{"title":"Towards a General Iconomy","authors":"Peter Szendy","doi":"10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127899","url":null,"abstract":"What is “iconomy” (a portmanteau of “icon” and “economy”)? And how does this concept capture (if it does) a “changing ontology of the image” that the questionnaire for this issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics invites us to consider? In The Supermarket of the Visible, I developed a concept of iconomy as an explicit response to what we could call a relational ontology of the image. An image, I wrote, “is always more or less than an image”: “An image has value only in relation to other images.”1 Such a statement about the relational value of the image could easily be misunderstood. One could think that it holds only for filmic images that are meant to be unreeled in succession (“the value of an image,” Robert Bresson said, “must be, above all, an exchange value”).2 Or one could think that it holds only for the images that circulate today on social media, where they are constantly displaced and replaced, according to an exacerbated logic of “exhibition value” (Walter Benjamin’s “iconomic” translation of Marx’s “exchange value”).3 My contention, though, was not simply that images have become relational or differential entities within a worldwide system of exchanges. It was rather that, with the hypercirculation of contemporary images, what comes to the fore is the heterochronic tension that is inherent to any image as such. In other words: images have always consisted in their exchangeability with others or with other versions (formats) of themselves, but the speed of their exchanges was slow enough to make them seem completely stable and self-contained, whereas it now tends to accelerate to the point where it overshadows the image itself. In The Supermarket of the Visible, I offered Brian De Palma’s 1976 film Obsession as an example of “a masterful staging of different speeds in the exchange between images”: while a close-up of the paddle wheel of a boat evokes a slide carousel rotating with extreme velocity, the fresco that appears underneath another fresco when it flakes off because of humidity is the result of a long-term transformation. This is what led me to conclude that, “whether they change places every millisecond or have to wait several centuries,” images can never be considered as definitely individualized entities: “from the point of view of TOWARDS A GENERAL ICONOMY","PeriodicalId":38858,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Journal of Aesthetics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45039343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Lesser Being. From Louis Marin to Simondon and Back","authors":"Emmanuel Alloa","doi":"10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127841","url":null,"abstract":"How to qualify the changing ontology of the image—that is the suggestive as well as provocative question we are invited to answer in this questionnaire. The question itself is formulated rather vaguely, and leaves space for at least two interpretations: Does it mean that the ontology of the image is undergoing a major change today (because of the mutation in its materialities, its codes, its modes of circulation, for instance)? Or does it mean that the ontology of the image—its imaginal or iconic being— could never be addressed other than in terms of inconstancy and change? Either interpretation is suggestive and provocative, as it either hints at a change within ontology or at an ontology of change. Both interpretations, however, presuppose that we can address images in ontological terms at all, and that visual studies should talk about images qua being. For sure, for centuries, a lasting onto-theological tradition made such an endeavour unthinkable: in Aristotelian metaphysics, images belong to a category of relational entities that have no substantial existence of their own, while in a Platonic setting, images are defined by their lack of being. While excessive in their appearance, they are deficient with respect to the being they depict.1 Against the backdrop of such a lack that expresses itself in the guise of falsehood (pseudos) or non-being (mè on), images can’t be grafted onto an ontology; or, inversely, they can’t offer secure grounds for any ontology to come. If the point of any ontology is to study what remains unchanged of a being throughout all its contingent alterations, both the idea of a change within the ontology of the image as well as the idea of an ontology of change tout court must resonate rather oddly. Either the contemporary image changes to a point that it becomes something radically diverse, setting up an altogether new way of being that has nothing in common with what was before. Or it forces, in its ever-changing modes, to change the very project of what we call ontology, beyond the substantiality of the unmodified. Undeniably, the current fixation of certain regions of the social","PeriodicalId":38858,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Journal of Aesthetics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42271980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Copilia to Anywhen","authors":"I. Blom","doi":"10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127856","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38858,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Journal of Aesthetics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49481222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Cubitt, Celia Lury, S. McQuire, N. Papastergiadis, Daniel Palmer, J. Pfefferkorn, Emilie K. Sunde
{"title":"Ambient Images","authors":"S. Cubitt, Celia Lury, S. McQuire, N. Papastergiadis, Daniel Palmer, J. Pfefferkorn, Emilie K. Sunde","doi":"10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127861","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38858,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Journal of Aesthetics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43212851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Necropolitical Screens: Digital Image, Propriety, Racialization","authors":"Marina Gržinić","doi":"10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127885","url":null,"abstract":"How are racism, colonialism, classism, and exploitation re/ produced in images today? This will be my main question. What is the image’s “relation to the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial line that cuts global neoliberal capitalism from within and heavily conditions contemporary necropolitical capitalist production” and its financialized/digital images?1 My attempt here is to radicalize the status of images of the digital (financial) mode of production.2 Much like the novel in the 19th century—that as a cultural form allowed the spreading of colonialism despite the monstrous history of racial slavery’s violence, which gave rise to supremacist orders of modernity in the Americas and the imperial capitalist world—the digital image, albeit floats, sustains the race/class/ colonial /exploitative divide. This may sound as a pretty doubtful statement; given all is floating, digital, laisse-faire, borderless? One of the hypotheses I share is that every period of capitalism developed its proper form of extreme re/production. Capitalism is always extreme, and we have to redefine, reformulate what is it that this extreme entails. Technology provides a direct boost to capitalism.","PeriodicalId":38858,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Journal of Aesthetics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41515755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Technológos \"Responds\" to What Used to Be Called \"Images\"","authors":"W. Ernst","doi":"10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127863","url":null,"abstract":"LIBERATING THE IMAGE FROM ITS ANTHROPOCENTRIC DEFINITION “Traditionally we think of images as [...] delimited phenomena that in one way or the other appear to the human mind and apparatus of perception” (Questionnaire). The choice of words in the Questionnaire is indicative already. When optical physiology and cognitive image sensation—from the “analogue” camera obscura-like eye to the almost “digital” signal-computing brain— is observed closely,1 image processing within the human turns out as, indeed, a function of an “apparatus.” Sigmund Freud’s nonmetaphorical concept of the psychic “Apparat” in chapter VII of his Interpretation of Dreams2 explicitly compares the preliminary stages of imaging to the microscope, or to photography.3 The mechanistic approach reemerged in protocybernetic research into the electrical circuit simulation of neural image perception.4 The human “mind and apparatus of perception” (Questionnaire) literally became a nonhuman machinery in Rosenblatt’s computational Perceptron, liberating the “image” from its physiological anthropocentrism.5 Machine vision, so far, stayed profoundly different from human image cognition. But technical images as outputs from Artificial Neuronal Nets start to challenge, and to emulate, the human imaginative potential, once they are not only trained by human tagging, but (in a more complex way) by rivalling machines among themselves which are fed with big data derived from “social media.” Just like Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, in his 1766 treatise Laokoon, had almost identified the aesthetic properties of the visual arts as parallel perception (aisthesis, in the Aristotelean sense) of coexistent units in space, today, it is no coincidence that “deep” machine learning takes place in parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) that were originally developed for image processing in computers. Artificial Intelligence does not simply mimick human image perception (even if Van Gogh-like paintings HOW TECHNOLÓGOS “RESPONDS” TO WHAT USED TO BE CALLED “IMAGES.” A MEDIA-ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESPONSE TO THE “QUESTIONNAIRE ON THE CHANGING ONTOLOGY OF THE IMAGE”","PeriodicalId":38858,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Journal of Aesthetics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43616824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, G. Cox, A. Dekker, A. Dewdney, Katrina Sluis
{"title":"Affordances of the Networked Image","authors":"Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, G. Cox, A. Dekker, A. Dewdney, Katrina Sluis","doi":"10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127857","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38858,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Journal of Aesthetics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44835582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Diagrams of AI (Image)","authors":"J. Parikka","doi":"10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127893","url":null,"abstract":"A history of images about images is as mesmerising in its own right as images themselves are. This is not merely a history of the copy—the attempt to reproduce an image through an image— but also of the various guides and diagrams that tell a story of production of images. This is also the entry point for my argument about the changing ontology of the image. This argument about ontology concerns then not merely what an image is in its essence, but how images function as as operative ontologies1: described, drawn, pictured, instructed, guided, and diagrammed into existence. Such diagrams are an educational arm of knowledge about images, but obviously they are also images already in themselves. Diagrams occupy a central role as a modern form of knowledge about images. Diagrams that describe the operations and insights of image geometry are a special case in point, where the linear perspective in (and since) the Renaissance period has given rise to a long line of commentary, in the arthistorical way of tracking the changing ontologies of the image. How to calculate image surfaces, lines, and ratios becomes instrumentalised into a productive machinery and subsequently into an analytical machinery, as is the case in the various techniques of reading the geometric data packed into an image. From Johan Heinrich Lambert’s Die freye Perspective, oder Anweisung Jeden Perspektivischen Aufriß Von Freyen Stücken Und Ohne Grundriß Zu Verfertigen (1759) to Colonel Aimé Laussedat’s works on photogrammetry (or “metrophotography”) toward the latter part of the 19th century, the work of descriptive geometry becomes crucial to the diagram of the technical image and image as data.2 They are manuals of “this is how that operates” and take on a second order quality themselves: a cultural technique that recursively images an image. One can also observe a similarity with the function of the metapicture, as per WJT Mitchell’s term that refers to such images that “might be capable of reflection on themselves, capable of providing a second-order discourse that tells us—or at least shows us—something about pictures.”3 In terms of the contemporary image, the shift from questions on the ontology of digital images (do they capture reality? Do THE DIAGRAMS OF AI (IMAGE)","PeriodicalId":38858,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Journal of Aesthetics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41675705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Forever Inside Images","authors":"M. B. Rasmussen","doi":"10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127895","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38858,"journal":{"name":"Nordic Journal of Aesthetics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47659139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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