critical writing – Thought Factory

abstraction, AI, black + white, critical writing, digital image, water

seascapes and generative AI image making

May 21, 2024

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’.

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.

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.

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.

critical writing, large format, trees

Photography and the anti-pastoral: part 1

September 21, 2023

A key issue in contemporary photography is how can photography address climate change, given the convincing account by climate science with respect to the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. We now live in a world where non-human entries are more vast and powerful than we are: our reality is caught up in them, and they could well dislodge us from our commanding position over nature. This points towards a dark ecology that assumes an awareness of our ecological dependency, coupled with our realisation of how we have been re-shaping and damaging the planet’s ecological systems. If we are to really think the interconnectedness of all forms of life and all things, then hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness need to be put back into ecological thinking.

If photography is to be relevant to this present, then what could an eco-orientated photography say? What kind of story could it visually narrate? Could such a photography create a cultural space within which very different kinds of knowledge and practice meet?
Though there is no blueprint, such a photography would need to be different to, and critical of, the photographic visions of settler colonial landscapes of John Watt Beattie and Nicholas Caire as these were premised on the emptiness, pristine wilderness and pastoral utopias . It would also need to critically assess the aesthetic concepts established during the Romantic era, which framed the golden age of landscape painting and the visual arts in the nineteenth century.

These aesthetic concepts divided the natural world into the 3 categories of the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime. If the first two historically represented nature as a comforting source of physical and spiritual sustenance, the sublime referred to the thrill and danger of confronting untamed nature and its overwhelming forces, such as thunderstorms, alps, deep chasms, wild rivers and stormy seas.

Whilst both the pastoral and picturesque reference human kind’s ability to control the natural world, pastoral landscapes historically celebrated the dominion of humankind over nature. If the roots of the pastoral lie in a form of poetry that celebrates the pleasures and songs of the herdsmen, then this steadily expanded to a visual representation of rural nature that exhibits the ideas and sentiments of those to whom the country affords pleasures and employment. The scenes, which are usually peaceful, historically depicted ripe harvests, lovely gardens, manicured lawns with broad vistas and fattened livestock, were in contrast to the views of the court or the city. John Constable’s landscape paintings of the English countryside are a classic example.

In colonial Australia the settlers developed and tried to tame nature so that the land yielded the necessities the colonialists needed to live, as well as beauty and safety. If Joseph Lycett established the pastoral landscape tradition in Australia, then Arthur Streeton’s ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’ is an iconic example of the representation of the Australian pastoral landscape. In this tradition of the Australian idealisation of settler landscapes — Australia as a Promised Land — Europeans are seen to be in harmony with a fertile land; a land which has been ordered and produced by them, and in which they are able to experience leisure and pleasure. The Heidelberg School’s celebration of colour and light is a popular example of this tradition.

critical writing, digital image

unthinking photographic culture

June 30, 2023

In this post on the Leica Poetics blog I referred to Wim Wenders view about the shifting ground of the photographic medium (as the single, static image). So what has happened to photography with networked computing? Wenders held that photography is dead and that we need to find a new term for the digital photography in our contemporary visual culture. Digital images in this culture are images that are co-constituted with software; are networked; are driven by algorithmic analysis of the vast banks of images collated by social media platforms that are profit-driven; whilst seeing is now platform or screen seeing. Now we hav generative AI, which produces text and images in abundance, and soon, music and video, too. As James Vincent of The Verge says the dynamics of AI is producing cheap content (AI junk) based on others’ work through scraping their content.

We are a long way from the photography and ways of seeing of the Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity project of the late twentieth century that finished in the 1990s. The images produced by this analogue photography has been replaced by the automated processes of algorithms, data flow, big data and social networking. So we need to unthink photography; or more specifically unthink the ontology and culture of the analogue photography in the Bowden Archives, Mallee Routes or my large format photography, now that the historical period of the mechanical analogue has passed.

This representational kind of photography in the age of the computational mode of image production is redundant, whilst still exerting an influence as an after-life. It is an obsolete medium, one which refuses to die, that has become a historical medium of heritage.

abstraction, critical writing, film, water

Encounter Bay seascapes

April 14, 2023

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.

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?

abstraction, critical writing, large format

on abstraction

February 3, 2023

I want to pick up on an earlier post on photography and abstraction in relation to the practice of large format photography in order to begin to dig into what we mean by abstraction. There are multiple reasons for this. Firstly, the word abstract is vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, and secondly there has been little written about abstraction despite its centrality to the visual arts in the 20th century. Thirdly, there is even less written on abstraction in photography.

These reasons are underpinned by the habitual disdain for theoretical abstractions, which once informed empiricism, the philosophy with which the English-speaking world is most associated. This restricts abstraction to the mind wherein is identified as an abstract or general idea formed from sense data or sensory impressions of classes of objects or patterns in nature–ie, the general idea of rocks as opposed to these particular rocks. This post, then begins to explore what is conceptually meant by abstraction.

Abstraction in the visual arts in Australia is traditionally tied to both the modernist paintings in The Field Exhibition in the late 1960s, and to the modernist understanding of abstraction of Clement Greenberg’s conception of abstract visual art as the pinnacle of the medium of painting, due to it having succeeded (according to Greenberg) in stripping away other media. The art historical conception that is found in exhibition catalogues and art history books interprets abstraction as the absence of figuration or depiction of everyday objects. The consequence is that Patrick McCaughey, an Australian modernist follower of Greenberg, held that photographers should forget abstraction because it is not suited to the medium of photography. That was Greenberg’s position as well: the medium of photography in its essence was an art of documenting the world as opposed to documentary being a subdivision of photography.

If we are to explore abstraction in photography we need to step away from the habits and conventions of this modernist cultural frame in the sense of shifting our patterns of thought beyond familiar aesthetic norms so we can open up abstraction more broadly to new tendencies to stasis or change, eruptions and becomings. We need to look at abstraction conceptually, and not just in terms of what it has been as outlined in Lyle Rexer’s The Edge of Vision.

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