Imperfect Messengers,It’s February 2025, and I am watching Trevor Paglen through my screen. His face is next to an optical illusion, (the illustration of the duck/rabbit) and he says, “So in photography, this old idea of indexicality, this is kind of gone.” I wince. - I have a friend that would always say, “The cloud is just somebody else’s server.” Meaning, that beyond the marketing for idealized and free information, there's a physical reality to your data, and these systems are intentionally obscured and yet "exceptionally and exquisitely material. ”[1] - Presently, the dilemma at hand seems to be that Art, photography in particular, remains in an unresolved state. Often cited is that Sontag quote : "By taking over the task of realistic picturing hitherto monopolized by painting, photography freed painting for its great modernist vocation– abstraction”. [2] Thus, photography would take over the indexical work of sorting, freeing up painting to now be its true art form. Yet photography, with its foundation in the material world, is paradoxically arrested in place. It can't change in the way that painting changed– it is stuck between two worlds. Algorithmically generated images do little to take on this work. These technologies mathematically determine your most likely input of signifiers into an output. Since it is impossible for a computer to do the labor of knowing, discerning and interpreting– computers can never reliably take over the responsibility of indexing; it can count. To its credit, AI images are born in abstraction, cannot desire anything, and point back to nothing. They are works of telemetry. Without a human observer, these reproductions remain unexamined. In contrast, Jacques Lacan’s theory of condensation happens in the human unconscious. “Verdichtung, "condensation," is the superimposed structure of signifiers in which metaphor finds its field; its name, condensing in itself the word Dichtung, shows the mechanism's connaturality with poetry, to the extent that it envelops poetry's own properly traditional function.” [3} The camera is moving inward and there is a drive to see the self reflected back. Displacement happens constantly and freely through a network of transforming associations, documenting the unconscious. The synthesis of conscious intention and unconscious desire, are now seen through a more discerning public. In this way, photography has been freed to realize what it has been doing all along: manifesting metaphor in the physical world. 1 Trevor Paglen Lecture at the Smithsonian 2 On photography By Susan Sontag 3 The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious - Jacques Lacan
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