Digital Dirt and the Entropic Artifact: Exploring Damage in Visual Media

Abstract

The transition from photochemical to digital imagery presents an exceptional opportunity to re-examine damage and the “entropic artifact” (one that reveals its interactions with time), as well as how technology mediates our visual experiences. This article compares entropic cues in photochemical and digital images and discusses their processes and outcomes. For example, photochemical media gradually decay, while digital media experience glitches that often lead to sudden image destruction. In photochemical media, damage provides intuitively understood cues about the passage of time, value of the artifact, and its handling. As digital media are adopted, decisions about content encoding, how damage is visually represented, and what contextual metadata is stored influence the inevitable process of damage in digital images.

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the valuable suggestions made by participants at Viscom 20, Yvonne Houy, Larry Mullen, and Jery Kilker, whose interest in photography over 50 years ago initiated this project.

Julian Kilker (PhD, Cornell University) is associate professor of emerging technologies at the Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He researches socio-technical interaction, with current projects examining user control and unintended consequences in emerging media and comparative lifecycles in traditional and emerging media. E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.nevada.edu/~kilker

Notes

¹Note the prevalence of “de-” in words associated with damage, from the Latin for “remove.”

²Similar types of predictable decay are useful for researching other media. For example, woodblocks and metal plates used in hand-operated printing presses crack and erode at predictable rates over time, and thus visual characteristics in their prints can be used to estimate the date of printing (Hedges, 2006).

³“Viewing” damage is in fact a multi-sensory experience: The mold on these damaged slides has a distinctive odor and tactile nature that contributes to the visceral reaction. Because these characteristics are replaced by those of the medium used for the reproduction—in this case, the grayscale versions printed on the crisp paper of this journal—the experience is highly modified.

⁴As editor, Morrison intentionally crafted the sequences to suggest these tensions.

⁵New visual cues for digital media will become intuitively understood as people become experienced with each medium. For example, digital images on the web that are overcompressed, have low resolution or excessively manipulated proportions have distinctive visual presentations. In the context of this article's focus on the social construction of damage, these new cues become particularly interesting when typical viewers can recognize and interpret them.

⁶The “exchangeable image file” format (Exif) is the current standard for storing this metadata in digital still cameras, but this standard does not store an extensive history that documents multiple steps in a digital image's lifecycle, in contrast to the history stored in cues available to a professional archivist of traditional media.

⁷Extraordinary measures are available to read and restore damaged digital media. But “to restore” in this sense is to retrieve and copy the data to another medium, such as a new hard drive, and abandon the original medium. These measures are technically complex, expensive, and their success depends on the specific circumstances of the damage.

⁸Examples of this audio genre are available in three volumes of the “Clicks and Cuts” CD series.