CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Technology Factor

Overview

Culture determines the subject matter of the images that we see but technology determines the kinds of images that we can make. Every technology from ancient cave painting tools to the latest high-def screen revolutionizes the world of the image by changing what we can see. Fresco, stained glass, canvas painting, photography...each of these changed what we expect from and what we project into images.


Cycles of Revolution

Because images do not just pop up out of our heads, at least not yet, they must be constructed using tools and materials.  All images emerge from some kind of technology, if we use that term to mean the stuff we use to make things in the world.

It is technology determines the kinds of images that we can see and each new technology allows us to make pictures that we could never see before.  Images did not move before movies and did not peer through surfaces until x-rays.  Yet once they take on these characteristics, such magical effects become something we expect from our images.  Notice, for example, how difficult it is to sit through a silent film, simply because we expect images to speak.

New images created with these new technologies expand the whole world of images by their sheer number but also in terms of their content, appearance, use, and context.   And because we are so intimately involved with the, these new images change the way we think about the world and about ourselves.

In turn, thinking in new ways about ourselves and our world encourages us to be innovative and creative and thus come up with new technologies, creating new kinds of images, altering our thinking, changing the world again and so on through cycles of revolution.

In this way, technology and the image are intimately connected through what we might think of as an engine of continual change that is at the very heart of the human experience.


The Impact of Change

In every era, in every generation, new technology makes new images possible that force us to revise our means of understanding them.  We still probe images in an attempt to make sense of them.  Our desire to resolve questions about the what, how, and why of the image remains the same.  But new images also confront us with new challenges specific to these new images.

In attempting to understand the Content of an image in the age of the electron microscope, for example, we can ask all over again what kinds of things can be shown, what kind of size scale can be represented, what aspects of life can be represented, how much does the technology alter what is depicted?  In the age of flatscreens, we can revisit the issue of Appearance and raise new questions about the impact of color and tone, balance and rhythm, and the level of detail that we expect from our images.  YouTube and the video revolution challenge us to think within a new framework about the Use of images for communication or commerce, who owns them and who manipulates them, what we can and cannot share through them.  And in the age of the Web in which every image links to vast related information we can wonder about the relationship of external information – its accuracy, scope, and relevance – to the image all over again.


Technologies of the Image

Every image is based in a technology that produced it.  Ice Age cave paintings relied on complex processes of creating pigments and ways to bind them to the cave walls, tools for applying the color, and the technology of torches and lamps, climbing and caving tools, and so on.  Frescoes, stained glass, drawing on paper, painting on canvas…the success of all of these depended on a functional technology.

But the impact of any change in imaging technology goes beyond our individual attempts to understand what we are looking at.  The engine of change insures that these developments and innovations have a much broader impact.

Take photography, for example, which is usually thought of as the beginning of the modern era of the image.  Beyond confronting us with new challenges to content, appearance, use, and context, photographs also altered our expectations of the details of images because photos could be so precise, our sense of their reality since they seemed to automatically capture a slice of life, and our use of the image as an accurate record of an event since the truth of the photographic image seemed at first to be unassailable.

The same broad effects are true for all the technologies that followed.  Offset printing in the 1800s, for example, made it possible to create multiple copies in the thousands. The mass production of images is the start of the very idea of the media and images for all of society that could be seen by everyone, not just as precious objects in the possession of the rich.

By the early 1900s, motion pictures – based on the fact that images presented rapidly frame by frame gave the illusion of movement – had another profound impact. They made it possible to tell more elaborate stories that unfolded in time not just space.   Editing, juxtaposing, splicing, and montage all created new understandings of how to read images and new expectations about what images might convey.  Words and sound and music began to be part of the content of the image, rather than just context for it.

The development of television, live transmission over electrical lines, by the 1930s ushered in yet another new age of the image.  Among many other effects, it re-set our sense of mimesis, our judgment of how “real” the image seems since the televised image, unlike any before it in history other than the mirror, presented something that was actually happening somewhere in the world at that moment.  The notion of news was re-invented as a result, among other innovations.


The Power of Technology

The reading connected with this chapter is a summary of the main ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who wrote about technology and the media.  His theory goes beyond the idea that technology and media are important influences on us.  Instead McLuhan suggests that technology itself and the ways that it forces us to think and respond, is far more crucial in shaping our lives than anything it shows. 

"The medium is the message" – one of his famous catchphrases – points to the idea that what we see on pages or screens for examples is less significant than what viewing a page or a screen does to us. Printing technoloyg, in his view, turned us into passive, linear thinkers while screen technology makes us active, connected, and engaged.

The Global Village – the uniting of the entire planet through net technology – was another of McLuhan's insights and this globalization, in his view, is the direct result of the technology of television and other electronic media, not anything particular that one sees on the screen.


The Digital Revolution

Digital imaging has once again forced us to look at and think about images in a new way, even as we use our traditional approaches to understand what we see.

Content
In terms of their Content, digital images are completely malleable since every pixel can be manipulated, every visual atom of the image, so to speak, can be changed, morphed, warped, altered, etc.  This leads to very precise images that are not necessarily about the “real” world at all and so new questions about mimesis and how images relate to the real world and can be believed and trusted are raised. The digital manipulation of images, impossible to detect, throws into question the entire issue of the relationship of images to reality and what we mean when we say that an image seems "real."
As an example, take a look at this video whch reveals how even the most basic images that we see on television every day are in fact computer simulations that don't really "exist" in the real world.
For more examples, look at just a few of the challenges to the relationship between the digital image and reality that Thomas Wheeler mentions in his article PhotoTruth or Photofiction?

Appearance
Regarding their Appearance, digital images create an entirely new sense of image quality and the issue of resolution becomes quite significant.  Most computer screens display images at only 72 dpi…compared to magazine images at 300 dpi and photographs which are much higher.  HDTV will challenge these limits but the issues of weaker details (because the image is broken up into pixels) and brighter colors (because they are illuminated) change our expectations.  In addition, images onscreen – which is increasingly the way we see them – are quite small and this changes our notion of scale.
Take a look, as an example, at this extraordinary website created for the painting The Last Supper which provides an entirely new way of looking at the painting in terms of its appearance, only possible in the digital age.

Use
In terms of their use Use, we are confronted with a new sense of the personal use of the image.  Until the digital age, most images were created by specific individuals like artists for the small elite of people and institutions that could afford them.  But now we have the use of the image for widespread individual communication by anyone to everyone.  More youtube videos added each day than can be calculated.  Digital images can also be quickly recorded and stored, sent around the world, instantly and printed out endlessly from digital files.  This radically changes our sense of images as originals, as precious objects.
To get a quick sense of this, look at this website which displays a particular use for a well known series of images and imagine how impossible this kind of use would be before the digital revolution.

Context
And finally, in terms of Context we have the instantaneous connection of each image to a vast array of information - sometimes relevant, sometimes not – but always providing a context.  Backgrounds, opinions, stories, facts, explanations, other images…all available instantly along with the image itself.  This is a whole new set of challenges for us as we decide which parts of that flood of information matter and which do not….and how we decide the difference.
Notice, as an example, how much information is connected to the Mona Lisa on this one website alone as you explore it. And this only one of 8 million websites providing context for this famous image.


These are just a few examples of the radical changes brought about by the latest technology and, of course, it is important to keep in mind that all of this refers only to the technology of the moment.  The next round, the next cycle of the engine, will produce a whole new world of the image to understand.

Stay tuned.

Image Assignment

Find an image (scientific, video game, digital fake?) that would not have been possible to make before the digital or computer revolution. Write about how you think this kind of image changes YOUR sense of what images can convey or communicate.


Extra Credit

Find an image from any source that would not have been possible to make before the digital or computer revolution. Scientific image? Digital fake? Video game or movie still? Write about how you think this kind of images changes YOUR sense of what images can convey or communicate.

Some things to think about:

1. Does the image change or challenge your idea about the relationship of the image to reality?
2. Does the image change your sense of how an image may appear in terms of colors, details, rhythms, etc?
3. Does the image alter your sense of why images are created or how they are used? Do digital images have new uses or reasons for being created?
4. Does what you know about the image come to you in a different way than images of the past? Would information about it not be possible before the digital or computer revolution and if that is the case, what has changed?