If as Serge Daney writes, “all form is a face looking at us“, what does a form become when it is plunged into the dimension of dialogue? What is a form that is essentially relational? It seems worth while to discuss this question taking Daney’s formula as a point of reference, precisely because of its ambivalence: as forms are looking at us, how are we to look at them?
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics
Culture has not only created epistemology, but indeed also signal-processing machines, which are then by definition detached from culture: they do not ‘count’ semantic aspects; they do not view images as icons; they do not perceive sound as music; and they read texts with the aesthetics of a scanner, by Optical Character Recognition.
Wolfgang Ernst: “From Media History to Zeitkritik“.
The significance of images is on the surface. One can take them in at a single glance yet this remains superficial. If one wishes to deepen the significance, i.e. to reconstruct the abstracted dimensions, one has to allow one’s gaze to wander over the surface feeling the way as one goes. This wandering over the surface of the image is called ‘scanning’. In so doing, one’s gaze follows a complex path formed, on the one hand, by the structure of the image and, on the other, by the observer’s intentions. The significance of the image as revealed in the process of scanning therefore represents a synthesis of two intentions: one manifested in the image and the other belonging to the observer. It follows that images are not ‘denotative’ (unambiguous) complexes of symbols (like numbers, for example) but ‘connotative’ (ambiguous) complexes of symbols: They provide space for interpretation.
While wandering over the surface of the image, one’s gaze takes in one element after another and produces temporal relationships between them. It can return to an element of the image it has already seen, and ‘before’ can become ‘after’: The time reconstructed by scanning is an eternal recurrence of the same process. Simultaneously, however, one’s gaze also produces significant relationships between elements of the image. It can return again and again to a specific element of the image and elevate it to the level of a carrier of the image’s significance. Then complexes of significance arise in which one element bestows significance on another and from which the carrier derives its own significance: The space reconstructed by scanning is the space of mutual significance. (more…)
As with their ancestor, perspective, today’s binary seeing machines, have managed to convince us that now we really can possesses an infallible method of representation: a system for the automatic and mechanical production of truths about the material world. That is, if we buy the new 15-megapixel cell-phone with the Adobe plug-ins that will no doubt be available next year. Or was that last year? Aided by the political and economic ascendance of Western systems of objectification and piggy-backing on photography’s history, artificial seeing has conquered the world of representation.
[…] No matter whether it is a monitor, camera, printer, or the screen of a mobile phone, the output device is always an attempt to reflect or transmit light to the retina of a viewer. The viewer in turn, mesmerized by the light, enters commands that again shine onto the retina. In this way the pixel and its attendant soft and hardware systems can be seen as an element in a net drawn up by the social, economic and cultural reordering of the variables of ambient light. Such a net is made possible by reducing the spectrum of light to a set of repeatable tasks, as analyzed by the linguistic tools of code, made possible by contemporary hardware environments. This is now the natural mode of representation in most rich countries and through it we enjoy our neutral appropriation of the pixel’s reality.
Graham Harwood, Pixel in Software Studies: A Lexicon, p. 216-217
153
00:22:56,202 –> 00:22:58,408
I can hear myself.
154
00:22:58,495 –> 00:23:01,069
– You hear your own voice?
– Yes.
155
00:23:01,165 –> 00:23:03,834
– Good.
– You called me a scanner.
156
00:23:05,502 –> 00:23:07,542
What is that?
(more…)
The image as a database containing echoes of itself.
Abstract:
Methods for super-resolution (SR) can be broadly classified into two families of methods: (i) The classical multi-image super-resolution (combining images obtained at subpixel misalignments), and (ii) Example-Based super-resolution (learning correspondence between low and high resolution image patches from a database). In this paper we propose a unified framework for combining these two families of methods. We further show how this combined approach can be applied to obtain super resolution from as little as a single image (with no database or prior examples).[…] Our approach is based on the observation that patches in a natural image tend to redundantly recur many times inside the image, both within the same scale, as well as across different scales. Recurrence of patches within the same image scale (at subpixel misalignments) gives rise to the classical super-resolution, whereas recurrence of patches across different scales of the same image gives rise to example-based super-resolution. Our approach attempts to recover at each pixel its best possible resolution increase based on its patch redundancy within and across scales. […]
Source:
Super-Resolution From a Single Image
Daniel Glasner, Shai Bagon, Michal Irani
http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~vision/SingleImageSR.html
Significantly, the final illustration in this research paper is a drawing by M.C. Escher, the Dutch graphic artist who’s work (typically popular with mathematicians and engineers) explored the idea of self-similarity, fractals, and (often impossible) repetitions.
Notes from a “performative presentation” made at the KHiO, Oslo Norway Thursday 15 October, 2015
http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/sicv_khio_presentation_2015