This project reconnects with, and builds upon, the abstract photographic tradition in Australia, whose roots lie in the 1960s, but which appears to have been displaced and forgotten. Australian Abstractions proposes an engagement with the forces that drive and organise the abstract image in the Nietzschean sense of forces presenting themselves in the aesthetic sphere in the sense of manifesting themselves in the image.
The reference is to Gilles Deleuze who holds that the relationships between the concept, perception, and affects follow a combinatorial logic, in which no element is privileged over and above any of the others. This allows for the Deleuzian “‘flux’ of perpetual change.” Deleuze regards art as a matter of recombining and objectivizing elements whose status remains co-equal. None of these is the ground for any of the others: there is no priority, implicit or otherwise, of concept over percept or affect, and so for all these terms.
Art is the site where percept, concept, and affect combine like the threads of a fabric whose strands are completely interwoven with one another.
As is well known, the orthodox modernist response to photography’s taking away the responsibility for representational content from painting was an affirmative withdrawal into painterly autonomy through abstraction in the form or spiritual or painterly values. The more radical avant-grade response was the rejection of painting altogether in the the form of the readymade. Photography was seen to have usurped painting’s aspiration to objectivity in painting’s older tradition of the naturalistic representational function. That left photography’s representations as truth telling.
container abstract
Most of the critical emphasis to this crisis of painting in the 20th century has been on painting and the way that photography is used as a ready-made source for paintings i.e. painting as photo painting. But what if photography starts working with abstractions in the form of painterly values? Does that negation of painting’s specificity signify a failure to reconcile art and politics? Does it imply a turning to high culture and the traditional values of art and a rejection of non art and popular culture where most of today’s photography is situated? Is it a response to the anti-aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s that celebrated cultural and vernacular forms that denied the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm?; an anti-aesthetic that is willing to discard the aesthetic as an outmoded modernist category in its desire to overcome modernist formalism. Continue Reading…
I have an exhibition of abstractions coming up at the Light Gallery during the 2015 SALA Festival in August. It is a modest solo exhibition that consists of both abstractions from nature and from various walls and containers. The work has been constructed from the archives, and it can be seen as part of the shift inn photography to abstraction as a response to the digital realm.
An example of the abstractions from nature:
trunk abstract #1
This picture was made with my old 8×10 Cambo monorail, and it is the trunk of a redgum that Suzanne’s mother bought back from Arkaroola as a seedling and planted in the reserve across from the studio. Then–the 1980s–the reserve was barren with just a bunch of pine trees. It was old farmland. The storm water from the large housing development up the side of the hill currently flows through the reserve, and it is now populated with large native trees and lots of birdlife. So we live near the sea surrounded by trees. Continue Reading…
It started when the Microsoft backed OpenAI went public in late 2022 with ChatGPT with its new technology of summarization. These new technologies, which process human generated information, are taking the form of being the newest, hottest thing with stock market speculation and investor stampede for AI startups. The hype cycle is in full swing, expectations are bubbling over into euphoria about the potential transformations. Silicon Valley’s motto is ‘move fast and break things’.
seascape+mist
This Large Language Model (LLM) is a technology that makes it cheap and easy to summarize information. They generate general purpose text for chatbots, and perform language processing tasks such as classifying concepts, analysing data and translating text. Usable maps and summaries of big inchoate bodies of information can be incredibly helpful. So are the emerging transformations in human-machine interaction with respect to text, text to images and text to video. Apple, though, appears to have gone missing as it currently lacks a publicly available generative AI product.
AI-generated images are increasingly everywhere in contemporary visual culture with lots of whispers, positive vibes on the street and wild swings in the share prices of infrastructure and software vendors as investors attempt to read the tea leaves of the generative AI market. There is money in image-generating models. It’s akin to a gold rush.
Encounter Bay, 2023
If these cultural technologies are to have long term value, then they require reasonably high quality knowledge to keep on working. AI models are thus built on the backs of out-sourced human labor: people toiling away, providing mountains of training examples for AI systems that corporations can use to make billions of dollars. By themselves the AI do not provide a solution to the garbage-in, garbage-out problem, from the ever increasing disinformation, hallucination and fakery on the internet. So how do they get the right data with all this tainted data? How is that data protected in the applications built on top of the AI platforms? How will they address safeguards around facial recognition? Are safety culture and processes taking a backseat to shiny products?
The tectonic cultural plates are indeed shifting — eg., using Claude on the iPhone indicates that the modern chatbots allow users to now interact with computers through natural conversation–and the newly arrived flirtatious and coquettish GPT-40 that accepts visual, audio, and text input, and generate output in any of those modes from a user’s prompt or request. Creating images through innovative AI generators, such as OpenAI’s art generator DALL-E 3, or Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has become a new form of image production.
Encounter Bay seascape
This is based on a text prompt that then turns it into a matching image — it assembles a new images from a database of already existing ones. So the dataset is just a big scrape of the Internet, and the current legal situation about intellectual property is incredibly murky, given that the AI companies are using copyrighted images to train their algorithms without asking for consent or offering compensation.
By the looks of it, AI generated images will have a big immediate impact on stock photography to the extent of replacing Shutterstock-type photography. Adobe is saying in relation to its Firefly AI generator to ‘skip the photoshoot‘, rather than enhancing the photoshoot. The political economy here is simple: Adobe gets the money as Firefly will be used to benefit their makers at the expense of others. At the moment I see the array of new generative “AI” tools to enable me to modify my photographic images as being offered solutions to problems in post-processing that I don’t have.
I have been looking at some recent scans of the seascapes that I made during 2022 with my vintage RolleiflexF TLR. This is a 60 year old camera and so it is no surprise that the elements of its Planar 75m lens that were joined with balsam glue have recently separated. Apparently the issue of lens separation is often associated with the camera having been exposed to high heat situations during its life. It can be repaired through baking the lens to de-glue the elements, but there is a risk of the elements cracking from the baking process. I decided to go ahead with the repair.
The 2022 seascape images that I made with this Rolleiflex TLR looked quite different to what I’d expected. From the traditional perspective of the quality of the image that is produced by a digital camera you could say that these are degraded images and so failures. That is how I saw them when I’d scanned the negatives and then compared them in Lightroom to the digital images made at the same time. I had initially thought that the degraded images resulted from the lens being salt damaged like the Leica M4-P due to by a rogue wave sweeping over me — but it was lens separation not a salt ladened camera.
seascape, Encounter Bay, #1
I put the scans to one side and forgot about them. Some time later I went back and re-looked at Gustave Le Gray’s mid-19th century coastal photography of Normandy and the western coast of the Mediterranean. I concentrated on his seascapes, that were made using the wet-collodion process and from different negatives (one for the sea and another one for the sky) being combined to produce an image that showed both sky and sea in one unified, double-structured picture. He produced an album of sepia brown toned seascapes of albumen prints called Vistas del Mar. These are images from the prehistory of an instantaneous photography, or pictorial instantaneity, which emerged after 1878.
I found these images created by the combination of two different negatives taken at different moments with different exposure times stunning. They also raised the issues of how does photography represent time? How does photography figure the temporal nature of the medium? What kind of philosophy of time, if any, can be found in photography?
