Nonhuman Vision

The view from where, exactly?

The term “nonhuman vision” perhaps most readily furnishes readers’ imagination with images of CCTV cameras, Google Earth, satellites, and drones. And, indeed, this chapter does take as its starting point processes of perception in which the very act of seeing something, and its subsequent temporary fixing into an image, are performed by a nonhuman agent, even if their addressee is determinedly human. The term may also bring up visual acts where the human is more explicitly positioned as part of the sighting process in real time: endoscopy, microphotography, or night photography. In those latter cases, detailed images obtained via technical apparatuses such as electronic microscopes or cameras equipped with a CCD sensor featuring very high ISO sensitivity enable access to realms that normally remain hidden from human sight. The role of such apparatuses is thus to enhance limited and partial human vision. Yet it is not my aim in this chapter to celebrate uncritically any such technological enhancements to, or even replacements for, human vision, because, as Donna Haraway bluntly states with reference to examples such as magnetic resonance imaging, home and office video display terminals, and satellite surveillance systems, “Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony: [the] eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters.”¹ Technologically enhanced vision is therefore still human, and most definitely humanist, in that it reinforces the visual mastery and material dominance of the observer: it is like the eye of a slave owner glancing over his plantation or a general scanning the battlefield,² only better. However, just as it is not my intention to gush over technological enhancements to human vision, neither is it to promote any kind of visual Luddism as yet another installment in man’s (or woman’s) struggle against technology. So, even though this chapter does start by looking at the machinic aspects of vision that challenge the limitations of the human senses and that produce images which defy human perception, it proposes the concept of “nonhuman vision” as an ethico-political response to what Haraway calls the “god trick” of infinite vision, a masculinist gaze of domination and occupation “seeing everything from nowhere.”³ Importantly, as the examples just cited demonstrate, nonhuman vision is not directly opposed to its human counterpart. As pointed out by John Johnston, “Among the inherited oppositions that continue to impose limits on reflection about vision and visual culture today, that which opposes the human to the technical is perhaps the most visibly widespread and invisibly pernicious.”⁴ Therefore, rather than counterpoise human vision with a machinic one,⁵ the chapter will position the human as part of a complex assemblage of perception in which various organic and machinic agents come together—and apart—for functional, political, or aesthetic reasons.

In addition to being about perception and vision, this chapter is also about viewpoints—that is, about actual points and positions from which what we humans refer to as “the world,” or “the environment,” is apprehended and from which knowledge is constructed. It is thus also about scale, proclaiming as it does the need to reintroduce structure and framing to seemingly vast posthumanist vistas, if we early twenty-first-century human thinkers and observers are to make any meaningful argument about them. Writers such as Martin Jay and Jonathan Crary, as well as Haraway herself, have variously argued that vision is historically constructed. Yet the construction of vision as vision does not occur separately from other developments: it is part and parcel of the all-encompassing and indivisible process of mediation “that is simultaneously economic, social, cultural, psychological, and technical.”⁶ From this perspective, the chapter recognizes that something unique has occurred to human perception and the associated ways of grasping the world in the last couple of decades, with the unprecedented extrapolation of vision to apparatuses big and small—to an extent that, as Crary puts it in Techniques of the Observer,

Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world. If these images can be said to refer to anything, it is to millions of bits of electronic mathematical data. Increasingly, visuality will be situated on a cybernetic and electromagnetic terrain where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide and are consumed, circulated, and exchanged globally.⁷

Yet the historical specificity of data-driven images and nonhuman scales in perception aside, my position in this chapter stops short of embracing the radical discontinuity and disruption of perception as a result of the extension of visuality across various scales. Instead, I aim to develop an argument about the inherent nonhumanity of all vision, while also zooming in on some recent technological and sociopolitical developments around vision and perception to illustrate this point and consider its consequences.

Photography beyond humanism

The humanist argument about photography and image making is reflected in the widely disseminated stories about the image deluge we are said to be producing today, as a result of which there is supposedly nothing left for us to see or know. We can hear echoes of these stories in such headline-grabbing statements as: Every two minutes, we take more pictures than did the whole of humanity in the 1800s! Every day, 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook! There are over twenty billion photos on Instagram! And it’s estimated that humankind has taken 3.8 trillion pictures so far!¹³ The accuracy of such statements should be taken with a grain of salt, not least because of the rapid changes these platforms and the practices associated with them are undergoing, as well as the relative impossibility of measuring accurately the activities they are referencing. However, numerical accuracy is not the primary concern of those who make such proclamations. By drawing on the rhetorical strategies of the mathematical sublime, they are first of all interested in creating a shock effect among their audiences, dazzling us with numbers that are difficult to grasp—whose role is to act as “clickbait,” to instigate the purchase of an app or a device, or perhaps even to cause a moral panic.

It is not only generators of media hype, salespeople, and “life as it used to be” morality peddlers who treat us to narratives about visual excess. In a similar vein, media and visual studies scholars have interpreted the production and consumption of images in the digital age in terms of affective labor: a form of work that is seemingly limitless, yet that remains unaccounted for and hence ultimately unrewarded, even if it is temporarily satisfying on a personal level. Indeed, clicking and sharing are never-ending tasks we are all mobilized to perform if we are to keep up with the times, or at least with the timelines of our friends’ and families’ lives. Marxist critic Jonathan Beller, writing primarily about cinema but also extending his argument to social media, argues that, in the current culture of visual excess, “in accord with the principles of late capitalism, to look is to labor.”¹⁴ He goes on to suggest, “With the rise of [the] internet grows the recognition of the value-productive dimensions of sensual labor in the visual register. Perception is increasingly bound to production.”¹⁵ Beller is rather pessimistic about the possibility of escaping from this factory of late modern visuality, set up as a narcissistic hall of mirrors. The fact that, at the time of writing, the most popular tags on Instagram include #love, #me, #cute, #follow, and #selfie seems to corroborate his thesis.¹⁶

Yet it may be worth turning at this point to photography critic Lyle Rexer, who refuses to be swayed either by excessively optimistic or excessively pessimistic stories about the supposed image deluge—or, more importantly, by their humanist underpinnings. Instead, in his book The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, Rexer attempts to reconfigure photography as a medium of nonhuman vision. He encourages us to engage, slowly and meticulously, with various kinds of abstract images instead, i.e., with “photographs without pictures,” also called “photographs that withhold,”¹⁷ because they invite us to practice a “way of looking that doesn’t privilege the subject of the photograph.”¹⁸ The reasons for this visual exercise are not just academic: Rexer aims to promote what he terms “novel seeing,” in which photography “is not a looking at or a looking through but a looking with.”¹⁹ For Rexer, “The photograph itself is a piece of performance art, and the performer is light—its passing through and encountering things in the world.”²⁰ His revisionist rereading of the traditional narrative that photography is about looking at traces of light, and hence originally about the sun, rather than about decoding human-made signs and symbols, reveals his deeper ontological and ethical ambitions for the medium. He writes, “We feel throughout the history of photography a chafing at its limits, an impatience with mere visuality, and a wish for some more intimate expression of the world’s relation—but one somehow made available through the eyes.”²¹ Rexer’s sentiment about the photographic medium is akin to my own desire that shapes this book. It is a desire to position photography as a zoetic, life-giving, and world-making force, albeit one that entails the enactment of (at times violent) actions of the cut that need to be performed in order to still time. The ethical dimension of photography can be confronted and engaged by its human subjects when they respond to those cuts by means of looking-with (or even becoming-with) an image. If it seems to some readers like too large a philosophical claim, the proposition of photography’s zoetic ontology and relational ethics could perhaps be seen instead in terms of an artistic performance: as an articulation of a possibility, or an attempt to engender a different language about, and a new perception of, the familiar technology and practice.

As mentioned before, nonhuman vision in photography is therefore not opposed to the human mode of seeing but rather forms its constitutive aspect, even if at times this is unseen or repressed. But this aspect is also one that has been present in the history of photography from its beginning. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827) (figure 1.2), which is considered to be the first photographic image ever made, took eight hours to expose. Niépce had positioned a camera obscura on the upper floor of his country home. Within the camera he placed a polished pewter plate coated with a type of asphalt called bitumen of Judea—a light-sensitive material that hardened on being exposed to daylight. The plate was then washed in a mixture of lavender oil and petroleum, revealing a faint yet clearly traceable image of the buildings and landscape surrounding Niépce’s estate, Le Gras.

Figure 1.2 Enhanced version of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s *View from the Window at Le Gras*, 1826 or 1827. Public domain.

As Bill Anthes explains,

The required eight-hour exposure produced a visual paradox: sunlight and shadow can be seen on two sides of structures at left and right—the “pigeon house” or upper loft of Niépce’s home, and the sloped roof of a barn with a bakehouse in the rear. As such, Niépce’s landmark image presages something that will be true of all the photographs produced in the centuries following his invention: the camera has recorded a view that, for all its apparent veracity, is a scene which the human eye could never see.²²

The first image in the history of photography therefore presents a distinctly nonhuman vision, while also enacting a nonhuman agency at the heart of its production. Such a nonhuman mode of seeing and doing will arguably shape the whole of subsequent photographic practice, as well as the early discourse about this practice—even though, with the increasing focus on human subjects and on the representational aspects of the image in the second half of the twentieth century, this mode will recede into the background of the narrative about the photographic medium. This is why it is important to highlight that, working within a similar time frame as Niépce, English scientist Henry William Fox Talbot—who, alongside his French contemporary, also laid claim to the coveted title of “the inventor of photography”²³—described the photographs gathered in his book The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846) as having been “impressed by Nature’s hand.”²⁴ Talbot foregrounded not only the nonhuman impressioning of paper by light as the fundamental aspect of every photographic act but also the nonhuman vision of the camera obscura’s eye. He associated the camera obscura with detachment and the lack of passion, and thus of moral vision, as manifest in its inability to tell the difference between human and nonhuman entities: “the instrument chronicles whatever it sees, and certainly would delineate a chimney-pot or a chimney-sweeper with the same impartiality as it would the Apollo of Belvedere.”²⁵

Even war photography, later subsumed by the humanist aspirations of the documentary practice—which is somewhat erroneously premised on the causal link between perception, empathy, and moral action—has nonhuman antecedents. English photographer Roger Fenton traveled to the Crimea in 1854 to record the events of the ongoing military conflict. However, due to the weight and size of his equipment, as well as the limitations of the photographic technology at the time, he was constrained in the kinds of images he was able to capture. The need for long exposure times may explain why some of the most memorable photos of the conflict—such as his vast and melancholy Valley of the Shadow of Death—have a distinctly nonhuman feel. Interestingly, it is now widely suspected that Fenton had altered the vistas captured in that photograph by adding the cannonballs to the desolate landscape for effect. This constructionist approach, coupled with the vision dislodged from a singular human observer, was carried on to Fenton’s postwar photography, as Rexer comments:

Take for example his work The Long Walk, Windsor (1860), whose path splits the image in two and disappears into the empty, overexposed sky. The photograph organizes a perspective that is, strictly speaking, not human, an extreme version of the vanishing point that actual experience would have contradicted. Fenton reveals to us now what the connoisseurs of his century did not understand: that photography was quintessentially a conceptual art, not a quotation at all but a visual reconstruction of reality, a simulacrum with a difference. Insofar as they reconstruct reality, photographs withhold a measure of it.²⁶

Visual experimentation of this kind increased with the development of camera technology at the end of the nineteenth century. Attempts to slow down time and break it into singular instances, normally invisible to the human eye, drove the work of motion photographers such as Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, whose images of movement led to the overall sense that the universe itself was “expanding with machine-aided human vision” and that “there were orders of reality yet to be disclosed.”²⁷

The attempt to find new perspectives that would further challenge established ways of seeing, literally and figuratively, was taken up by many European artists in the early twentieth century. In the images of Russian photographer Alexander Rodchenko, Modrak writes, “transmission towers soar into the sky from a worm’s-eye point of view, horns trumpet directly overhead, and we float over crowds and stairways as though seeing with a bird’s eye.”²⁸ The insect and bird perspective was meant to allow for a displacement of fixed relations and arrangements, whether on the material or sociopolitical level. Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy went so far as to label “photography’s ability to exceed human vision with radical points of view achieved by cameras, and with experimental processes using light and photographic chemistry,”²⁹ a “New Vision.” The embracing of nonhuman perspectives in photography by central and eastern European avant-gardes was more than just an aesthetic experiment: the gesture carried an explicit revolutionary agenda. By breaking with representationalism and aiming to shock viewers with radical new angles and vistas, photographers such as Rodchenko and El Lissitzky endowed the photographic medium with the power to transform reality—or at least with their belief in that power. This belief then resurfaced in the work of media theorist Vilém Flusser, to whom I will turn later in my attempt to rethink and reimagine photography and its discourses today. It is also worth pointing out that the avant-garde experiments with photography most likely received conceptual and technical impetus from the early scientific photography of the day. In the introduction to Revelations: Experiments in Photography, a catalog accompanying the exhibition on the influence of science photography on modern and contemporary photographic art, which was a collaboration between the National Media Museum in Bradford and the Science Museum in London, Ben Burbridge goes so far as to suggest that the nascent scientific imagining in areas such as microphotography or radiography in the early twentieth century “helped to introduce a radically abstract vocabulary into the field of fine-art photographic practice.”³⁰ The exhibition’s co-curator Greg Hobson in turn states that, since its early days, photography has been able to “lend form to things that were not normally visible to the human eye—providing them with the appearance of something permanent and solid, or at least bound by shape and structure.”³¹ Hobson’s definition captures both the inherent world-making function of photography as a medium that gives form, or stabilizes, the world in motion, and the medium’s inherent nonhuman aspect.³²

My brief sketch of the nonhuman side of the history of photography hopefully demonstrates that there is something rather conservative about the discourse of the photographic medium that has dominated the field of both professional practice (in its artistic and journalistic guises) and amateur pastime in the twentieth century, when photography’s transformative ambitions were overshadowed by the conviction that the medium was close to “truth.” Rexer traces back the emergence of this conviction and approach—which he terms “a broadly documentary catechism for photography”³³—to the curatorial vision of North American institutions such as MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in the 1960s, when work of artists such as Diane Arbus and Robert Frank helped establish the photographic medium as art, while also curbing its experimental tendencies. The nonhuman, mechanical, and transformative vision as practiced by the followers of the avant-garde tradition never entirely disappeared from the picture, but it did recede into the background in the mid-twentieth century, with the representational approaches coming to stand in for the medium itself.

Improvements in camera technology and color printing no doubt contributed to the strengthening of this link between photography and verisimilitude—and thus to the forgetting of the fact that early photographs were “translations, not transcriptions.”³⁴ If not strictly black and white, the first photographic images were monochrome, with the image established through the play of shadows and lights on a photosensitive surface. Subsequent developments such as the popularization of color photography as well as the increased affordability of the medium and its portability have obfuscated this moment of visual translation by positing an equivalence between an image and its representation. And thus, “As Alan Sekula … has pointed out, it is the most natural thing in the world for someone to open their wallet and produce a photograph saying ‘this is my dog.’”³⁵ This broadly documentary approach to photography finds a continuation in the amateur use of images on social media. Formal experimentation with filters on Instagram and other sharing platforms only serves to highlight the relatively narrow scope of available subjects and viewpoints, which have all been preprogrammed and preseen by the camera’s and editing software’s algorithms. The images on Flickr, a platform with arguably more creative ambitions for the medium and its audience, as demonstrated by a quick look at the “recent photos” on any given day, also tend to fall into one of several preestablished and hence visually legitimated representational categories, such as portraiture, landscape, or still life.

Nonhuman versus inhumane photography

It can perhaps be argued that the domination of the humanist tradition in the discourses about photography as well as in its practices in recent decades springs from an attempt to offset the anxiety some feel about photography’s mobilization for all kinds of inhumane practices. Although I am using this latter term cautiously—as any theorist of posthumanism worth his or her salt would—I am seeing its value as an indicator of wider social concerns about photography’s role and function today. Inhumane practices are practices which are shaped by the cybernetic logic of performance and functionality, but from which responsibility to and for the human as a living, breathing assemblage of culturally specific values, desires, and passions remains distinctly absent. The decision not to publish images of victims in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings out of the unwillingness to disturb the American public illustrates how inhumane values can be perpetuated in and on behalf of photography, even if on the surface such decisions are presented as signs of “humanism” and “care.” As Modrak writes: “[I]n the weeks after the bombings, U.S. newspapers and magazines reproduced aerial views of the demolished cities and photographs of the mushroom cloud, images that effectively distanced Americans from the specifics of human suffering and focused on the scientific and military victories of the bomb itself.”³⁶ Yet photography’s possible complicity with inhumane practices does not apply only to wartime events. As demonstrated by the contributors to the collection Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture edited by Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin, the aerial view has become a “symbol of modernity” per se,³⁷ with the aerial image, as encapsulated by Google Earth, being “the most prominent manifestation and stimulant of this voracious contemporary appetite for views from above.”³⁸ In a separate publication—a 2008 article titled “Mindless Photography”—photography theorist John Tagg also extends this problematic of aerial perception to the highly technologized and seemingly prosperous Western world of the early twenty-first century—a world which knows no warfare within its own territories. I will discuss Tagg’s argument in more detail in the following chapter, but, for now, I would like to highlight briefly two developments involving the expansion of photography and photo imaging beyond the human visual capacity that have caused particular distress to Tagg: the regulation of urban traffic by CCTV-controlled systems and the surveillance of space by satellites equipped with cameras. Tagg claims that such practices instantiate an “inorganic machine regime,”³⁹ as a result of which “photography loses its function as a representation of the ego and the eye.”⁴⁰ It also establishes a “circuit of mindless assemblage,” whose primary role is to “capture the viewer as a function of the State.”⁴¹ Nearly a decade later, this instrumental function of image capture is not only executed by the state (although, as we now know thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations, various modern states have become extremely efficient in executing it), but it has also been taken up by Silicon Valley–based technological corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. In this global networked setup, images arrive to us as data which is then assigned visual characteristics and converted, or rather translated, into what we humans recognize as photographs. It is in this sense that “the activities of visuality are enacted prior to, or beyond, representation.”⁴²

Tagg laments the fact that the photograph no longer touches the body the way it did in the old punctum model, when an individual image affected the viewer beyond the semiotic meaning it conveyed. Today, even if it does travel through the body, as electricity and data, the image is “emptied of any content of palpable sensation.”⁴³ Rob Coley adopts a similar tone in his essay “The Horror of Visuality” when he argues that “a monstrous control operates in the form of computational stimuli, functioning socially and biologically, infiltrating bodily relations so as to cultivate an addiction to its influence.”⁴⁴ It would perhaps be easy to dismiss Tagg’s concern as just a manifestation of his unreformed humanism (and, indeed, I will put this challenge to him later in the book). Yet Tagg’s turn to the age-old anxiety about technology seems to have found an unwitting resonance with many contemporary theorists of new media, including Coley, who, after Julian Assange and Snowden, have realized that the promises of a horizontal, collaborative, and truly sharing society made in the early days of the Internet have now been overshadowed by a much darker ensemble of hierarchy and enclosure, and by the monetization of subjectivity on both affective and cellular levels. Indeed, we know now, Coley writes, “that the vast majority of data intercepted from fiber-optic cables is unexamined by humans. It is software that sieves metadata, that conducts complex pattern analysis, that searches for ‘triggers.’ … Here, as Deleuze warned us … , the individual becomes the ‘dividual,’ the network subject, depersonalized as packets of potential.”⁴⁵

This sentiment has been reflected in the emergence of what could be called “noir theory”: writing in the shadow of the double eco-eco crisis,⁴⁶ when the precariousness of the human has been exposed not just economically but also existentially, as a species. What Tagg identified in 2008 was, therefore, a premonition of a new nonhuman visuality which has a definitive inhumane touch: one that reduces the human to a source of digital capital in social media or treats the human as a visual disturbance in Google Street View (GSV) imagery (see figure 1.3)—or as an accident in drone warfare. As Jon Rafman, a photographer who first came to fame after turning surreal scenes he had found in Google Street View captures into photographic objects, has commented: “I saw GSV … in some way as the ultimate conclusion of the medium of photography: the world being constantly photographed from every perspective all the time.”⁴⁷

Figure 1.3 Joanna Zylinska, *Park Road*, London, 2011 (developed as part of the “Excavating Utopia” exhibition for the Look2011 Liverpool International Photography Festival). Park Road is the most common street name in the United Kingdom. There are over a dozen Park Roads in London alone: from the leafy and wealthy thoroughfare bordering Regent’s Park in NW1 through to the urban and suburban byways of E10 and SE25. Using Google Street View, I have “visited” these different Park Road locations in order to create a multilayered portrait of the mediated city, always under surveillance. The close-up photographs zoom in on the intimate moments of life as it unfolds on “Park Road, London.”

Circuit-breaking envisioners as new revolutionaries

This is precisely the problem posed by Vilém Flusser in his book Into the Universe of Technical Images, a poignant analysis of how photographs, television broadcasting, and other mechanically produced images are contributing to “a mutation of our being-in-the-world.”⁵¹ The basis of Flusser’s argument is the opposition he proposes between traditional images (which are made up of “surfaces”) and technical images (which are mosaics assembled from particles). Produced by an apparatus and driven by computational logic, a technical image is a “blindly realized possibility.”⁵² Flusser harbors no illusions about the human ability to manage the process of producing or even perceiving such images long-term, even if the apparatus—unlike the universe, as Flusser is keen to point out—“is subject to human control.”⁵³ But “in the longer term, the autonomy of the apparatus must be liberated from human beings” and behave the way all systems do—i.e., aim toward entropy, or heat death.⁵⁴ Yet Flusser’s philosophy is not deterministic, even if he rejects any straightforward notion of “free will” and other similar humanist niceties. Acknowledging that information logic shapes the universe and its constituent parts and particles, he identifies the uniqueness of the human in the human’s ability and willingness to actively oppose “the implacable tendency of the universe toward disinformation.”⁵⁵ He also outlines a role (albeit temporary) for envisioners, i.e., “people who try to turn an automatic apparatus against its own condition of being automatic.”⁵⁶

Figure 1.4 Still from Richard Whitlock, *The Street*, HD video, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

The automaticity of photography is executed not only on the level of algorithm—with the majority of cameras manufactured today being able to choose the “correct” exposure, light temperature (aka white balance), and focus—but also on the level of framing. Indeed, on picking up a camera and looking through a viewfinder or at an LCD screen, we are entering the flat perspectival vision that only began to be passed off as natural in Renaissance painting. This point of view is determined by the lens, which is positioned as an extension of the human eye—although it could more accurately be described as the eye’s constriction, or “tunneling.” As Richard Whitlock, a contemporary photographic artist who has attempted to challenge the visual domination of perspectival vision in his practice, argues:

Under perspective, the dominant visual mode today, we find ourselves distanced from the things around us and from each other. We become onlookers, outsiders to a world in which objects become things to be to be looked at and studied. We look at them and examine them with impunity, since they belong in a different world. Under perspective nothing returns our gaze, nothing looks us squarely in the face, unless it be positioned at the vanishing-point, in which case it will have vanished.⁵⁷

Experimentation with perspective becomes for Whitlock more than an aesthetic endeavor. Just as it was for Russian constructivists such as Rodchenko, for Whitlock it is an epistemological and ethico-political task, one that challenges the mastery of the vanishing-point vision and reminds us that there are other ways of constructing the world. Whitlock’s eight-minute looped moving image The Street, composed of many photographs and videos, depicts a nondescript yet visually pleasant street in Thessaloniki, Greece (figure 1.4). Initially we think we are just looking at a photo of an urban corner surrounded by relatively low-rise city mansions, on a sunny day. But then our brain quickly registers visual incongruity: the whole cityscape seems located on one plane, as if it had been folded to eliminate any sense of distance or depth. We also start noticing movement occurring in selected sections of the frame: people bustling about on balconies, laundry fluttering in the wind, cars and bicycles passing in front of our eyes and receding into the background … except there is no background and the objects that move away retain their size. While the scene looks realistic at first glance, on being seen properly, it starts to resemble a medieval painting, in which several temporalities are unfolding at the same time, inviting the viewer to travel with her eyes from one scene to another, without offering a linear trajectory between them. The flattened perspective ends up disappointing the (modern) eye that seems to know how to look at the world, and at photographic images of this world, but it also offers the viewer something else in return: an excitation resulting from the brain being pushed to unthink that it knows what it is seeing. The Street ends up generating what the artist himself has called “an extraordinary vitality,” or an enhanced sensation of life itself—rather than just a mimetic representation of life. While Whitlock is adamant that the project is not a direct commentary on the Greek financial crisis unfolding at the time of its production—which is why the collapsed perspective should not be seen as a metonymy for the foreshortening of Greece’s political and economic future by the European Union, with its rigid decisions about the management of the Greek debt—he does agree that art should challenge established viewpoints, whether they are about traditional cinematographic vision or “Greek profligacy.”⁵⁸

Whitlock thus seems to have become a Flusserian envisioner: someone who has been freed by the apparatus he uses “from the pressure for depth” and who is therefore capable of devoting his “full attention to constructing images.”⁵⁹ Working with the algorithm, while also being worked by it, envisioners do not step outside the world that they describe: their creations are always born in medias res, i.e., in the midst of the technical setup. The liberatory role of the artist as creator is clearly acknowledged by Flusser, but its performance does not involve rage against the machine. Only by becoming nonhuman, by letting him- or herself be ruled by the system, can the envisioner unleash “a wholly unanticipated power of invention.”⁶⁰ Flusser explains: “For envisioners, those who produce technical images, stand against the world, pointing toward it to make sense of it.”⁶¹ They inform the world, or give it form. This conscious in-forming activity is opposed by Flusser to the sheer act of taking images: not every image maker is an in-former; not every photographer is an envisioner. Google’s “search by image” feature, introduced in 2011, which, thanks to its pattern recognition algorithm, allows users to find images across the web that bear visual similarities to the one they input into the search box, brings this fact home rather poignantly. As curator and writer Katrina Sluis provocatively teases:

Think your #srsly #cute #scottishfold #cat is unique? Think your enhanced high-dynamic-range photo of the Franz Josef glacier viewed from the altar window of Waiho church in the South Island of New Zealand is unique? Think again. The grouping, aggregating and tracking online of images “visually” made it possible to discover images that were just like yours, and escape the image-language problem of previous archival taxonomies.⁶²

It is not that the photo of the envisioner’s cat will necessarily stand out from the Google image grid, or that his or her Instagram feed will be better curated. Rather, a true envisioner, as envisioned by Flusser, should be able to break the feedback loop between the image and the receiver that generates ever new versions of the system’s predictable outputs, while also making images themselves “fatter and fatter.”⁶³ This act will need to involve interrupting the ceaseless flow of likes and retweets, of tags and mirror images—in other words, of all those acts of digital creation which forfeit more insubordinate forms of creativity and which thus end up colonizing their users’ attention, turning it into affective capital for the still insatiable Giant Tech Monster. Actively promoting dialogical, rewired images, envisioners have the potential to become new revolutionaries, capable of producing “new information, improbable situations.”⁶⁴ Flusser is not being naïve in imagining what may sound like “a revolution by a camera phone,” albeit one used by a circuit-bending artist. Writing in 1985, he is already acutely aware that “it is possible to miss the deadline”⁶⁵—hence the urgency of his vision to reenvision image making as a nonhuman practice of creation, before it becomes truly inhumane: “For the way telematics gadgets are used now, to produce empty chatter and twaddle on a global scale, a flood of banal technical images, definitively cements in place all the gaps between isolated, distracted, key-pressing human beings. Soon there will be nothing more we can say to one another, so now is the moment to talk it over.”⁶⁶ Have we not left it too late?

British artist Erica Scourti seems to be starting from a similar standpoint, even if the tenor of her work is less dramatic and more playful. Her project So Like You developed for Brighton Photo Biennial 2014 responds precisely to this obesity of images today, with everyone’s photos from birthday parties, beach holidays, or London looking more or less the same. Rather than take on the role of a digital demiurge who would in-form us ex nihilo, Scourti works not only with the apparatus and its code but also with its clients, products, and outcomes. Taking as its starting point selected snapshots from her own family album—the kinds of images most of us have stowed away in the attic, drawer, or, especially the younger among us, on our computer hard drives and Facebook—as well as letters and other personal memorabilia, she runs them through the aforementioned “search by image” function provided by Google to recognize patterns and discover similarities within the web’s visual trove. In the process, she collects strangers’ images to create multiple mirror versions of her own life—which loses its singularity and becomes a replication of cultural (as well as genetic) code. Yet Scourti’s project does not entail a complete abdication of authority and decision making to the machine. The creative gesture is still very much at work here, but it lies in re-forming the perception of what counts as human uniqueness, and of the forms of freedom afforded to us by the apparatuses—cameras, servers, Google, but also the historically and biologically constructed visual apparatus, the environment in which we see and image things, and even the biological makeup of that “we.” So Like You therefore fits into a certain legacy of the modernist, and humanist, gesture of pointing to an object (a urinal, say) or a visual array and turning it into something else. The artist’s gesture is both informative and performative in this case, i.e., it rearranges the seen object’s established role, setup, and legacy with a view to making it look different and say something different to us. But it also serves as a premonition of a new era for images, when, as Sluis writes, “a photograph’s value might not lie in the specificity of its content but rather in its legibility to machines and the data generated around it. This reflects a paradigm shift in which there is less value to be extracted from individual images than from the relations between them. These relations tell us much about audience sentiment, patterns of consumption and potential future demand for images.”⁶⁷ So much, then, for the “free” image storage offered by many online platforms today! In the era of images getting fatter and fatter, the free lunch is not being had by their makers, nor, contrary to the rhetoric of the day, is it even being shared: it is, rather, being enjoyed, in private, by the few Big Data companies who are getting more and more gluttonous.

Figure 1.5 Bonamy Devas, from *Photographic Tai Chi*, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Could an envisioner make the Giant Tech Monster choke? Bonamy Devas may be just the man for the job. Working in the tradition of glitch artists who break the established circuits of communication by introducing a malfunction into the system, he has developed Photographic Tai Chi, a project whose aim is to fool the cell phone camera’s algorithm (figure 1.5). Devas invites audiences to join him in his exercise in circuit bending. The process involves some actual exercise: participants are asked to move their bodies in a tai chi–like manner and then photograph each other with the panorama function of their camera switched on, while also trying to do everything one is not supposed to do when shooting panoramas: shake the camera vigorously, move it up and down as well as back and forth, wiggle. The images produced take on all sorts of shapes and sizes, depending on the individual phone’s algorithm. They are visually reminiscent of cubist experiments, with their broken lines of vision, multiple viewpoints, and surreal connections between elements. Yet they also differ from modernist masterpieces precisely because of their networked character. The artist encourages the participants to enter what Flusser imagines as a “dialogue” and share the results of their experiments, offline and online. He also participates in the game himself. “By tagging the images #phototaichi and sharing via Instagram, a dispersed, crowd-sourced, evolving, post-human digital entity emerges from the feed,”⁶⁸ says Devas. Through this, he can perhaps be said to be taking a step toward what Flusser called “a society of artists”—players who engage in moves and countermoves in order to reprogram the apparatus. Revolutionary engagement today, according to this cybernetics-inspired critic of technology, has to begin “with the silly telematic gadgets. It is these that must be changed and changed in ways that suit their technology. Should this be successful, the centers will collapse of their own accord.”⁶⁹ Just as China seems scared of Falun Gong, should Silicon Valley, “our new default provider of infrastructure for all basic services,”⁷⁰ not be scared of Photographic Tai Chi?

The haptic eye

The projects discussed above seem to open up possibilities not only for telling a different story of photography, one that goes beyond its most conservative, representational, and naturalistic goals, but also for rethinking perception as unfixed, nonlinear, embodied, and mobile. Drawing on insights from current theories of, and narratives about, perception, I aim to take some further steps in my effort to shift the understanding of photography and vision beyond their humanist associations and affinities. Interestingly, art history, philosophy, and other humanities fields which have been concerned with vision may prove to be at least as useful in this interrogation as science-based disciplines. This is because scientists working on perception seem to be rather wary of dealing with the conceptual and the conjectural, thus typically limiting their analyses to the mechanics of vision and its psychophysical and physiological aspects. For example, the key textbook of psychology, Sensation and Perception by E. Bruce Goldstein, while providing an accessible account of perception as “conscious sensory experience” which “occurs when the electrical signals”⁷¹ representing the object we see are transformed by our brains into our experience of seeing that object, nonetheless pronounces in its opening pages that “we still don’t understand perception.”⁷² Goldstein offers a detailed account of the mechanics of perception by explaining: “Perception is determined by an interaction between bottom-up processing, which starts with the image on the receptors, and top-down processing, which brings the observer’s knowledge into play.”⁷³ He also claims that recognition and action form its inherent components. Yet, when it comes to making a leap from explaining the mechanics of perception to explaining how nerve impulses, or sodium and potassium molecules flying across a membrane, become transformed into actual perceptual experience—i.e., the perception of a person’s face or the experience of the color red—Goldstein admits defeat, not just by himself but by his fellow scientists. He states, “Although researchers have been working to determine the physiological basis of perception for more than a century, the hard version of the mind-body problem is still unsolved. The first difficulty lies in figuring out how to go about studying the problem.”⁷⁴ For this reason, many researchers focus instead on the physiological problem of the neural correlate of consciousness (where consciousness can be roughly seen to stand in for our experiences).

It is therefore to philosophers and visual theorists that we should turn in an attempt to rethink perception, not only because such scholars are more willing to take on open-ended questions but, most importantly, because they approach perception as a cultural problem and not just a physiological one. As Crary has poignantly argued, perception and vision “have no autonomous history. … [W]hat determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface. It may even be necessary to consider the observer as a distribution of events located in many different places.”⁷⁵ An art historian by training, Crary does an excellent job in tracing back the changing ideas of perception and vision across Western history to demonstrate how the dominant model of vision as linear, based on a straight ray of light emanating from God—even if it is not scientifically accurate⁷⁶—has shaped our modern understanding of perception. He cites the camera obscura, “with its monocular aperture,” as becoming “a more perfect terminus for a cone of vision, a more perfect incarnation of a single point than the awkward binocular body of the human subject.”⁷⁷ The camera obscura thus ended up stabilizing perception for centuries to come. It was only in the early to mid nineteenth century that the increased physical and conceptual mobility of the human subject in the world encouraged some new articulations of the human’s relationship to, and cognizance of, his or her environment. Yet Crary also manages to trace an alternative, even if suppressed, history of perception, which he terms the “anti-optical notion of sight,”⁷⁸ with thinkers as diverse as Berkeley, Goethe, and Schopenhauer pointing to more subjective and more sensuous aspects of vision, and hence to its inherent tactility. While the stereoscope opened up the possibility of embracing the physical side of the act of perception, this possibility was overcome by that of the photographic camera, which managed to remap and subsume the phenomenological and the tactile within the optical.

Yet it is important to emphasize here that it is not photography as such that led to this withdrawal and reductionism, but rather its unbroken association with the linearity and fixity of vision. Crary explains that photography “recreated and perpetuated the fiction that the ‘free’ subject of the camera obscura was still viable. Photographs seemed to be a continuation of older ‘naturalistic’ pictorial codes, but only because their dominant conventions were restricted to a narrow range of technical possibilities (that is, shutter speeds and lens openings that rendered elapsed time invisible and recorded objects in focus).”⁷⁹ However, as I have tried to show throughout this chapter, photography from its beginning has developed a parallel trajectory of nonnaturalistic experiments, working against the equipment’s technical limitations or even embracing them as modes of artistic expression. When representationalism is not the main goal of image making, the camera’s technology does not have to be seen as “restricted” and “narrow” but can rather be embraced as facilitating a different way of imaging. But, with the technological developments in optics and electronics, the naturalistic set of visualizing conventions became the norm, thus firming up the dominant understanding of photography as a practice of representation.

My effort to remap vision as nonhuman, decentered, and distributed has by no means been driven by a desire to elide the human form from the history of photography. Even though the “pure perception of modernism,” as Crary puts it, was premised on “the denial of the body, its pulsings and phantasms, as the ground of vision,”⁸⁰ the story of nonhuman vision I have been telling here by casting light on nonhuman and nonrepresentational photography has in fact been an attempt to reclaim vision’s embeddedness and embodiment—and thus to reinsert the human back into the picture beyond the strict subject-object dichotomy. Yet grasping vision as distributed allows us to sever the “ray of light” believed to connect the human observer in a straight line with the divine on the one hand and with the perceived object on the other. This gesture has been in step with Haraway’s intimation that “Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions.”⁸¹ I would thus like to insist, together with Haraway, “on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere.”⁸² We could perhaps go so far as to embrace what Haraway calls, after coral and ethnography researcher Eva Hayward,⁸³ “the haptic visual,” whereby vision is figured “as touch, not distance, as entwined with, or negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying from above.”⁸⁴ There is a clear ethical imperative in this kind of material-conceptual refiguration of visuality “as a becoming-with or being-with, as opposed to surveying-from.”⁸⁵

Interestingly, architecture has been at the forefront of developing alternative theories of perception that go beyond the linear visual model, as it is an explicitly visual and sensual practice, focused on the relationship between bodies, buildings, and environments. In his tellingly titled book The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Finnish architect, educator, and writer Juhani Pallasmaa argues against the denigration of the body in perception. Resisting the traditional positioning of the eye outside time and history by many philosophers, and the subsequent adoption of this model by artists and architects—a culmination of which can be found in the visual distancing of certain forms of modernism, with buildings designed to be looked at rather than dwelled in—Pallasmaa develops his theory of the eye as skin instead. His theory of vision as haptic rather than just ocular revisits the suppressed sensuous dimension of architectural history, going back all the way to ancient Greek architecture, with its “haptic sensibility.” He argues that “The sense of sight may incorporate, and even reinforce, other sense modalities.”⁸⁶ In this framework, the eye is dethroned from its function as the ultimate source of knowledge and arbiter of meaning in the world. It is rather redefined as just one of the senses, with all of them seen as “extensions of the sense of touch—as specializations of the skin.”⁸⁷ Interestingly, one of the architectural designs by Pallasmaa himself that returns most often in his book (and in its afterword by Peter MacKeith) as both a concept and an image is that of a door handle: a seemingly innocuous architectural detail that is also a literal invitation to touch the building. We could therefore conclude that Pallasmaa’s theory of the haptic eye is close to my concept of nonhuman vision because it repositions seeing as an active and dynamic process of sensuous interaction between surfaces. While stripping linear, ocular perception of its dominant role in cognition and world making, it also enriches our understanding of how perception works by pointing to the fact that we are already of the world—and that we emerge with it.⁸⁸

Figure 1.6 Fibonacci, *Kanizsa Triangle*. Such “kanizsa figures,” named after researcher Gaetano Kanizsa, trigger “the percept of an illusory contour by aligning Pac-Man-shaped inducers in the visual field, such that the edges form a shape” (“Illusory Contours,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_contours), 2007, license: CC BY-SA 3.0.

Pallasmaa’s ideas develop from the ecological theory of perception outlined by psychologist James Gibson in the mid-1950s. Premised on the assumption that the point of observation is mobile rather than fixed, Gibson’s theory moves away from the model of perception as the transmission of an image from an object to the eye (or the brain). Instead, he understands vision as a panoramic perceptual system, with both the eye and the brain being parts of that system. This model is a direct opposite of what Haraway described as a “god trick” of infinite vision “from nowhere”: in Gibson’s ecological model of perception, “to perceive the world is to coperceive oneself.”⁸⁹ According to Gibson, vision is kinesthetic, requiring a movement of the perceiving agent’s body and delivering simultaneous information about, and awareness of, “the world” and “the self in the world.”⁹⁰ There is an ethical dimension to Gibson’s proposition: concerned that we modern humans “live boxed-up lives,”⁹¹ he is intent on returning us to ways of seeing that are, if not entirely nonhuman, then at least premodern-adult-human: those of our ancestors, children, and animals. Importantly, Gibson is keen to liberate us from the fixities of not just our viewpoints but also our standpoints, and to get us to look around, literally. This involves challenging the camera/shutter model of perception because, in his understanding (supported by scientific research), our eyes are never fixed: “The eyes normally search, explore, or scan, and there are seldom fewer than several saccadic jumps per second. They look at but do not fixate.”⁹² Being in constant movement—following in a smooth way, searching in a jerky manner, and experiencing a small low-frequency tremor—our eyes are “drawn to hard edges”⁹³ as points of stoppage on this inevitably blurry journey of perceptive movement. Rebekah Modrak explains: “The eye and brain are accustomed to using contours as a way to understand the environment.” Even though nothing in the world is actually made up of lines and edges, “the eye and brain have evolved systems that encode these differentiating signals and process the information in such a deceptively casual manner that we start to believe that edges and lines are visible components of the ‘real world.’”⁹⁴ We could therefore go so far as to suggest that our visual apparatus introduces edges and cuts into the imagistic flow: it cuts up the environment so that we can see it, and then helps us stitch it back together again (figure 1.6). With this idea, we arrive at the concept of perception as active, or even world-making, rather than just secondary and responsive.

The ethical force of the cut

In light of the analysis above, I would like to suggest that vision itself can be understood as photographic. Similar propositions have been made before, but they were premised on a very different model of both vision and photography, with the act of seeing considered as purely mechanical, the eye as a passive vehicle of image production, and photography, to cite Susan Sontag, as “an act of non-intervention.”⁹⁵ The aim of this chapter has been to challenge such passive models and to position photography as a zoetic, life-giving force. It has also been to return life and movement to the very process of human perception—a process which needs to become (again) other-than-human if it is to be truly liberated from its physical and conceptual constraints. We are entering here the realm of photography understood not as a passive recording of the world but as an active process of shaping it through making cuts in the imagistic flow. Photography can play a key role in the liberation of vision from its conceptual and physical rigidity by allowing us to take stock of the imagistic flow—and of the insertions made in it by our visual and cognitive apparatus. So, rather than follow the “flow of images equals the flow of life” line of thinking, which has led some theorists—from Bergson and Deleuze through to Gibson—to proclaim that “Moviemakers are closer to life than picture makers,”⁹⁶ I want to return to photography here as a quintessential practice of both life and the cut. The cover of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photobook The Decisive Moment, featuring a paper gouache cutout by Henri Matisse, serves as a telling illustration of this point. Even though the humanist narrative of Cartier-Bresson’s eponymous idea, as encapsulated in his rather conventional photographs of “the Occident” and “the Orient,”⁹⁷ promotes the idea of the photographer as a self-contained focused eye that can isolate chance events and grab them, Matisse’s cover returns us to the mechanical aspect of photography as the practice of cutting undertaken in alliance with various apparatuses: the eye, the brain, the camera. This is to say, cutting is not a purely human-centric process because its driving mechanism exceeds human control, but there do, of course, exist instances of cutting which the human subject can make her own, and of which she can give an account. Drawing attention to the cut is therefore also a way of reintroducing the moment of ethico-political decision into the perceptive flow. As Kember and I have argued in Life after New Media, “The process of cutting is one of the most fundamental and originary processes through which we emerge as ‘selves’ as we engage with matter and attempt to give it (and ourselves) form. Cutting reality into small pieces—with our eyes, our bodily and cognitive apparatus, our language, our memory, and our technologies—we enact separation and relationality as the two dominant aspects of material locatedness in time.”⁹⁸ If vision is indeed nonhuman and if its liberation can be achieved only through displacing it from its humanist anchorings and models, we need a cut to be more than just a technique—one that we encounter not only in photography but also in film making, sculpture, writing, or, indeed, any other technical practice that involves transforming matter: it must also be seen as an ethical imperative (“Cut!”).⁹⁹ Given that perception involves the insertion of edges and lines into the flow of vision, a process that is to a large extent nonconscious and not just human, we may need to introduce reflection to this process and pose the question of whether it is possible to recut the world anew, to a different size and measure, beyond the “god trick” of the straight line and the visual gluttony of the insatiable eye fuck.

Figure 1.7 Joanna Zylinska, from *Active Perceptual Systems*, 2014–2016.

Notes

92. Ibid., 212. Argentinian artist Mariano Sardon’s Morphologies of the Gaze (2012) offers a poetic illustration of this phenomenon. The project consists of a series of video portraits, constructed by the superimposition of lines over images of faces which represent the eye movements of various people looking at those faces. The “200 Gazes Looking around Them” (200 miradas recorriendo sus rostros) series, which is part of this project, “connects information, technology and neuroscience with regard to how we perceive and construct the world. When looking at someone’s face, each person performs a unique sequence of eye movements. In the work, the eye movements of a person looking at a face were drawn over an image of the observed person. The eye movements of each person looking were recorded for a period of time by a special eye-tracking device used in a neuroscience lab. This test was undertaken by 200 people. The image of each face was subsequently reconstructed, mapping all the eye movements of each person looking. The videos produced show how the image of a face is constructed over time by the gaze of 200 people. The image of a face that emerges is therefore a collective construction, made up from gazes of different people.” Web text for the biennale of new media art, Transitio_MX05 Biomediaciones, held in Mexico City, September 20–29, 2013.

1 Nonhuman Vision

The view from where, exactly?

Nonhuman vision as an ethico-political pointer

The liberation of the I/eye