IMAGE FLOW

Abstract

This essay is about the phenomenon of mass, mobile photographic images in a digital, networked context. In response to recent writings that challenge the relevance of the close reading of singular images, it proposes rethinking the opposition between singular images and images en masse through philosophical ideas of multiplicity and, in particular, via the concept of image flow. It examines four connected contexts in which concepts of flow have been used: in discourses surrounding the internet and digital media, where it is used to naturalise these media; in psychology, where ideas of flow underpin descriptions of consciousness and human/animal perception; in robotics and artificial intelligence, where ideas of flow from psychology joined with a move away from dependence on representation to facilitate increasingly autonomous mobile machines; and finally in studies of television, where the on-tap transmission of images has been understood in terms of a flow that articulates or choreographs bodies and attention, connecting the rhythms and temporality of private and public space, cities and suburbs. This model of flow, in particular, allows for analysis that operates across different scales, and undoes oppositions of scale and surface/depth that pervade recent photography theory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Lister, “Is the Camera an Extension,” 267.

2 Lister, The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 8.

3 Rubinstein and Sluis, “Notes on the Margins of Metadata,” 154.

4 Kittler, Essays, 31‒32.

5 Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémy Marie even conclude (in a summarising sentence that doesn’t really do their analysis full justice): “The image, then, is nothing but the moment of network access.” Hoelzl and Marie, Softimage. In other fields, the rejection of close reading is connected to the often uncritical adoption of methods from computer science and the rise of the “digital humanities”. See Hall, “Towards a Post-Digital Humanities” and Herrnstein-Smith, “What Was ‘Close Reading’?”

6 Hoelzl and Marie, “From Softimage to Postimage,” 72.

7 Burgin, “Photography, Phantasy, Function,” 43.

8 Frosh, “Indifferent Looks,” 177.

9 Keller, “Visual Difference.”

10 Frosh, “Indifferent Looks,” 173.

11 The category of “technical images” is itself an ambiguous one, since many image-making processes are hybrids produced through both manual, human gestures and technical instruments or apparatuses. Here I use it to refer to electronic and chemical images, consistent with both Benjamin and Flusser’s distinction between traditional and technical images. See Van Der Meulen, “Between Benjamin and McLuhan,” 188.

12 Rubinstein and Sluis, “Notes on the Margins of Metadata.”

Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 34‒35.

14 Here, “discrete” has a different implication than it has for Lister (at the start of this essay): meaning not only singularity and separateness of the whole image, but the construction of the image out of parts. Stiegler, “The Discrete Image,” 155‒158.

15 Ibid., 151‒154. For Stiegler, the “discrete image” was a digital photograph, an “analogo-digital image-object” that simultaneously undermines and partakes in the illusion of “indivisible singularity”, and continuity between photographed subject and observer, that characterised older photographs.

16 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 30‒44.

17 Rook et al., “Mycobacteria and Other Environmental Organisms.”

18 Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Virilio, The Vision Machine.

19 Deleuze, Cinema I, 89‒94. In the French school of cinema in particular, he finds a “liquid perception”, that is “more than human” (89), and he reads Dziga Vertov’s “cine-eye” not as a prosthetic extension of the human eye, but as “the formation of an image defined by molecular parameters”, something that is taken even further by video (94).

20 Spinoza, “Ethics,” 252‒253.

21 Johnston, “Machinic Vision,” 46‒47.

22 Belting, An Anthropology of Images.

23 See Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things”; Appadurai, The Social Life of Things.

24 Foucault, “Photogenic Painting.”

25 Rubinstein and Sluis, “Notes on the Margins of Metadata,” 153.

26 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 326‒327.

27 Thibault, “Streaming.”

28 Deleuze, Cinema I, 86.

29 James, Principles of Psychology, 239.

30 Csikszentmihalyi, Flow.

31 Nakamura and Czikszentmihalyi, “The Concept of Flow,” 91.

32 Hansen, “From Fixed to Fluid.”

33 Brooks, “Intelligence without Representation,” 141. This was a view he shared with H.P. Moravec at Carnegie Mellon University, who had been developing mobile robots since 1980. Moravec pointed out the difficulty in giving computers the equivalent of a young child’s sensory and motor skills, in contrast with the ease with which they could be made to exhibit adult-level reasoning. See Moravec, “Locomotion, Vision and Intelligence.”

34 Duchon and Warren, “Robot Navigation from a Gibsonian Viewpoint,” 2272.

35 Ibid., 2272.

36 Brooks, “Intelligence without Representation,” 147.

37 Ibid., 149.

38 Johnston, “Machinic Vision.” However, Mark B.N. Hansen argues that there can be no such thing as machinic perception since perception involves affect, and that we need to differentiate “properly human perceptual capacities from the functional processing of information in hybrid human–machine assemblages”. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 100‒102.

39 Gibson, “Visually Controlled Locomotion,” 182.

40 Ibid., 183.

41 Ibid., 184.

42 Ibid., 185.

43 Electromagnetic images are not necessarily digital, nor is computing, but nevertheless the robot has to be able to identify patterns, and it has to translate optical information into locomotive activity.

44 Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 103. I find this notion of humans being “left out of the loop” odd, as if the potential autonomy and indifference of robots is more threatening than their use by the military or by corporations. Similarly, Hoelzl and Marie assert that robot seeing threatens “the obsolescence of human vision”. Nevertheless, insofar as robot vision is still dependent on humans rather than being totally autonomous, the “postimage” is collaborative and distributed “between machines/robots and humans/animals and any intermediary forms”. Hoelzl and Marie, “From Softimage to Postimage,” 72‒73.

45 Morley, “Belongings,” 427.

46 Williams, Television.

47 Wiley and Packer, “Rethinking Communication,” 263‒265.

48 Oswald and Packer, “Flow and Mobile Media.”

49 Ibid., 284, 282.

50 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.”

51 Ward, Augenblick, 131; Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, Bystanders, 157; Frosh, “The Gestural Image.”

52 Lister, “Is the Camera an Extension of the Photographer?,” 267.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle Henning

Michelle Henning is a writer and artist, and is Professor of Photography and Cultural History at the University of West London. She writes on photography, modernism, new media, and museums. Her latest book is Photography: The Unfettered Image (Routledge, 2018).