhizomatic repository whose interconnectedness from image to image produces narratives both implied and intended. In the oscillating relationship between social and individual information, Legrady's long interest in evidence, document, sign the index grounds his work in an intellectual history comprising issues as diverse as Freud's unconscious, Foucault's archaeology, Derrida's archive fever, Lacan's symbolic, and Barthes' punctum. Yet his assessment of the contributions of these seminal figures is not legitimated through "readings" of their pathological or symptomatic meaning. Rather, he joins them in a filtering of information and technology of linking that goes far beyond the metaphor of transference to become an "associative engine" whose trajectory aims away from rather than in to the image.

This kind of destabilization finds early expression in Legrady's works from the late 1970s, shown under the title Floating Objects. Though connected through a conceptual strategy that investigated the limits of image as reliable witness,9 these blunt replicas dramatized the specious assumptions of evidence by evoking its forms while dismantling both sentiment and the aura of intrinsic legitimacy of the "decisive moment" that still haunts traditional photography.

Recognizing that the record is "largely a misrepresentation," Legrady extended the assessment of the image in works and writings that rightly broached the issues of technology and representation as more than a means to an end, as a dynamic process intertwined with communication and imagination. Indeed, by the mid-1980s, his work had evolved into a continuing discourse with the electronic image. In an important essay of 1991, "Image, Language, and Belief in Synthesis," he wrote: "Because of its dependence on an a priori, real-world referent subject, a photograph by nature refers to the past a viewing experience termed by Roland Barthes a sense of the 'having-been-there.10

With a digital image, whose construction could potentially be totally fictive, one could claim at most that the event represented a "could possibly be." This reasoned position, countering the ethical upheaval that hounded early writing about the digital image (including some of my own), situated Legrady outside the spate of photographers who were to investigate neo-montage through programs such as Adobe Photoshop, and within a more rigorous group working to redefine representation as it was assimilated into computation. Hence, his interest in syntactic and structural issues expanded to include programming and information theory.

These collisions of real and possible led to works such as Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree (1984), Between East & West (1990), and ultimately Equivalents II : The News Series (199294); the last marked a significant departure from the relationship between image and text precisely because of its inversion of the seemingly causal link between seeing and reading. Yet the decoupling of cause from effect posed an even more subtle question about the distinction between a syntactical image and a generated one an "image" rendered on the border between representation and recognition, but without an identity corresponding with a recorded event. Equivalents II , by conjuring up the emotionally amorphous series made by Stieglitz in the 1920s, establishes firm relationships between theories of language/image and signal/noise. Paralleled by excessive public hullabaloo about virtual realities and simulated environments, Equivalents II instead showed a closer affinity with the intricate discussions in the fields of cognitive science, the imagery debate in particular, in which distinctions between image and description are entangled in conditions that involve synaptic activity and the recording and retrieval of memory.11 Legrady suggests that generated images confront the "minimum conditions under which a set of tonal gradations produced from mathematical algorithms can be perceived as an authoritative image resembling the photographic."12 By transposing the image =>language equation, Equivalents II asks questions that go to the heart of the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Judith Roof writes, in Reproductions of Reproduction, "The intrusion of digital technologies is not the cause of a gravitational slide towards metonymy, but the effect of such a shift . . . Metonymy also governs certain viewing predilections linked not so much to sustained narrative but to the desire to fill in gaps, to provide complete chains of information. Metonymical ordering is linked not only to contiguity, but to the illusion of connection . . . Metonymy's gaps make us nervous, not because we are still deeply aligned with metaphor, but because metonymy instills a desire for a fullness comprised of facts and connections that constantly defer to another and, finally, leave no fact unturned, no moment unfilled."13 And surely it is this reciprocity between desire and narrative that grounds Legrady's move into multimedia. Three central works have evolved from the investigation of "minimum conditions" in Equivalents II : An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War (1994), [the clearing] (1994), and Slippery Traces: The Postcard Trail (1996). Rather than further explore the conditions for the image, these works redirect the investigation of representation within the twin realms of technology and history.

In An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War, Legrady assembles a history of representations (snapshots, travel documents, sound recordings, Super-8 family footage, etc.) drawn from his family's flight from Stalinist Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and interleaves them with the public propaganda that surrounded the revolution. Housed in an architectural plan of the Worker's Museum, the work confronts the relationship between the logistics of the archive and the realignment of memory and history. The juxtaposition intentionally leaves unresolved the narrative experience of the material, yet positions individual histories as implicated in the spectacles of politics by peeling away the veneer of the public as undistinguished mass and individuating the effect of social transformation. The Archive is an act of retrieval and extension, memory and speculation. Not limited to redeeming sentiment, it refigures both memory and politics as inseparable components of history. As Derrida writes in the recent Archive Fever, "There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority . . . the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future."14

But while the elaborate archive collects endlessly linked data, an individual images can serve as well to contain multiple readings and implications. In [the clearing] a single image stands as stark entry into layers of interpretation surrounding the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Using an interface problematized as a targeting device, [the clearing] is an image burdened with statistics, characterizations, Western perspectives, reductive identity formations, and so on, "sampled" from media sources whose conventions of intelligibility survey surfaces while oversimplifying depth. These "facts" emerge from the metalayers of the image and punctuate the insufficiency of a theory of representation and innocence.

Slippery Traces joins the concerns of the Archive with that of [the clearing] by involving the user in a game of associations. Some 230 postcards approached through details develop into sequences whose narrative logic may be "a-chronological and episodic," in Andrea Zapp's words, but that reduces "to absurdity the typical film form of narrative time as a closed circuit by offering an infinite product in which no constellation appears twice."15 This is the kind of arrayed information that provides the substructure of important questioning of the hitherto time-constrained forms of narrative that utilized montage, jump-cuts, flashbacks, or flash-forwards to develop a rhythmic effacement of literary narrative. Not driven by the fancy footnoting of much hypertext, Slippery Traces allows a kind of re-subjectivization to emerge within the user's intentionality, an intentionality linked with the reciprocity between reflexive and recursive media. And if the shifting agencies of multimedia can erode the privileging of linear narratives, they simultaneously extend the episodic notions of experience into modalities outside those of cinema, hypermedia, or immersion. This joining of subjectivity and behaviour is a terrain largely ignored by media theory and has too frequently been pathologized by psycho-sociologists of media (like Sherry Turkle), aestheticized by designers of media (like Brenda Laurel), or unhinged from much more than vague literary aspirations (as suggested by Richard Lanham or George Landow). Still, issues of intentionality emerge from the nexus of the self (so clearly linked with psychoanalysis), from the constitution of experience as structured, and from the narrativizations of storytelling. But this isn't all. As Paul Ricoeur writes:

The fragile offshoot issuing from the union of history and fiction is the assignment to an individual or a community of a specific identity that we can call their narrative identity. Here "identity" is taken in the sense of a practical category. To state the identity of an individual or a community is to answer the question, "Who did this?" "Who is the agent, the author?" We first answer this question by naming someone, that is, by designating them with a proper name. But what is the basis for the permanence of this proper name? What justifies our taking the subject of an action, so designated by his, her, or its proper name, as the same throughout a life that stretches from birth to death? The answer has to be narrative. And the identity of this "who" therefore itself must be a narrative identity. Without the recourse to narration, the problem of personal identity would in fact be condemned to an antinomy with no solution.16

More than the repositioning of intentionality is at stake in Slippery Traces. Legrady's interleaving of histories establishes an allegorical sphere made up of vestiges and narrative episodes whose mutability and meaning coincides with contingency and subjectivity. In this light, it is interesting that Legrady cites the film version of Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'année dernière à Marienbad as a "reference model" for Slippery Traces. Robbe-Grillet's works evoke meanings more than reveal them in what Legrady calls "a shuffling of time and space." Yet the underlying structure for Slippery Traces also resides in a kind of theorization of the database as immanent meaning. In this joining of the "meta" issue of searchable information with an elision of the notion of unified meaning, Slippery Traces outdistances traditions of cinematic mise-en-scène and introduces an open-ended system in which closure is impossible. Jacques Derrida described his book The Postcard as between "the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter," and specifically suggests an affinity with the goal outlined for Slippery Traces:

All these trajectories transitional, transcriptive, transpositional and transgressive, transreferential trajectories open up the very field of speculation. It is there that speculation finds its possibility and its interest. There, that is, in the trans or the Über of translation (Übersetzung), of overestimation (Überschatzung), of metaphor or of transference (Übertragung).17

What seems so interesting in George Legrady's work is a continuing willingness to position technology within evolving discourses of representation, to find in the increasingly slippery image not just the echo of singular meaning but, in fact, triggers for cascading associations, to find in the technology not just convenient storage or transfer, but, indeed, the possibility of remarkable couplings. Oscillating between "screen memories" and "associative engines," Legrady's work inscribes its users in a delicate interplay of memory and technology.