I appreciated tracing the origin point of the history of the computational image back to the Paleo-camera theory. I can imagine how this phantasmic apparition would have conjured divinity, mysticism, and an expanded consciousness in the early humans who witnessed this accidental camera obscura before they had the knowledge to describe, replicate, or systematize the observed phenomena. This sudden apparition would form a rupture in the fabric of reality, opening up new possibilities for viewing, perceiving, and understanding the world. These momentary ruptures in the perceived boundaries of reality continue today, though more frequently and cumulatively, with each major paradigm shift in artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual and mixed reality, projection mapping, simulation, robotics, and space exploration, just to name a few.
The spectre of the Paleo-camera theory, along with the mention of the Shroud of Turin in Week 2, made me think back to two excellent essays covered in Professor Jenni Sorkin’s Art History seminar on
Alchemy, Magic, and Spirituality in Contemporary Art. Tom Gunning’s
“To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision” and Georges Didi-Huberman’s
“The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)” both examine notions of truth and fiction, miracle and artifice, through optical and tactile mediations. These texts, while rooted in the history of photography, cinema, and anthropology, particularly interest me in their application to contemporary modes of photogrammetry, UV mapping, holograms, AI, deep fakes, and digital forensics.
In
“To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision”, Gunning examines the history and affect of Spirit Photography through a range of optical phenomena, philosophy, illusions, sleight of hand, poetry, and photographic and cinematic processes. Gunning is less interested in the objective truth of a recorded image, and more concerned with the medium’s potential for new ways of seeing (and new channels of communication between spirit realms) to emerge through optical devices and technology. Gunning states, “the virtual image becomes the modern phantom” (Gunning 2007 p.111), and he quotes the literary scholar Terry Castle as saying photography was “the ultimate ghost-producing technology of the nineteenth century” (Castle 1995, p.167). He goes on to quote Castle, who stated that modern culture:
“felt impelled to find mechanical techniques for remaking the world itself in spectral form. Photography was the first great breakthrough—a way of possessing material objects in a strangely decorporealized yet also super naturally vivid form. But still more bizarre forms of spectral representation have appeared in the twentieth century—the moving pictures of cinematography and television, and recently, the eerie, three dimensional phantasmata of holography and virtual reality.” (Castle 1995, pp.137-138)
The uncanny and phantasmagoric aspects of Spirit Photography that Gunning and Castle discuss can be extended to new forms of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, and photogrammetry. The title itself,
“To Scan a Ghost”, evokes the 3D scanning process of photogrammetry, and the odd blobs, deformations, and artifacts accidently generated by photogrammetry software resemble the ectoplasm, orbs, and spectres that “appear” in Spirit Photography. Gunning’s text from 2007 and Castle’s text from 1995 discuss the ghostly forms present in new media (though Gunning was frustrated by the term) and virtual reality, and I’m very curious how they would update their analyses today after the rapid technological accelerations of the subsequent years.
Didi-Huberman’s
“The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)” examines the Shroud of Turin and the lengths that scholars, historians, scientists, and surgeons have gone to in an attempt to prove or disprove the authenticity of the shroud. Like Gunning, Didi-Huberman is less concerned with the fact or forgery, and more in the imagination, devotion, and fantasy the shroud produces. What I found most interesting in the text was the translation from the plotted stains on the 2D plane of the shroud to a 3D reconstruction of a body, and it’s orientation, from that tactile data. The shroud itself resembles a UV map in 3D modeling, or the 2D skin of an unwrapped 3D mesh. The essay includes rudimentary axonometric projections of the crucifixion based on the geometry of the stains drawn by Giulio Ricci in 1972. The renderings are almost laughably crude by today’s standards, but the idea of translating 2D data and geometry into 3D forms remains interesting. It is also interesting to think of in relation to the first chemically fixed image by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. Niépce’s heliograph is almost abstract in it’s grainy pointillism—itself a collection of geometric stains formed by photons meeting a chemical substrate. While the Shroud of Turin is not a traditional photograph, it is a collection of geometric stains on the substrate of linen—a point cloud with data and memory.
Throughout our accelerated history of the photographic image, I was fascinated by the back and forth process of progression between chance and calculation; between apparitions, happy accidents, and artistic experimentation, and in parallel rigorous scientific experiments, highly engineered optical devices, and advances in chemistry and the computational image. The first humans to be captured on film by Louis Daguerre in 1839 occurred almost by happenstance as the subject pauses to get his shoes shined, standing still just long enough to be captured by the long exposure. Jacques-Henri Lartique perhaps inadvertently advances the photographic capture of motion in
Le Grand Prix A.C.F. (1913) as he barely captures a speeding car in frame, mixing blur and focus. Stanford and Muybridge seem to bridge these two realms in their capture of animal locomotion. Leland Stanford had the hypothesis that horses took all four feet off the ground mid gate, and he functions as both provocateur and patron to support Eadweard Muybridge’s meticulous five year experiment to prove Stanford’s theory. While rigorous and scientific, this breakthrough also inadvertently builds the foundation for the advances in moving images and cinema that will follow. Étienne-Jules Marey and Harold Edgerton would also fall into this rigorously scientific study of photography, which resulted in absolutely gorgeous images that expanded our understanding of reality. In relation to this dynamic between aesthetics and science, R. Buckminster Fuller once said:
“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
Didi-Huberman, Georges, and Thomas Repensek. “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain).” October, vol. 29, 1984, pp. 63–81. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/778307. Accessed 9 Apr. 2021.
Gunning, Tom. “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision.” Grey Room, no. 26, 2007, pp. 94–127. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/20442752. Accessed 4 Apr. 2021.
Castle, Terry. (1995). The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 137-138.
https://monoskop.org/images/e/e6/Castle ... canny.pdf