Paradoxically speaking, meta-dating makes us deaf towards images.
Western cultural competence and technology of finding,
transferring und processing stored images has been marked by the
supremacy of the word as instrument and medium of control and of
navigation, such as catchword translation of image contents and
the titling of authors and works – a practice which the mediaphilospher
Vilém Flusser calls „Iconoclasm“. Iconography is the
essence of a text-based grip on images (comparable to Optical
Character Recognition), trying to reduce the informational
richness of an image to the clarity of verbal semantics.
In sharp contrast to iconography the media-archaeological
investigation of image archives do not take images as carriers of
verbally expressable meanings. Image processing by computers can
no more be re-enacted with the anthropological semantics of the
human eye. The starting point is rather a theory based on Michel
Foucault´s discourse analysis and Claude Shannon´s mathematical
theory of communication, as well as practices and notions of datastructure-oriented
programming. A meta-data-free visual memory
leads to intuitive visual archives: modelling similarity without
verbal annotation; instead: query by visual (ex)sample, automatic
feature extraction. This model does not replicate human behaviour
but media-archaeologically performs data mining. Just throw an
image into the computer and see how the computer, orders it –
which, finally, might teach humans to take the perspective of
computer perception (for a moment at least).
Wolfgang Ernst, in “Visual im/mediacy: towards a cultural technology of images”