Thoughts on Making
Pictures of the Screen
Table of
Contents
Part I.
Why the “Screenshot”? Why Not Something Else?
An Introduction
Part II.
The Proliferation of the Pseudo-Synonym
Part III.
Media Metaphor / Media Equivocation / Media Materiality
Part IV.
Aconclusivity: Endings / Questions / Conclusions
Illustrations
All
screenshots in this thesis were made by me in an attempt to give form to some
general ideas: making and writing inflect and inform each other. Making is a
form of knowledge production; writing is a form of making. Producing certain
kinds of screenshots became a way of affecting potential so that some writing
could eventually be draped upon it. But just as often a turn of phrase created
the possibility for a picture. In this way, practice sometimes preceded
language and other times it followed. The two nourished each other. Although
our world is shaped in part by the semiotic, it does not flow exclusively from
this zone; there is and always has been such a thing as visual and experiential
knowledge. We have brains in our hands, our eyes, in our feet and toes; and we use
them all the time.
Abstract
The
screenshot is unexamined in current critical scholarship, despite appearing in
visual culture with more frequency and purpose. And while the screenshot has
inherited many behavioral quirks from photography, it also comes with unique
material and conceptual circumstances and issues. As a result, this text and
series of pictures draws on a multiplicity of theories and concepts, including:
software and photography studies, interface and media theory, ideas on embodiment
and user agency, as well as a personal investigation into the screenshot’s
creative potential. Essentially, this thesis unwinds a string of speculative
models meant to initiate theorization of a new creative practice, without
claiming any one model as the conclusive approach.
Part I.
Why the “Screenshot”? Why Not
Something Else?
An Introduction
…The
Terminological Scene of Interaction…
Whatever it means to make a picture of the screen,
it goes by many names, a fact that cannot be ignored. “Screen grab,” “screen
capture,” and “screenshot” are some of the expressions currently in
circulation.[1]
And although all these terms designate a similar action, to make a picture of
the screen, they also express something else—differences. As footholds, such differences emerge from between the
material realities these various terms suggest
and the concepts they enliven. Whatever it means to make a picture of the
screen requires feeling out these footholds, often moving laterally as much as
any other direction. The motion of this writing has little to do with
ascension. Terms cannot be substituted, not without an acknowledgment of the slippages
that make substitution possible, but never seamless. Additionally, just as
allowing these different expressions to be substituted uncritically will not
suffice, neither will eliminating less photographic terminology for the sake of
making straightforward and easy associations between screenshots and snapshots,
between pictures of the screen and photographs in general. A refusal is
required.
Terms such as “print screen” and
“screen dump,” although no longer commonly used, are nevertheless included by
Wikipedia in the cluster of pseudo-synonyms that define what it is to make a
picture of the screen.[2]
Consequently, these faintly anachronistic terms are important to understanding
the screenshot. The fact that a phrase or expression is irrelevant is only
interesting as far as what its irrelevance might illuminate. Thinking and
writing about what it means to make a picture of the screen means thinking and
writing about how making a picture of the screen is communicated, as well as
how it has ceased to be communicated. Such endangered expressions—“print
screen,” and “screen dump”—endure into the present as linguistic fossils giving
form to passed and passing realities. Literary scholar Terry Eagleton writes, “[b]y
having to grapple with language in a more strenuous way than usual, the world
which that language contains is vividly renewed.”[3]
This is not to say that language contains “the world,” but only that language
contains “a world,” one of its own. Simply relaying through the logic of an
argument with “screenshot” as its singular linguistic starting point would
bracket out too much. Something messy like a “grapple” is needed, a useful description
for how this text came to exist and what philosophic character it embraces.
One way of keeping certain
associations open, of encouraging a “grapple,” is to refrain from asking why a
particular event happened and instead ask why the alternatives did not.[4]
Although, instead of seeking to substantiate a single explanation by revealing
the absurdity of competing alternatives, a more open approach would be to treat
these various alternatives as fundamental to the explanation, as substantive.
Such a method requires the ability, from time to time, to look away from the
primary “object of study,” or to put it in language that refutes the hermetic object,
the “practice of study.” What is required is the ability to be peripheral, to allow
certain phenomena to float freely without letting anything slip completely away.
By leading an inquiry into the screenshot’s pseudo-synonyms, expressions that describe
making a picture of the screen but also mean something else, certain questions
and vantage points are protected from abrupt dismissal. Why are these other
phrases not taken up? Why not “From Snapshot to Screen Grab” or “From Snapshot
to Screen Capture?”
Examining the act of making a picture of the screen
and the resulting pictures must include an analysis of the moving parts of a
terminological scene of interaction as well as the concepts and material
realities that would populate such a scene. Conceptually, it would be an error
to disregard these epistemological shifts and overlaps as simply the unruly
affairs of language, to substitute terms uncritically, to conveniently ignore certain
terms altogether. After all, it is not a given that the best way to understand
making pictures of the screen is through a strict comparison to photography
alone; it is not a given that this examination should proceed listlessly from photography
to picture of the screen—despite the title of the text. The potential and uncertainty
that these other terms bring to the inquiry is integral to the ontology of the picture
of the screen.
…Technological
Embodiment…
While keeping in mind the importance of renewing
the world through an investment in language, it is an overestimation to imagine
that language explains or structures all orders of being absolutely and along
the same axis. Literature and science theorist N. Katherine Hayles admonishes
against this type of reduction of the human subject. “One belief from the
present,” Hayles writes, “likely to stupefy future generations is the
postmodern orthodoxy that the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic
and discursive construction.”[5]
In “The Materiality of Informatics,” Hayles argues that material and contextual
experiences, what she refers to as “embodiment,” are as significant to humans
and human practices as language and discursivity.[6]
Embodiment, Hayles notes, is “enwebbed within the specifics of place,
time, physiology and culture.” The
body unstructured as a raw element, in this sense, signals the total potentiality
of the undetermined, while the discursive signals a totally regulating pressure.
Embodiment resides between these poles, providing a realistic environment where
a somewhat unexamined but visible agency exists, an agency that is linked to
the humble fact of being. Hayles gives the example of postures, which are “generalizable
to some extent” but nevertheless “depend upon the specifics of the embodied
individual.”[7]
Such a proliferation of
unpredictability, emerging through the specificity of embodied life, challenges
power as a unilateral and unidirectional force that constitutes and normalizes
whatever it comes into contact with, without diminishing how the social and
cultural configure an agent’s ability to act. Embodiment as a creative and
heterogeneous energy certainly hints at the gesture and experience of the “user”—a
concept that has special significance in relation to computing.
In
regard to human machine interaction, design historian John Harwood writes,“[t]he computer, like a corporation, is a form of
discourse every bit as much as it is a machine or a commodity and as such has
profound implications for the self-image of the human being who uses it.”[8]
Exactly how profound these implications are is what is at stake. As a
technological act, making a picture of the screen does indeed define a
range of human motions and thoughts—what computing affords. But the act of making
pictures is more than any specific technological device; it is ultimately a
human endeavor, a user’s endeavor. Thus, theories
and descriptions of technology that do not account for embodiment abstract away
how assessments of and interactions with technology transform technology
according to desire. This is not to suggest, as software theorist Matthew
Fuller warns, that models of user subjectivity and agency should “stray
anywhere near the singalong themetune of 'empowerment',”[9]
but only to allow for the type of user agency that embodiment affords,
something everyday yet animated. Certainly empowerment can be conceptualized as
less than an anthemic “themetune,” and more like the humming of an amorphous
melody, something personal and less self-congratulatory, something improvised
as it goes along.
Any examination of the screenshot as a cultural
practice cannot emerge from a totally abstract linguistic or technical
position. Inquiries into the ways and reasons that human agents use technology
are required—both in accordance with the purposes a technology claims for
itself and against such purposes. If certain technologies can be considered
intertwined with the body, as opposed to phenomena independent of the body,
then theories of embodiment have a particular value. Whatever it is about the
body that cannot be finitely constructed through discourse extends to the
practices that a body engages in, including practices that intersect
technology. This is particularly true if technology is not defined as strictly mechanical
but as anything that extends an agent’s already present capacity.[10]
Embodiment situates technologies within the same contextual matrix as the agents
that use them; it subjects technology to coevolution.
How have the reasons for making pictures of the
screen changed as computing has exited the insular world of the engineer or programmer
and entered the larger matrix of consumer culture, as the computer has been
made to interact with more and more bodies? To engage such a question is to
engage the screen itself, what it depicts and what these depictions mean. Sociologist and technology historian Thierry Bardini surmises,
“[t]he personal computer became ‘personal’ the moment when it came
into the hand’s reach, via a prosthesis that the user could forget as soon as
it was there.”[11]
The “prosthesis” that Bardini refers to is the graphical user interface (GUI), the
field of graphics that constitutes a user’s relationship to modern computing. Certainly
the GUI has put the computer into many diverse hands, but the proliferation of
pictures of the screen proves the interface has not been easily forgotten. In
fact, as a site of human interaction and user design the interface is quite the
photogenic subject.
…The
Shared Creation of Meaning…
However discursive power may be proportioned in
relation to embodiment, the structuring force of language remains key. Of particular
interest is how language gains traction in the cultural field, a circumstance
that provides clues into how non language-based phenomena function without
necessarily submitting them to the logic of signification and the sign. Linguist
Nick Crossley describes a philosophy of knowledge creation that supersedes the
individual and turns to the social. “[L]inguistic meanings are strictly
irreducible to individual consciousnesses,” Crossley writes, “They are[…]dependent
upon social and intersubjective relationships and conventions,” and are
“therefore necessarily shared.”[12]
As true as this assessment of linguistic meaning is, it is also true that other cultural practices and artifacts, which may not
necessarily be based in language, can also be understood as gaining meaning
through socially construed, intersubjective relationships.
Continuing with the logic of a shared creation of
meaning and the relationship between the individual and the sociocultural,
Jürgen Habermas suggests a bi-lateral explanation of dialogic interaction
“where individuals are conceived as both the initiators and products of the
cultural debates that surround them.”[13]
Similar to a feedback loop, culture is not simply a one-way transmission emitted
from the agent to the world, but is also an internalization that is expressed by
putting more cultural chains of action into motion. Thus, the individual, both
“initiator of” and “initiated by” culture, is not strictly at the mercy of
pre-existing and pre-approved models of being, but affected by them all the
same.
As a result, the screenshot, like other
cultural forms, develops in the social field where it is both shaped by and
shapes its user, where the development
of user knowledge about making pictures of the screen is set into motion in
relation to already internalized ways of deploying and understanding picture
making techniques in general, techniques which are motivated but not totally
determined by culture. Although no practice exists unframed by previous
iterations and the meanings those iterations have imparted, new picturing
technologies and attitudes are not totally defined by the past or by collective
cultural concerns. There is the unpredictability of embodied users to act, not
as entirely radical factors, but as factors that can in some way update the cultural
debates that surround them through unpredictable initiatives of their own.
…The
Black Box and The Circuit Box…
The question remains. Why the screenshot? Why not
something else? The brief and apparent answer is that the screenshot appears to
be linguistically set up to directly relate to photography. There is a very
strong connection between the terms “snapshot” and “screenshot,”
a bridge that is strengthened on the back of the “shot.” Naturally, thinking is
pushed down a specific and photographically inflected path. But do the snapshot
and screenshot share more? Moving through linguistic similarity, there are
intermingling phenomenal and material parallels as well, parallels derived from
related technological characteristics—although of an abstract nature. There is
a certain amount of shared mechanical or apparatus-based automation for
example. Media theorist Villém Flusser would call a photograph and a screenshot
a “technical image,”[14]
as they both come about through the prompting of a machine that can “make
elements such as photons or electrons, on one hand, and bits of information, on
the other hand, into images.”[15]
Depending on the importance given to the level of interaction
(or lack thereof) such prompting requires, the categorical distinctions between
film-based and software-based picturing becomes less self-evident. The
screenshot like the instantly realized photograph, whether digital or analog, offers
very little control over the apparatus making the picture. In more complicated
picture-making applications and processes option upon option are available for
the purpose of intervening into the picturing act, options that require an investment
on the part of a user. When an apparatus does not require much investment, automaticity
becomes its distinguishing quality.[16]
Such logic challenges the idea that an increased ability to make technical pictures
correlates to an age of photographic literacy. When Flusser states, “The camera
is a structurally complex, but functionally simple, plaything,” and “anyone who
holds a camera in their hands can create excellent photographs without having
any idea what complex processes they are setting off,”[17]
he is critiquing the ease with which automatic and vernacular photography have
been linked to a democratization of knowledge production. In other words,
making a relentless stream of photographs may not equate understanding what is
at stake or what is philosophically and technically happening in the picture
making process.
Whatever is confounding about photography and the
interior working of the camera persists despite widespread use. Undoubtedly one
way that the screenshot is similar to the snapshot is the ease with which they
both make pictures, and thus, in the obfuscation of the technological and
philosophical processes that are set in motion with the push of a button, or in
the case of the screenshot with the sequential push of several buttons—command+shift+3.
If the two correlate, making pictures and comprehension, then the effortlessness
with which users can make pictures of the screen would suggest an age of
widespread computer criticality and literacy, or at least an age of interface
criticality and literacy, which is doubtfully the case. Whether it takes place in
a black box or the circuit box, photography continues to elude any totalized
comprehension. The user continues to wonder if it is her point-of-view that the
camera is subjected to or the other way around.
…The
Bustle of Innumerable Electrons…
Another
correlation between making a photograph and making a picture of the screen is
the frame, which refers to more than an agent’s power to select or prefer one
view to another. Framing gives shape to reality by defining the world through
limitation. Although this act of world defining furnishes much-needed agency to
the user of automated picturing processes, it is not simply about what falls
within the frame or an agent’s ability to bracket. Also imbricated is all that
remains outside, what is beyond the frame. Both the screenshot and the photograph
are defined by what they set apart as well as what they leave out, or better
yet, what they are unable to set apart. Gilles Deleuze conceptualizes the space
outside the picture as the “out-of-field,” a zone that “designates that which
exists elsewhere, to one side or around.”[18]
For Deleuze what is inside the frame is ordered and made coherent through the
act of differentiation, a structuring of the world to human scale, while the
“out-of-field” is set up to be a “disturbing presence” and a “radical
Elsewhere.”[19] Whatever
remains outside the frame, which as it turns out is quite a lot, eludes the human
register, and can only serve to conjure the apprehension of an ongoing,
expansive cosmic openness that is totally indifferent to human concerns. It is
something on the other side of the concept of nature.
Although Deleuze’s idea refers specifically to the
cinematic frame, unquestionably a similar circumstance is in place regarding
all forms of photography, whether they are digital, slow, snap, of the screen,
or of the world beyond the screen. Is it such a leap to imagine that framing
and making pictures of the screen serves to differentiate specific moments of
computing in an attempt to comprehend the expansive, unrelenting experience and
potential of ongoing computing? And if this is indeed the case, what can be
said about all that is left “to one side or around” the frame of the screenshot,
that which exists as computing in an undifferentiated and unending state of
potential, all that is unframable? Furthermore, if Deleuze suggests an anxiety
exists towards the indifference of cosmic openness, a result of it being in
excess of the frame and therefore beyond human coherence, can the concept be
pushed further into the abstract, can the circuit also be thought of as an
atomic and subatomic frame? If in fact it can, then what escapes the screenshot
is not simply a matter of the unframable, overgrowth of connectivity and
potential of ongoing computing, but something comparable to the utter openness
of the cosmic. The frame of the circuit intersects the microcosmic not the
macrocosmic, it intersects that all-over bustle of electrons, innumerable and
unknowable, some bracketed and differentiated through circuitry, but so much
more beyond.
…Interwoven
Ontologies…
While there are digital characteristics that are
clearly distinct from analog characteristics, just how far apart these
distinctions push analog and digital photography is arguable. In regard to the difference
between the digital and the analog two logics have been repeated to the extent
that they appear to conclude any debate. On the one hand there is the
difference between digital and analog manipulation, with the digital supposedly
operating on a much more malleable level than the analog. This can be referred
to as a difference in the range of manipulation, with the analog characterized
as stiff and the digital characterized as limber. On the other hand there is the
difference between the digital’s discrete unit (either one or zero) verses the
analog’s haptic gradation, the discrete being hermetic and definable, while the
gradient is limitless in its material nuance.
Under these criteria a more or less clear
distinction has been created with digital to one side and analog to the other.
Nevertheless, approaching the materiality of the digital and the analog from
other criteria as they relate to the “practice” of photography may yield a more
porous distinction. The very term “digital photography” suggests that despite
the clear conceptual partition between digital and analog productions and techniques,
certain forms of digital picture making continue to be photography despite
radical innovations in applied technology. Simultaneously there are digital pictures
that fall outside the cultural understanding of photography, referred to coldly
as data visualizations. And despite being constructed through roughly the same
technical processes as digital photography there is no belief that such
pictures are like photographs. That some digital pictures are photography and
some are something else is a distinction having little to do with the
differences between analog and digital production. Such a distinction is more
or less joined to user knowledge and cultural practice. This is not to say that
what was once more closely related to data visualization cannot be transformed
along human concerns into something more like photography.[20]
This is also not to say that the photographic apparatus cannot be used to make
something other than photography.[21]
In fact, photography is not contingent on particular techniques or
technologies, but rather it is technologies and techniques that become
contingent on photography in order to exists as certain types of picture making
practices, a fact that further complicates any easy division between film and
image-sensor production, and ultimately between making a camera-based
photograph and a software-based screenshot.
However, inflexible consideration of the photograph
and the screenshot as too analogous, as the outcomes of too similar an ontology,
discards the specificity of software, what software means, and the material and
social effects and affects of computing. The screenshot eliminates certain phenomenon
associated with both analog and digital photography. The screenshot eliminates
the need for the camera, the need to develop film, to make prints, and to place
prints on a scanner. But it also eliminates the need to connect devices and to
transfer or upload files. The screenshot eliminates the need to focus, to look
through a viewfinder, and thus appears to eliminate the point-of-view. The
screenshot manufactures an image for and from the screen, and as a result
appears to have little left in common with photography whether digital or
analog.
Nevertheless, forcing too wide a gap between camera-based
and software-based picture making leaves the significance of the latter
dangerously unfettered, as if new technologies and their meanings are strictly
conjured at the moment of their creation, as if users and innovations do not
engage previous knowledge and biases when creating and deploying new
technologies. In essence, the only way to understand what a screenshot is
demands wandering across a series of language-based, practice-based, and
technology-based similarities and dissimilarities with other picture making media,
being careful not to let either similitude or dissimilitude tip the scale. What
is required is a peripatetic ontology of the interwoven. Because the screenshot
is a simple and ubiquitous computing action it is a good object and practice to
think through the ways that photography persists as a recognizable form in the
face of radical technological innovation, particularly as photography moves
beyond simply incorporating software into its morphology and begins to emerge
from software itself.
…Computing
as Representation…
Photography theorist Geoffrey Batchen, in Burning with Desire: the Conception of
Photography, suggests that photography has no stationary identity to
investigate, that the practices and pictures that constitute photography amount
to a “flickering across a field of institutional spaces.”[22]
If photographic identity flickers across institutional spaces, it must also
flicker across those agents that establish, upkeep, and participate in such
spaces. Although care should be taken not to lump cultural agents uncritically
into homogeneous groups, agents that find themselves under the roof of one
institution or another do indeed have some stake in each other, in their commonalities
and vested interests. Literary theorist Michael Warner suggests that socially
related groups “share reference points, career trajectories, and subclass
interests. They share protocols of discourse.”[23] The computer is such a discourse. A public
manifests through identifying or being identified on a spectrum across a series
of classifications, meaning there is no single public, but rather a series of
interlocking publics with more or less in common. This is certainly true for
those publics that are established through relative proximity to or distance
from emerging technology, a fact that influences the very shape of technology
and what activities technologies are put towards. Software theorist Ron Eglash notes
that computing power is expended most strenuously when wealth is at stake.
Referring to a group of graduate students using computers to design a
competition yacht, Eglash writes, “I was struck by the way in which computing
power and financial power had managed to stick together, even in this
ostensibly nonprofessional exception.”[24]
There is no such thing as power, either
computational or financial, without a relationship between agents, those that
are subject to or enact power’s expressions. In conflict theory, “[d]ominant
and subordinate groups battle over norms and resources, with dominant groups
seeking to engineer consent through producing representational systems.”[25]
Although the ability to put computers to particular uses may not be easily
defined under the category of a “representational system,” access to technology
does indeed participate in the battle over resources. Entrée via the comprehension
of certain hardware and software regimes tends to demarcate one class of person
from another, which clearly compounds socio-economic standing. Furthermore, computing
has a distinct visibility, which is not only a result of advertisement or
representation in the most literal sense, but is also a result of how
portability has made computing a pervasive cultural image. Such an image,
everyday computing in any place whatsoever, clearly stands for economic
advantage. The fact that access to computers still resides in the realm of the
real suggests that the screenshot and the technological amalgamations required
to make a screenshot are tethered indelibly to the body, and therefore to all
the ways that different bodies are limited or enabled as principal interpreters
and formatters of the screen.
In a digital world were “all well-fed people are
expected to take pictures in the same way everyone is expected to speak,”[26]
the screenshot, as a particular type of digital picture, is necessarily linked
to the resources and infrastructure that must accompany computing power. Among
other things, the screenshot expresses the agency of a user constituted by
access and privilege in general, which manifests as prolonged uninterrupted
interaction with certain software and interface regimes. Thus, at least part of
what defines a screenshot is directly related to the opening of a particular
gap within various cultural, national, geographic, and ethnographic communities—a
gap between the technological haves and have-nots.
In March 2012, during the much celebrated, annually
held South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Austin, Texas, a program was
initiated by the global marketing agency BBH, which turned homeless people into
Internet hot-spots. Festivalgoers could pay participants for a password and
instantly connect to wireless networks set up throughout the city.[27]
Although criticizing such a program, part publicity stunt and part charity, is
a knotty prospect, David Gallagher of the New
York Times points out the unseemly side to this scheme that masquerades as altruism.
“When the infrastructure fails us…we turn human beings into infrastructure.”[28]
No longer just the stuff of science
fiction, a program such as homeless hot-spots indicates a shift from value surplus
to network surplus, not created through labor, but through the base existence
of human bodies with nothing to do and nowhere to be, passive bodies that can
be easily channeled into network amalgamations. As it turns out, being a node
in a system does not guarantee access to that system. Keeping such social
manifestations of computing in mind—who is connected to what and how—it is glib
to proceed with the under-examined assumption that computing is innately and
universally a solution to whatever ails a community or that computing is a
neutral act unaffected by the kinds of social, political, and financial
privilege it necessarily represents, both conceptually and visually.
...Animated
Objects within a Genealogy of the Incomplete…
In a last set of instructional sentences, this text
is about the screenshot, even while it rambles. If this writing resembles
anything like a genealogy, it is a genealogy of the incomplete, made of both
so-called productive and unproductive paths—a genealogy of backtracking and
no-outlets. Mieke Bal writes, “objects are active participants in the
performance of analysis.”[29]
That this particular analysis favors the concept of a “practice of study” over
an “object of study” only further complicates what the thing being studied
brings to its being studied. As such, if a “practice of study” participates in
its own analysis, there is no guarantee that this is a helpful or even benign
act. Perhaps its participation is antagonistic and impossible to satisfy.
Regardless, to perform analysis, as opposed to conduct analysis, gives analysis
flexibility, opening it up to ideas of play and gesture. Such an attitude
ensures a place from which to proceed, not necessarily bound by the received knowledge
of logical order or cause-and-effect, but open to notions of stimulus and
response in which characters bring energy to their interactions.[30]
[1] The OED entry for screen grab provides this 2010 usage, “S. S. Ko & S. Rossen Teaching Online (ed. 3) ix. 255 ‘Print screen’ keys can
provide capture of an entire page, but
when you only want the menu on the left hand side of the screen, you need to
use screen grab software.” The
italics are mine. This example is meant to illustrate how similarly common
usage treats the terms screen capture
and screen grab. In addition, the
description of Snagit, an overblown screenshot application, also reveals how
loosely this language is handled in the world.
What follows are a few excerpts from the Tech Smith webpage dedicated to
Snagit: “grab your entire desktop,”
“take the time to set up what you capture,”
and “never misspell a word in your screenshot
again.” The italics are mine to stress the uncritical substitutions of
terminology. See: http://www.techsmith.com/snagit.html
for more.
[2] Wikipedia. “Screenshot.” Last
modified 5 December 2012. http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html.
[3] Terry Eagleton, Literary
Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983),
3.
[4] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an
Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and
Epistemology (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1972), 399. In this
book Bateson puts forth the idea of a cybernetic explanation. “We consider what
alternative possibilities could conceivably have occurred and then ask why many
of the alternatives were not followed, so that the particular event was one of
those few which could, in fact, occur.” I am not deploying Bateson’s concept so
much as I am hi-jacking it and forcing it to deviate from its predetermined
path in order to land in some unknown territory.
[5] Katherine N. Hayles, "The
Materiality of Informatics," Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 147. http://muse.jhu.edu/.
[6] Ibid., 155.
[7] Ibid., 158.
[8] John Harwood, The
Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 62.
[9] Matthew Fuller, Behind the
Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia,
2003), 2.
[10] In his chapter on apparatuses, Flusser refers to
the pick as an extension of the toe. See: Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000), 23.
[11] Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping:
Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 53.
[12] Nick Crossley, Intersubjectivity:
The Fabric of Social Becoming (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 8.
In this
quote Crossley is specifically referring to Heidegger’s turn away from
Husserlian phenomenology, which also marks a turn towards the linguistic as
well as the social.
[13] Christopher Crouch, “Afterword,”
in Visual Literacy, ed. James
Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 200. Crouch is referring to
Habermas’s concept of communicative action, what Crouch calls a “reflexive
dialectic.”
[14] Vilém Flusser, Into the
Universe of Technical Images (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2011), 16.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Vilém Flusser, Towards
a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000), 73. Flusser is
something of a technological determinist, which I take issue with.
Nevertheless, his description of the impact of the automatic apparatus is very
important to understanding what it is that the embodied agent is up against. It
heads off easy utopic definitions of users as the empowered centers of
manipulation. Referring to the power of the automatic apparatus, Flusser
writes, “This is the intention with which they [automatic devices] were
created: that the human being would be ruled out.”
[17] Ibid., 57-58. The issues of automaticity lead
Flusser to have a pessimistic outlook on the idea of vernacular photography
that I find both intriguing and somewhat against the grain of cultural studies,
which generally hopes to look at culture without judgment, whether it is high
or low, vernacular or professional.
[18] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: the
Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
17.
[19] Ibid.
[20] A clear example of this drift can be found in the
technology used to perform ultrasounds. What was once a more or less abstracted
depiction has been transformed using 3-D imaging into a picture making
technique that borders on portraiture.
[21] Certainly an artist like Sherri Levine, who is
known for making photographs of other photographs, challenges viewers to not
only denounce the artistry of her work but also its basic standing as
photography. Thus even pictures made with a camera can be construed as
something that is not-quite photography.
[22] John Tagg, quoted in Geoffrey
Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997), 5.
[23] Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics
(New York: Zone Books, 2002), 148. Although Warner is specifically
referring to reading publics the basic concept is true for any public,
especially as discourse (textuality) is easily expanded to Discourse (picture,
object, sound, attitudes, organization of space). In other words, the same way
that the shared creation of linguistic meaning is expandable to cultural
objects such as pictures, the formations of reading publics and counterpublics
is expandable to publics that rally
around criteria aside from texts.
[24] Ron Eglash, “Computing Power,” in
Software Studies: A Lexicon,
ed. Matthew Fuller, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), 62.
[25] Janet Staiger, Media Reception Studies (New York: New York University Press,
2005), 6–7.
[26] Graham Harwood, “Pixel,” in Software
Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew
Fuller (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), 213.
[27] “South
By Southwest: 'Homeless Hotspot' Stunt Stirs Debate At SXSW,” Huffington Post, March 13, 2012,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/13/sxsw-homeless-hotspots_n_1342972.html.
[28] David. F Gallagher, “NYTSXSW,” March 11, 2012, http://nytsxsw.tumblr.com/post/19145988299/getting-a-decent-data-connection-at-sxsw-can-be-a
[29] Mieke Bal, "Visual Essentialism and the
Object of Visual Culture," Journal
of Visual Culture 2, no. 1 (2003): 24. vcu.sagepub.com.
[30] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an
Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and
Epistemology (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1972), 403.
Within
the chapter on the cybernetic explanation, which I referred to at the beginning
of this text, Bateson suggests that “[i]n general in communicational systems,
we deal with sequences which resemble stimulus-and-response rather than
cause-and-effect.” Here Bateson applies a concept normally reserved for the way
the physical world interacts through energies that objects have and house to
the metaphysical world, so that objects have conceptual (communicative)
energies as well.
Part II.
The Proliferation of the Pseudo-Synonym
…Print
Screen…
Although not all current digital devices manifest the
desire for an increase in what can be open, available, and shown concurrently
on a single screen, the look of the personal computer (if indeed computers can
be said to be personal) nevertheless remains ubiquitous.[1]
Whatever recent transformations the computer interface has undergone, such as
track-pad commands and touch displays, the “windowed style of the graphical
user interface,” in which, “different programs, representing different media, can appear in each window,”[2]
still dominates the screen. Interface innovation is driven by the need to
minimize the effort required to toggle between ever-growing proliferations of
computer applications, each with the potential for multiple open windows.[3]
This is especially true as computer screen real estate continues to increase making
more space for more and more windows to be open simultaneously.[4]
But even as the screen has shrunk to fit into the palm of the hand, this need
endures: to flip, to switch, and to leap unfettered across operations and applications.
More requires navigation while the interface appears to interfere less. This
fact persists regardless of screen size—especially as users come to expect all
screens to deliver a similar kinesthetic and interactive experience.
Given the increasing and ongoing
complexity of interaction the windowed computer screen affords, it is clear
that the command “print screen” recalls “usage patterns from the 70’s, when
personal computers were strictly single-task machines.”[5]
Such a singular command—print the entire screen exactly as it appears—reflects
a conceptualization of the screen as an indivisible mass. Although certain
functions have allowed users the option to make a picture of either the entire
screen or a single window, both the screen and its user has far outgrown this
function. The ongoing and polyvisual field of the screen exceeds the choice
between “whole screen” and “active window.” The contemporary screen requires
the ability to copy and make pictures of any place on the screen whatsoever, to
address the scatter and overlap of windows, icons, toolbars and menus, all
vying for attention, while self-arranging or being arranged into innumerable
compositions. The space between the window defines what a screenshot is as much
as the window itself. Advanced screenshot software addresses this fact by
beginning with the creation of a frame, albeit an unfixed and reconfigurable
frame that can be positioned on the screen in any place whatsoever.
Putting aside such concerns, the command “print
screen,” nevertheless plays an important conceptual role in understanding the
picture of the screen, specifically as it relates to printing logics that
express the requirements of the industrial and information age. Management
historian JoAnne Yates, in Control
Through Communication, argues that the rise of modern systematic forms of
management, which served large-scale manufacturing and industry, necessitated
particular advancements in communication methods. The need to circulate and
retain copies of memos, contracts, policies, and other managerial records drove
the innovation and proliferation of specific low-involvement printing
processes, such as the carbon copy, the cyanotype, the electrostatic copy, and
eventually the ink-jet printer. In fact, these intricate management systems
“were established, operated, evaluated, and adjusted—that is to say managed, or
controlled—all on the basis of flows of information and orders.”[6]
Printing logics based on dispersing information cheaply and easily were more than
simply adjunct to management systems; they were constitutive. Clearly the
motivations of a bureaucratic management system differ from those that shaped
photography. The command “print screen” is undoubtedly affiliated with these
administrative printing logics, which are also camera-less and lean more
towards duplicating contracts, invoices, memos, and timelines than printing
photographs.
And although office-based copies are not photographs, they are imbricated with photography. In “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush’s prophetic essay of 1945, a speculative information storage and retrieval device is described—something similar to a futuristic microfiche machine. Although the Memex, as Bush calls it, fails to manifest the importance of content manipulation, it predicts a system of linked texts and how such a system might structure access to evermore-widespread “flows of information.”[7] As a precursor to the hypertextuality of computing, the Memex hinges on a very specific form of photography, “in which the picture is finished as soon as it is taken.”[8] What is significant to this analysis is the way that a dry method of photography, a distinct bureaucratic category of picture making, emerges from photography in general.[9] And given that dry photography, or xeroxography as it eventually came to be referred, is a such large part of Bush’s prognostic thought experiment, it is not surprising that the Xerox corporation, “a kind of cultural symbol of the modern culture of copy,”[10] ultimately played a sizeable role in the formation of the contemporary personal computer, not only through the introduction of a series of interface innovations that revolutionized the computer’s usability, including the window metaphor, but in relation to bureaucratized forms of printing and information management.
…Screen
Dump…
The term “screen dump” conjures notions of dumping
data, the duplicating and transferring of information from one device to
another; it also makes associations between data and the contents of the
screen. Because data is generally regarded as transparent, an unmediated stand-in
for the object itself, data appears detached from issues of cultural
interpretation. And although data presents itself as a fact, Gregory Bateson’s
suggestive remarks about data are worth consideration; “‘data are not events or
objects but always records or descriptions or memories of events or objects.”[11]
Such an attitude suggests data, as a description, has a relationship to the
more or less conflicted world of the representational. Thinking through
Bateson’s definition of data, the screenshot as a picture making technique that
intersects data so decisively cannot simply be thought of as an objective
presentation of computing. If there is some relationship between photography,
data, and the screenshot, the cultural thorniness of “representation” cannot be
totally put aside in favor of the disproportionately smooth surface of
“presentation.”
Furthermore,
because computational data is so massive in scale and arching in breadth, a
fact that makes it generally incomprehensible, it is data visualization’s job to
organize these unintelligible fields of information according to “a level of
human sensibility.”[12]
While screenshots do depict visualized data via graphical interfaces—the drop
down menus, text fields, and bouncing icons that act to leverage computing
power along a human scale—they are also more. Screenshots offer a way to mine
and excavate certain pictures from an array of visualized data, to select what visualization
is of interest to an embodied agent along a secondary axis—reflexivity. As a
result, data visualizations and screenshots are inextricably linked, but
certainly not interchangeable. If data visualization remakes data to human
scale through the “mapping of digital data onto a visual image,” [13]
the screenshot remakes data visualization to human scale by restructuring the
screen as a picture, by affording an embodied intervention into the screen, an
act that is based on cultural concepts like staging and framing.
André Malraux referring to the conceptual effects
of the rise of the museum writes, “[w]e forget they [museums] have imposed on
the spectator a wholly new attitude towards the work of art. For they have
tended to estrange the works they bring together from their original functions
and to transform even portraits into ‘pictures.’”[14]
For Malraux this transformation is a loss. But the fact is, whatever contextual
stability of meaning the portrait surrenders as a result of its estrangement
what is gained is vital to understanding how a portrait—a representation—exerts
power. What is gained is a drive towards reflexivity and an interest in how a representation
creates effects. And although there is no place where various screenshots exist
like the unified social space of the museum, screenshots are nevertheless estrangements
that are decontextualized or pulled from their circumstance on the one hand and
brought together again on the other. In other words, the screenshot reconstitutes
computing by tear[15]ing
it apart, and by putting it back together, which imposes on the viewer and the
screenshot maker wholly new attitudes towards the graphics on the screen and
wholly new attitudes towards their interactions with these graphics, not to
mention what is set into motion by interacting with these graphics. Such a
reorganizing, which allows for arranging, rearranging, collecting, and
re-contextualizing accentuates and exposes new knowledge about computing and
new user relationships toward the computing interface.
The blog “Screenshots of Despair,” for example,
acts as site where users post screenshots that express a sense of contemporary
alienation that in many ways contradicts the utopic “themetune”[16]
of network connectivity as it has come to be erroneously, or at least
simplistically, equated with human connectivity. The organizing principle
behind Screenshots of Despair is hopelessness as it has come to be reflected in
the act of computing—images deleted, access denied, empty folders. As the
homepage suggests, “Screenshots of Despair” is “as much about the gap between
people and machines as it is about isolation.”[17]
But more than being about the disconnect between human and machine or between
human and human, the blog is also about the recognition of the human condition
within the act of computing and the need to isolate that moment from computing,
to tear it from the whole of the screen, to make it into a picture and reinsert
it into the network under the new human scale context of “despair.”
As a result, perceiving these moments of despair
exceeds the simple act of recognition and becomes an act of production through
the performance of observation. When observers observe, they change the very
things they observe; they suggest outcomes through their mere presence.[18]
The screenshot, via the phenomena of observation, guides the eye away from what
it needs to see to service computing in order to observe computing itself. Such
observations increase the likelihood that a computing activity or moment of
computing will be worth differentiating, and even encourages the manipulation
of computing in order to produce certain types of pictures—staging. As making
screenshots becomes a routine part of a user’s computer activity, computing
stops being “simply computing” and reflects a new attitude. The interface
becomes a stage that the user performs within and upon. A picture is snapped as
documentation of some performance. But because transparent or objective
documentation does not exist the screenshot does not simply follow the
performance, rather it precedes the performance as the potential of a formal
outcome and therefore affects the very shape a performative computing act might
take. Having seen others stage the interface along an index of “despair,” users
find it easier and easier to recognize or stage these moments themselves. The
result is a proliferation of screenshots and the creation of new reflexive knowledge
about what computing is.
…Screen
Capture…
Of all the terms used to describe making a picture
of the screen, “screen capture” has a special relationship to the screenshot, a
relationship that revolves around the link between the static still and the
moving image, between film-based photography and film-based cinema. Although a
“screen capture” can refer to making a picture of the screen it can also refer
to tracking and copying user keystrokes, video chats, and other on-screen
actions as they unfold in time. [19]
Unlike the screenshot, which only takes
an instance of computing out of context, the screen capture can be thought of
as an action that highlights, copies, and pastes a continuous slice of
computing temporality onto the Desktop. In
other words, a screen capture makes a movie of the screen. Deleuze advises that
the moving image of film-based cinema is not simply related to photography in
general but to the snapshot specifically. In fact, it is “the equidistance of
snapshots” and “the transfer of this equidistance” into a filmic structure that
affords the moving image of cinema.[20]
What is the result of extending the relationship between the still and moving
photographic image to the relationship between the screenshot and the screen
capture? It does not follow that screenshots as instances are aggregated into
the moving image of a screen capture. Rather it appears that the static still and
the moving image of the digital screen signals how the same data can be tracked
along a different axis.
Yet, however different digital-based moving images
are from film-based moving images, whether or not it can be argued that moving
digital images are aggregates of a multiplicity of stills, digital video
editing programs such as Final Cut offer frame-rate options when exporting
projects. Such an option acknowledges and offers some control over the instance
in relation to the aggregation of instances. As such, the rapid movement of
frames is important to both film-based and digital-based moving pictures. Frame
rates in video games, for example, determine the speed at which the screen is
refreshed, which dictates the quality of the visual experience. The less
frequently the screen is refreshed, the more disturbed the motion becomes. Image
disturbances of this sort trigger a shift in media interaction, from “media
experience” toward “experiencing media.”[21]
In other words, less equidistant frames and fewer frames replaced per second
manifest as digital artifacts that prompt user awareness of a normally
unnoticed apparatus. The fact is that such artifacts are not the exception in
network computing, but are the rule. And although the frame-rate in a moving
digital image is partially different from what a frame-rate means in film-based
cinema, both determine the look and nature of a real-time visual experience as it
relates to a viewer/user in front of a screen. Both operate through a process
of rapidly replacing one thing with the next in a succession that creates verisimilitude
along a human scale, what can be referred to as the uninterrupted dream-like
flow of pictures.
…Screen
Grab…
Abstractly considering a quotation from Henri Lefebvre’s
book, The Construction of Space,
might be a useful start for contemplating the implications of grabbing the
screen, particularly as it relates to the difference between discourse and
space. “The act of writing is supposed, beyond its immediate effects, to imply
a discipline that facilitates the grasping
of the ‘object’ by the writing and speaking ‘subject.’”[22]
Thus, Lefebvre challenges the authority of writing to bring about a transparent
form of understanding, suggesting that the relationship between the “speaking
subject” and the “object as graspable” is not a matter of logical order, where
one naturally follows the other as a conclusion (agent + discourse =
comprehension); but is only a “supposed” relationship. It would have been
preferable if, instead of “grasping,” Lefebvre had written, “grabbing,” which
would solidify discourse’s ability to move a non-linguistic object from the
murk of the unknown into the illumination of analysis. It is this assuredness
and conclusiveness that Lefebvre writes against, particularly when imagining
what language can say about space and social practice. For Lefebvre grabbing
can only be truly comprehended through the action of grabbing. However, as a
result of the computer interface, grabbing also has a discursive function.
Regardless, both grasping and grabbing imply
imaginatively stopping the speculative process. To grasp the screen, meaning to
comprehend, would ultimately reduce it to a contained and handled object,
reinforcing the common perception of technology as a fixed tool controlled by
its wielder. But the screen is more than an object with finite parameters, a
tool to be grabbed; it is also the site of and home to various picture making
and disseminating practices. The tool affects the body as much as the body
affects the tool. The computer screen is not a matter of abstract mathematical
space (or as Lefebvre might have called it “Logico-epistemological space”). [23]
It is a part of, and interwoven into, reality itself. Like any space or place,
the computer screen, and what takes place within it, is neither exclusively
physical, mental, or social, but is rather an amalgamation of these categories.
As a result, the screened space of the computer is also governed by all the
relationships that intervene in any reality whatsoever.
At the same time, grabbing is very important to the
act of computing and computer spatialization, as exampled through the commands:
grab, drag, and drop. Thierry Bardini writes, “[t]he personal computer
interface started with the hand, not with the brain (or the eyes for that
matter).”[24]
And although it may seem obvious to
suggest that grabbing objects in the world is similar to grabbing symbols on
the screen, computer interface design had to be constructed towards this type
of exchange between user and machine, an interaction based on making things
comprehendible at a kinesthetic level (to grab) as opposed to a semiotic level
(to write). In other words, if for Lefebvre grabbing can only be truly comprehended through the action
of grabbing, the problem computer interface proposes is that grabbing in the
realm of computer interface is both a kinesthetic act, something beyond
language, and it is distinctly discursive. This complexity manifests in the
very materiality of computing. Matthew Fuller suggests, for example,
that writing code for the dialogue boxes of a textual-based interface is a far
simpler engineering task than writing a “drag and drop idiom.”[25] If grabbing, dragging, and dropping are matters of
efficiency, it is neither an abstract mathematical efficiency nor a simple
kinesthetic efficiency that is satisfied. Rather, what is satisfied by such an
idiom is the way the physical relationship humans have to the world creates the
world along both a material and meta-material level. As such, the screen is a tactile differential that
mitigates the complexity of computing, as discursive, while opening computing
to embodied kinesthetic responses and codes of behavior, which the screenshot transforms
into representation. In many ways the computer interface signals the return to
the abacus, a movable visual representation, and a turning away from the
writing of numbers.
[1] Screened devices, such as smart
phones and tablets, display windows differently than personal computers.
Whereas personal computers tend to present windows as overlapping, these other
devices display one window at a time, although this is changing. As of now
Windows has released its new phone, which presents applications as an array of
tiles. And although these tiles do not overlap, they suggest the consumer’s
desire for the phone to act similarly to the personal computer insofar as they
both should show multiple computing options simultaneously.
[2] David J. Bolter, and Richard
Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New
Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 47. My italics.
[3] Active Screen Corners is one
example of how Mac interface designers are adding more navigation complexity to
the screen. Another example is the ability to toggle between applications via
the command + tab function. Another example is the f11 hot key that moves all
open windows out of the way of the desktop.
[4] As of now the largest computer
monitor a consumer can purchase is 30 inches, although some stunning examples
of amalgamations of screens are provided in the following link: http://the-world-pictures.blogspot.com/2012/08/18-computer-stations-truly-amazing.html
[5] Frank Stajano, “Security For Whom? The Shifting Security Assumptions of Pervasive Computing,” www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fms27/papers/2003-stajano-shifting.pdf, 2. |
[6] JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American
Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), xvii.
[7] Yates, Control through
Communication, xvii.
[8] Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1945, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
[9] See Scanography, a picture making
practice that uses a computer scanner in ways similar to a camera.
[10] Jussi Parikka, “Copy,” in Software
Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew
Fuller (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), 74.
[11] Bateson, Steps to an Ecology
of Mind, viii.
[12] Richard Wright, “Data
Visualization,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,
2008), 79.
[13] Ibid., 78.
[14] André Malraux and Stuart Gilbert,
The Voices of Silence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978),
13-14.
[15] There is an issue here with the
idea of the screenshot being a part of the whole. The fact is that this cannot
be reconciled. If the screenshot is really a part ripped from the whole then
there should be something missing from the whole, but in fact the whole of the
screen remains intact. The screenshot is part of the whole insomuch as it is a
redundancy at the same time. Similarly when the part of the screen is removed
or copied this part then becomes a whole in and of itself.
[16] I am suggesting here a link
between the problem of uncritically assigning empowerment, which Fuller
suggests through the use of the term “themetune,” to the subjectivity of the
user and the problem of uncritically assigning human scale values to the
technological fact of device connectivity.
[17] Screenshots of Despair, “About,” http://screenshotsofdespair.tumblr.com/.
[18] The OED entry for the prefix ob- yields
this, “in the direction of, towards, in the way of, in front of,” which
suggests the way in which observing itself interferes with the thing to be
observed. "ob-, prefix". OED Online. December 2012. Oxford
University Press.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/129506?rskey=cYlCNW&result=13&isAdvanced=false.
[19] I should note that movies of
screens are also referred to as “screen casts,” a term that is gaining
explanatory power. Nevertheless, “screen capture” is deployed as I have
described it above, but it also has a more broad meaning.
[20] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 5.
[21] Lev Manovich refers to computer
media as having an experiential quality, a concept that I will engage more
thoroughly in Part III of this text.
[22] Henri Lefebvre, The Production
of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 28. Emphasis mine.
[23] This kind of abstract space is
what Lefebvre tries to bring back together with what he calls
“practico-sensory” space, or what we might refer to as simply lived space.
[24] Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping:
Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 53.
[25] Fuller, Behind the Blip:
Essays on the Culture of Software, 150.
Part III.
Media Metaphor / Media Equivocation /
Media Materiality
…Tending
Towards and Array…
Mathew Fuller concludes in his essay, “The
Impossibility of Interface,” that ultimately metaphor is not inherent to
interface, that computing and software in general need to be recognized for
what they do and not what something else does.[1]
Such a request would ostensibly extend to media and media-like amalgamations specific
to computing, such as the screenshot and the metaphoric activity of grafting
photographic concerns onto the distinct act of making a picture of the screen.
“With every interface metaphor,” Fuller writes, “there is a point at which its
explanatory or structure-providing advantages collapse in the face of the
capacity for mutation in the universal machine, the computer, and what it
connects.”[2]
Fuller continues; no matter how useful metaphor is to “imaginally map out in
advance what functional capacity a device has by reference to a pre-existing
apparatus,” eventually “functionality outstrips the explanatory capacity of
reference to previous media forms.”[3]
While it is true that software metaphors are not absolute in their predictive
or instructive capabilities and that references to pre-existing media forms
lose potency over time, it is also true that comparisons and references
facilitate the comprehension of what software engineers and users might want a
given software or technology to accomplish.
Media scholar Steven Johnson
outlines a more sympathetic approach towards comparison between pre-existing
and emerging media. “Certain digital revolutionaries,” Johnson writes, “will
see this pilfering from the past as a limitation, a telltale sign of a thinker
still trapped in the analog world of the past. But the truth is...[t]he
interplay between past and future forms drives the creative process more than
it impedes it.”[4] Of
interest are the two ways the interaction between past and present are
characterized. In Johnson’s estimation this relationship is creative, while
Fuller describes something more or less limiting. If the screenshot can come to
exist fully as a media form, its expansion in this direction will most likely
be the result of a investigation of both photography and computing—how and when
they can be brought together, as well as when they should be pulled apart—and
not as a result of dogmatically forcing the screenshot to always concretize its
predetermined inherent software qualities in opposition to whatever photography
or any other media is understood to be.
Fuller is correct in stating that
“functionality outstrips the explanatory capacity of reference to previous
media forms,”[5]
but only if it is a given that metaphors or media comparisons are meant to
explain away, rather than guide or describe. As comparisons go “metaphor” is
more than a taskmaster of sameness; it is also an opening up to difference. If
“metaphor” means “this is that,” it also means, ”in fact, it is not.” It is the
ability of a metaphor to hold in tension both the sameness and difference
between the tenor and the vehicle that makes it enduring. By far a metaphor
does more to add to an utterance through its associative power than to reduce
through an insistence on sameness. But given that any language whatsoever—not
to mention the trickery of metaphor—struggles to land squarely on any artifact
or practice, thinking in terms of “description” is more useful than
“explanation.” Description creates options through accumulation and
aggregation, while explanations must either totally cohere with previous
explanatory structures (showing a predilection towards singularity) or they must
negate previous explanatory structures (showing a predilection towards the
reordering of knowledge). In other words, with competing explanations either one
or the other must prevail or one or the other must fit within a pre-existing
structure, while competing descriptions tend towards an array of choices open
to less structured, yet promising, navigation.
Neither software nor software
interface is developed a priori, without any sense of a user or the series of
tasks to be performed, tasks that necessarily draw on some aspect of the
material world. As a result, software is at least partially analogous to the
world that it finds itself, especially given that it is part of the world that
it finds itself in. The fact is, as much as software transforms and (in)forms the
world, the world transforms and (in)forms software. Software metaphors and
media comparisons are engrained in the “why” and “what” of software development
and not sprinkled on after the fact as ornamentation. They are constitutive of
and integral to the design of software-based media and computer human
interface, no matter how inadequate such comparisons grow. Furthermore, if a
metaphor participates in the formulation of software, it is not as if the
metaphor itself escapes transformation in relation to the software it describes
or the practices that a given software affords. Language comes off restructured
by what it portrays as much as it structures a portrayal. A classic and prescient example is how the
term “snapshot” has been transformed through its application to photography.
Initially used to describe rapid rifle fire, “snapshot” is less about game
hunting and more about the instantaneity and speed of making certain kinds of pictures.
This is not to say that “snapshot” does not bring those associations of
violence with it, but that the metaphor and language itself has undergone
change in relation to what it explains. Metaphor helps to determine but does
not overdetermine. It is open on both sides of the equation.
…Experiential
Forms of Knowledge…
Technological advancement “is a matter of the
minute and painstaking modification of existing technology;”[6]
it is built on previous innovation. While the sizzle of past forms of
technological advancement may seem slower by comparison to the explosive pace
of software and computing developments, fantasies of total and radical
technological breaks generally rely on historiographic tropes by which a
technology “is attached a precise date and particular man (few indeed are the
women in such lists) to whom the inspired invention ‘belongs.’”[7]
Regardless of the technological fact of incremental development, it is not
given that the digital is the natural or essential outcome of a self-governed
techno-lineage, that digital media simply complete or fulfill the media
processes and promises initiated by previous analogical devices.
That digital media represent both an extension of
already existing media and something distinct and new is what makes Fuller’s
interest in the particularities and specifics of software, as opposed to digital
media in general, important. By focusing on the distinctiveness of software and
software applications much of the noise of the past can be tabled and software
can be investigated as a thing in and of itself, with the hope that such an
investigation will say something about contemporary society’s profound software
entanglement, as opposed to an anteriorized speculating on the digital nature
of various past technological and conceptual innovations. In other words, the
promise of the “new” in “new media” can, through software studies, be
capitalized on.
Nevertheless, the assumption that software has
inherent independent qualities that exist completely outside the human praxis
of comparison and comparative driven production is a perplexing notion. As much as innovation comes from incremental
adjustments and additions to previous technology, it also comes about through
incremental applications of user knowledge, which does not always flow
front-and-center from the stated functions and objectives a technology is
claimed to have. Structures of knowledge also flow from the experiential, from
previous understandings and engagements with technology and media, from places
that cannot be determined as centers, but that exist as every other place. As a
result, a particular media’s production and application may be best gleaned
from the real-world experiential knowledge of similar technologies and media,
and not from an abstract techno-centric perspective or an over-investment in what
software is supposed to do. The screenshot takes on new meaning and promise as
the problems and potentials of photography are grafted onto its shiny new
software surface, an act that does not limit the algorithmic specificity of
software, but that ruptures it, complicating it further. Past and future forms,
coexisting and interweaving, drive the opening up of what making a picture of
the screen can be, allowing the picture making technology to exceed its generic
software purposes, allowing it to be defined through embodied practice as
opposed to inherent qualities.
…Strategic
Media Essentialism…
Searching for what interface, computing, or
software-based media do according to internalized and hermetic tenants suggests
a demand for media specificity. Film theorist Mary Ann Doane writes, “[t]hose
works that can be labeled ‘medium specific’ are those reiterating and
reconfirming the constraints of their material support.”[8] By aiming media at its own materiality the
influence of other media, of other material constraints, are necessarily removed.
The result is a form of logical media purity, which then, for example, drives naturalistic
space and figuration out of painting. The end game of painting conceived in
terms of its own support system is painting that reiterates the application of
paint and the physical flatness of the canvass. Sculpture is reduced to the phenomenology
of being in situ, to its occupation of space. Certainly the fact that the
screenshot captures the very image of the screen from which it emerges centers the
screenshot in its materiality. In this sense, the screenshot can only reaffirm its materiality and its
support—the computer screen. Thought of in this way, the screenshot would
appear to be the paradigmatic image of media specificity.
However, Fuller suggests something more, to rid computer
software of the characteristic of metaphor, which presumably would allow
software and interface to act in accordance with some essential technological characteristic.
If it were possible, as a thought experiment, for software to operate metaphor-free,
unfettered by the burden of comparisons to previous media forms, what would
this mean for the screenshot? Such an experiment might be considered a form of
strategic media essentialism, a tactic meant to temporarily allow discussions
of media specificity without getting embroiled in the ways that media users
often struggle against such claims of essence.
Photography’s specificity, however
arguable, is historically linked to the concepts of the trace and index. The
trace describes the mark or remnant found in the photograph, that which was once
in front of the camera, and the index describes how the photograph permanently
refers to something else, the way it points outside itself.[9]
What is most specific to the software that makes a picture of the screen is not
so much the inherent quality of algorithmic processing, something that a
screenshot more or less shares with all other software, but its ability to
interact in a specific way with a unique subject—the space of the user
interface. Graphically speaking, this is a specific kind of world where
bouncing icons scramble for attention, where edges softly round or come to sharpened
idealized corners, where delicate and uniform shadows are cast, and unvarying
highlights glimmer in mathematically determined regularity. The crisp blue
paper of a desktop folder never fades or wears out. When the white-gloved hand
of the cursor is dragged across a link it does not come up with a finger full
of dust. The interface purports a world of sanitized order. The façade does not
deteriorate or decay, so much as it becomes outdated. As such, interface is
only noticeably outmoded the moment it exists in comparison to a newer
iteration, the next version. In this way comparison, far from stifling, drives
the innovation of software. The user is conditioned to recognize this
out-of-dateness as a trigger for technological desire.
Within the specific world of the
interface, the picture of the screen is the record of this never-ending
(comparison driven) aging façade, a relationship that is thoroughly implied by
the website guidebookgallery.org. Guidebookgallery contains a pictorial history
of graphical interface development ranging from Lisa Office System 1.0 to Mac OS
X Panther, as captured in screen grabs and screenshots. Consequently, these
past moments of graphical protocols are structured into an archive, held static
for scrutiny. As an archive of interface, guidebookgallery instantiates the
pristine character of interface and promises the possibility of an abstract technological
history by focusing on interface alone. Yet this archive, like all archives, is
as much about what is absent as what is present. “A good art historical tale
can be as provocative as a mystery story,” Michael Ann Holly reminds us. “Some
thing has gotten lost, someone has gone missing, a visual clue remains unseen.”[10]
What is most missing from a screenshot illustrating
the aesthetic choices that went into an outdated text-editing program is
precisely the text that would have filled the blankness of interface. What is
abstracted away is the temporality and quality of contact, the clue of the
human agent required to give interface meaning. All the multiple iterations of
the text, the chaos and proliferation of versions that inevitably fill digital
hard drives and desktops, remain unseen in a collection of the blank form. Ironically,
the reality of living with and using computers contradicts the superficial
promise of organization that the digital often trades on. Certainly the
technological promise of computer-aided efficiency is easy to fulfill, but only
if the body is thoroughly mastered or removed altogether from the equation.
Interface, as contingent on context and content as any technology, does not
totally regulate itself, but is governed, at least to some degree, by the
embodied ways it is put to use.[11]
There is no such thing as technology in any significant way outside the purview
of the agent.
In lived life, hard drives and file directories
never arrive at total organization, rather they are always in states of wildness
and cultivation, overgrowing here and being placed into order there. Against
received knowledge, the instantaneous copying of files and the resulting multiplicity
of versions has made organization less and less possible. Ultimately, living
with computers is a messy human affair, with numerous versions of files strewn
across several portable drives, across several portable machines.[12]
Truer now than ever before, “Organizers have found themselves eaten up by
whatever they were trying to organize.”[13]
Thus, the mere picture of the screen, as a simple
reproduction of the space and place of interface, becomes media in ratio to how
it includes the activation of this space via user collaboration and
interpretation. It is the ability to address the interface as a zone where
users invest themselves in unique ways that affords the screenshot any kind of
specificity, a fact that exceeds the simple instantiation of software’s given
material support, a fact that exceeds the rote enactment of an algorithm, a
fact that exceeds purely copying. Yet, as satisfactory as it would be to
conclude this circumstance categorically makes pictures of screens unlike other
technical pictures, especially photography, a screenshot can still be conceptualized
as both as trace (an imprint of a past moment of computing) and as an index (a
constant referring to that moment of computing). These practices, making screenshots
and making photographs, are neither substitutional, where one naturally performs
and means the same as the other, nor are they obligatory, where one is forced
to behave exactly like the other.
…Media
Multiplication and Instantaneity...
In an effort to comprehend why media are made to
mimic each other’s functions and appearances, new media theorists Jay David
Bolter and Robert Grusin discuss media relations in terms of affiliations. One
example from their book-length study, Remediation,
are television news programs which often
incorporate “the influence of the graphical user interface,” particularly “when
they divide the screen into two or more frames and place text and numbers over
and around the framed video images.”[14] Bolter and Grusin describe two contradictory
logics: “hypermedia,” the multiplying and ongoing development of ever
increasing types of media, and “immediacy,” the desire for instantaneity and
direct contact with the thing being mediated.[15]
In fact, the blending of these logics via new media amalgamations and
assemblages, such as television shows that use computer aesthetics, signals how
“our culture wants to both multiply its media and to erase all traces of
mediation.”[16]
Remediation, as an overarching model, describes how the drive towards the “hyper”
in fact creates a sense of the “immediate.” Through such logic the screenshot
can be considered new insofar as it is a unique assemblage of certain photographic
and computing concepts. But does the screenshot always result in a picture in
which the effects and realities of computing are made immediate, in the sense
that they are un-mediated? As much as screenshots depict computing they also draw
attention to the conditions of computing, to the very mediation of interface;
they explicitly express new types of reflexive relationships to computing.
Putting aside Bolter and Grusin’s concept driven
ideas of media allows issues of materiality to be considered. In Software Takes Command,[17]
Lev Manovich constructs a theory of media related directly to the physical challenges
of describing software-based picture making, which in turn prompts concerns
over media and their relations to an agent. Among the many issues that Manovich’s
concept “metamedia” addresses, the time-based and interactive characteristic of
computing is by far the most useful. “Thus,” Manovich writes, “although some
static documents may be involved, the final media experience constructed by
software cannot be reduced to any single document stored in some media.”[18]
The reference is not to a media, but rather to a “media experience,” which
opens computing, and by extension all of the digital, up to conceptualization
as a process inexorably contingent on and defined by a user’s interaction. Although
it is worth noting that many of the media location issues that Manovich tries
to explain about computers have been historically true for cinema and broadcast
television as well. Does the media of cinema reside in the reel, in the
projector, in the screen, in the architecture of the theater, in the
architecture of the set, in the technology of the camera, or more accurately in
the “media experience” of the moving image in relation to an embodied agent?
Yet, no matter how Manovich’s
metamedia theory incorporates user experience at its base, placing much needed emphasis on media interaction, it does
not confront the screenshot head-on. Simply put, the question Manovich
asks throughout the book is as follows: “what
happened to the techniques, languages, and the concepts of twentieth century
media as a result of their computerization.”[19] The answer is the magnetization
of what were once separate media, which are drawn together under the power of
software. In other words, “metamedia” is an attempt to explain the
impact software has had on pre-existing media. Although
Manovich does eschew total media convergence or the reduction of media to various
effects brought up from the smooth unified space of computer data.[20] The fact is, screenshot
technology is not so much affected by software, but emerges from software
itself; it is not a pre-existing media transformed through contact to computing,
but rather it is the reflexive document of computing that surfaces from
computing itself.
Given that media are not strictly
technologically determined, that they are equally defined through interaction,
such a thing as media specificity can be said to exist as long as the meaning
of such a concept includes embodied agency in its structuring. The fact that photography
does not exclusively depend on any one technology to exist, that it is a human
concept in process and coevolving with technology, opens the debate to the
simple but powerful question: is it altogether known whether the digital has
subsumed specific media in a move toward media convergence or whether specific
media have subsumed the digital in an move toward digital divergence?
Returning to Bolter and Grusin’s double logic and putting away how
screenshots create a sense of reflexivity towards computing, it is also true
that screenshots can be thought of as instantaneous and factual presentations
of past acts or moments of computing, an immediate presentation of computing.
In October 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
upheld convictions for Akhil Bansal and Frederick Mullinix for
the illegal sale and distribution of prescription drugs in what amounted to the
most complex and globally dispersed Internet drugs case to date. The sheer density
of business is telling; up to 75,000 pills were shipped daily. Because all
sales took place through various websites spread across the globe, the
screenshot became a crucial way to visually corroborate certain online moments
in time—especially given that many of
the drugs related websites operated temporarily in order to avoid discovery. Part of
Bansal’s and Mullinix’s appeal questions the prosecution’s use of screenshots
in the original case. Ultimately the screenshots
were easily upheld in one paragraph of the Court of Appeals legal opinion,
which stated the pictures were in fact what they claimed to be as determined by
an expert witness who explained the reliability of Wayback Machine, the
Internet archive site used to regenerate the suspect websites. These past
moments of computing were then shown to the courtroom via screenshots. It was legally
determined that the jury had in fact been presented with trustworthy
visualizations of former computing moments, that these websites indeed existed
at some point. Although this was only a small part of the overall case, the
implications for pictures of the screen are profound. That the screenshot can
be verified and presented in a court of law as evidence of something that
existed at one point suggests a general attitude towards screenshots as more or
less having the same pictorial potential for veracity as photography, a fact
that goes against easy claims that the digital explodes concepts of
photographic reliability, as if analog photography has not always been imbricated
with manipulation, which has been more the rule than the exception. [21]
…Media Objects…
If screenshots can be logged as exhibits A and B, they have fully
emerged as media-objects, a fact that allows screenshots and software-based
pictures to be questioned through object-oriented concepts. Accordingly, the
skeuomorph is also a suitable model for describing how media becomes
“systematically dependent on each other and on prior media for their cultural
significance.”[22]
This is especially true if the materialization of digital media, the body, and
their relationship is of importance. On the surface, skeuomorphs are elements
of a design that, although no longer necessary, persist; frequently translated
into purely aesthetic expressions. The tiled look of linoleum creates a visual
connection with ceramic tile but as a matter of stylistic appearance and not
function, which would seem to diminish the meaning of style, limiting it to
formalistic play. But style and aesthetic expression are techniques of
communication that transmit significance as much, if not more than, content
itself. “One does not signify something; rather, one signifies in some way.”[23]
Content does not exist independently of how it is expressed, but is contingent
on forms of expression: how it appears, what arrangements it takes, how it is
transmitted. Thus, instances of design that are carried over from one object to
another, from one device to another, are not separate from but rather integral
to meaning. As a material metaphor, the skeuomorph concentrates its emphasis on
the object-hood of a thing and how artifacts materially relate. Yet, far from
mere appearances, these particular physical resemblances and aesthetic
decisions constitute sophisticated messages and instructions. Information
scholar Nicholas Gessler explains: skeuomorphs “are informational attributes of
artifacts which help us find a path through unfamiliar territory. They help us
map the new onto an existing cognitive structure.”[24]
Although many material characteristics persist across photography’s
various technological iterations, one unlikely skeuopmorphic trait is the sound
of the camera’s shutter opening and closing, which has been coded into the
software used to make a screenshot. When screenshot software is triggered a
distinct, although obvious, digital sound issues forth—the mechanical noise of
a picture being snapped. Certainly there is no reason for a camera-like sound,
or any sound whatsoever, to continue into the territory of software, aside from
the resonance that it creates between two distinct processes that no matter how
distinct, nevertheless, must share some commonality. And even if this
commonality is only a matter of a “sound effect” the question is begged: what type
of effect does this sound create?[25]
If there is no particular materially functional reason for linoleum to look
like tile, marble, or any other surface, or for making a software program
trigger the aural expression of a shutter opening and closing, it is important
to question why the new is contingent on its predecessor? It is important to
inquire into what effects such mappings might have and do in the world; to ask what
such mappings serve and what the function of user recognition is? It is
important to continue to look beyond philosophic media notions such as remediation
and metamedia, regardless of their conceptual rigor or descriptive power. What
are the material reasons that media resemblances exist?
An upgrade economy, in which new editions of software,
hardware, and even network capabilities are introduced to the market every six
to twelve months, is heavily reliant on various forms of product correspondences
to function smoothly—meaning certain categories of media and technology
associations are, at least partially, economically driven. “Such a repetition
is necessary in order to keep the mass scale of users, by means of an apparent
familiarity, on the upgrade path to perfection.”[26]
The skeuomorph contributes to this “apparent familiarity,” not by stopping at
the material level, but by instantiating the ways that the material and the
conceptual are interwoven. By making sense out of the differences and
correspondences across media and media devices, skeuomorphs help ensure
continued comprehension and mass consumption, despite, or maybe even because
of, unrelenting product development. More than mere embellishment, something that
gains meaning through its visual pleasure, skeuomorphs regulate what types of
attitudes user should continue to have towards certain amalgamations and
aggregations of technologies; they constitute specific “user friendly”
attitudes within aggressive, version driven realms of technological innovation.
While matters of upgrade economies certainly help
to explain skeuomorphic resemblance, how seamless an experience these
resemblances offer the user is altogether uncertain. While the skeuomorph helps
to “map the new onto an existing cognitive structure,”[27]
to facilitate a user’s ongoing competency across proliferating technological devices,
whatever the body and embodiment carry that is unpredictable is also dispersed
across these variously mapped interactions. To put it more overtly, the skeuomorphic
as instructional resemblance is not complete, or moreover, is incomplete-able.
The fluency of comprehension that is established through the skeuomorph across
photography’s ever-shifting surface, what allows users to amass specific user
knowledge and make connections between screenshots and snapshots, is equally
open to the indeterminate via the body and its affective capacity or that which
“fills the interval between perception and action—the very interval that allows
the body qua center of
indetermination to delay reaction and thus organize unexpected responses.” [28]
As a result, a technology like the screenshot simultaneously labors under the
ideological traits and behavioral patterns of the photographic, while also
being enabled to diverge from those patterns. Consequently, the digitally
constructed sound of the shutter opening and closing within the screenshot software
signals the drive toward photographic resemblance while simultaneously allowing
difference, opening the screenshot to photography while also allowing it to
exist as a software amalgamation in its own right.
[1] Fuller, Behind the Blip:
Essays on the Culture of Software, 99-120.
[2] Ibid, 102.
[3] Ibid, 100.
[4]Steven
Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create
and Communicate (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997), 19.
[5] Fuller, Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software, 100.
[6] Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy
Wajcman, “Introductory Essay and General Issues,” in The Social Shaping of
Technology: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum, ed. Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Milton Keynes: Open
University Press, 1985), 10.
[7] Ibid., 9.
[8] Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical
and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 131. doi:
10.1215/10407391-2006-025.
[9] Ibid., 140.
[10] Michael Ann Holly, “Mourning and
Method,” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (Dec., 2002): 660,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177289.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177289.
[11] I realize
that some aspects of technology are deterministic, meaning that they shape
society by determining what kinds of power structures are required to keep them
functioning smoothly. But it is equally true that technology does not exist in
a vacuum, that usage and context give it meaning. Langdon Winner suggests a concept of flexible
and inflexible technology as opposed to simply stating that technology
determines the social or vise versa. What this means is that some technologies
like nuclear power, to use Winner’s example, force the social into particular
patterns of control, while other technologies are less formative. Simply put,
whether a technology determines the social or whether the social determines a
technology is not a hard fact but determined on a case-by-case system that
questions a technology along a register of flexibility. Do artifacts have
politics? Langdon Winner in MacKenzie, Donald A., and Judy Wajcman. 1985. The Social shaping of technology: how the
refrigerator got its hum. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Pg 26-
38
[12] How cloud computing will affect
this idea is yet to be determined.
[13] Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones:
Digital Women + the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 46.
[14] Bolter and Grusin, Remediation:
Understanding New Media, 40.
[15] “Our culture wants both to
multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally it wants to
erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.” Here Grusin and Bolter
are describing loosely what they mean by hypermediacy (multiplying media) and
immediacy (the sense of no mediation whatsoever.) Ibid., 5.
[16] Ibid.
[17] In November 2009, Manovich
released a draft version of a book that he is working on, which was released to
the Internet in an unfinished form that I believe is related to the
transparency movement that other new media thinkers also embrace. An
acquaintance who owned and ran a new media gallery mentioned to me one of the
last projects that he wanted to take up was to make the gallery totally
transparent online, so that anybody could see what he sold and for how much,
what the rent was in the space, etc.
[18] Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command (Self-Published: Creative
Commons License, 2009), 15.
[19] Ibid., 36.
[20] Ibid., 78. Regarding convergence
Manovich writes this “But this is not what happens in media languages as they
hybridize. Instead, they acquire new properties–becoming richer as a result.”
[21] Federal Evidence Review, “Authenticating Internet Screenshot
Evidence under FRE 901,” December 19, 2011, http://federalevidence.com/node/1357.
[22] Bolter and Grusin, Remediation:
Understanding New Media, 56.
[23] Henry L. Gates, The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 54.
[24] Nicholas Gessler, “Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms,” http://www.skeuomorph.com/.
[25] One answer, although not the most
interesting answer, can be understood through such proposed laws as the Camera
Phone Predator Alert Act, introduced in 2009 by congressman Peat King. The act
hopes to make it mandatory that all cell phones trigger some tone when they
take a picture in order to alert others to the act. Although this law does not
stipulate that the tone sound like a shutter being released.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:HR00414:@@@L&summ2=m&.
[26] Fuller, Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software, 101.
[27] Gessler, “Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms.”
[28] Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 2004), 133.
Part IV.
Aconclusivity: Endings / Questions /
Conclusions
…in
Advance into an Image…
Regarding photography’s particular form of
influence, photography theorist Ariella Azoulay, writes, “[t]he camera
has the capacity through its sheer presence to set all of these effects in
motion without even taking even a single shot.”[1] Azoulay not only refers to the way that the photograph continues to
have effects after it has been taken, but also to the way that the mere
possibility of a photographic act changes whatever reality it comes into
contact with, the way the world anticipates being made into a picture.
Barthes describes a similar reaction to photography’s effect on reality, an
effect set in motion by the camera’s mere presence. “Now,” Barthes writes,
“once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute
myself in the process of ‘posing.’”[2]
Barthes could stop here and have it down—the effect of the camera is the
inauthenticity of the pose—but he goes on, “I instantaneously make another body
for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.”[3]
Such a transformation suggests more than the simple act of posing. To make
another body, as opposed to simply rearrange the pre-existing body, proposes
the presence of the camera initiates a wholesale change in reality, which becomes
transformed in advance into a pre-conceived photographic vision.
Both Barthes and Azoulay describe how the world structures
itself into the photographic prior to the act of a photograph being made, a fact that undoubtedly calls into question the automatic independence
of the real from the photographic. In other words, at least some aspects of
what is either graphic or scopic about the real does not simply exist; but
rather is constituted through a particular pre-existing and ongoing form of
visuality, a visuality that is related to the photographic. Essentially, as
human vision has been indelibly transformed through the act of seeing and
making the photographic, at least some aspects of reality have come to be
arranged along a photographic axis for a photocentric eye.
…Performative
Computing…
Furthermore, Azoulay parses two events from
photography: the event of photography itself and the event being photographed.[4] Within the world of computing a similar scenario
is unfolding. Whatever is left of what might be called naive
computing, that is “computing in and of itself,” is most certainly being
transformed by the potential to make a picture of the screen. It can be similarly
claimed that with the proliferation of screenshots two events are distinguishable:
the event of computing and the event of making a picture of computing. Similarly,
the screenshot like Azoulay’s photograph also reverberates
within the world of computing long after the picture has been made, influencing
and guiding other users in their understanding of making pictures of the
screen. But more than this after-the-fact influence, the screenshot as a mere
potential changes the very act of computing itself, charging it with possibility,
bestowing upon it a sense of reflexivity that emerges from the screenshot’s
ability to tear part of the screen from the whole, to re-contextualize and
re-present this instance/part under different criteria.
True as Marshall McLuhan’s axiom is, that “the
‘content’ of any medium is always another medium,”[5]
there is nevertheless also much more. The content of the screenshot is not strictly
the computer and interface in the abstract. Also included is the very residue
of activity, or refutation of activity, which an agent brings to computing and
the interface, the specificity of a particular body and culture. In other
words, the screenshot contains and makes visible two potentially inseparable
aspects of computing: 1) The radical space of the interface, which includes,
but is not limited to all the various media that occupy the screen 2) The
activity of computing itself, which can be thought of as an embodied interaction
with the computer interface. Thus, the screenshot simultaneously makes a
picture of the graphic and aesthetic space of computing and the user’s motions and
gestures within this space.
By structuring the screen and the interface as a
picture, the screenshot encourages a shift in computing awareness, invigorating
it with the impulse of performativity. In response to the ability to make a
picture of the screen, users arrange its icons into compositions, fill its text
fields in antithetical ways, set up atypical interface scenarios; they
transform the screen in advance into an image. As a result, the screenshot
raises the ground (the screen itself), and what was once only a support much
like the canvas in painting is converted from a state of naturalized neutrality
to a self-involved and reflexive object—a picture made for the screen, about
the screen, both the subject and object of its own creation.
But the fact persists, only particular users would
seek to make such pictures, users that have vested interests in understanding
computing along a “meta” or reflexive register, users that have had long term
and intimate exposure to the power of computing, who have necessarily benefited
from this power to the detriment of others. As such, certain questions remain: Is
the act of making a screenshot in fact critical or does it simply instantiate
the power of computing and as a result the cozy relationship between wealth and
computing? How does the screenshot, as an act undertaken by a specific type of
user, align itself with the desires of the wired and wired-less global North in
general? Can the screenshot ever express the aspirations of those populations
that have different kinds of relationships to computing, less imbricated, less
ingrained? If indeed such interventions into the screen can be said to operate
against the programmatic determinism of software, to create a hospitable environment
where unpredictable expressions of agency can occur, the question remains––whose
agency and to what degree?
…Under
the Influence…
When a user decides to compute two pathways are
potentially open: either computing naively
or expressly. Naively is used to refer to computing that is unaffected by the
possibility of the screenshot, while expressly
refers to computing conducted under the influence of the possibility of the
screenshot. Both scenarios are contingent on user experience and knowledge
regarding the ways in which a screenshot can be used as a tool to intervene onto
the screen in a more or less imaginative way.
Because I am a particular type of
user, one that has a certain proximity and intimacy to computing, mostly as a
consumer, but also as an artist who has explored the screenshot as a medium, I
can only compute expressly.
Nevertheless, within the concept of computing expressly there are more possible pathways. I can either proceed
with the potential of the screenshot as the background to my actions or I can proceed
with this potential as the foreground to my actions. As a background the
screenshot potential lies in wait, ready to snap at the screen, yet it is restrained.
The act of computing is subject to, but not overwhelmed by, the potential of
the screenshot. Subsequently, the screen is always on the cusp of becoming a
picture but is not beholden to this fact. As a foreground the screenshot
potential takes charge of the screen, its power as a possibility completely and
fully present in and informing every computing decision. Under these
circumstances computing is no longer strictly conducted along the technological
axis that computing power is supposed to serve. Instead, computing comes to serve
the picture. Thus, the screen is subsumed by the act of picturing.
If I compute under the auspices that
the screenshot will be the foreground to my computing actions, and as such,
subsume computing under the potential to structure it as a picture, if I
proceed on this path, the contents of the screen (the interface and my
interaction with it) can be thought of as a series of potential scenarios that I
set up in advance of the picture. In other words, I pose the screen. But I also
pose myself through this interaction, particularly as the interface always
contains within it the residue of its embodied use. The interface comes to
resemble a stage upon which I interrogate computing through a specific
subjectivity and through specific performative actions. To proceed in this way
opens computing up to a variety of end results that are not contingent on fulfilling
the logic that computers and computing sets forth for itself. The potential to
make a particular type of picture of the screen frees the user from the tyranny
of a programmatic step-by-step interaction with the interface. In other words,
a special picture can be created, one that communicates the unpredictable ways
that the interface cannot come to completely meet its user, the ways in which
the embodied agent continues to exceed the interface and the limited range of
desires and powers that computing represents.
[1] Ariella Azoulay, "Photography: The
Ontological Question," Mafte’akh:
Lexical Review of Political Thought, no. 2 (2011): 72,
mafteakh.tau.ac.il/en/.
[2] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang,
1981), 10.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Azoulay, "Photography: The Ontological
Question," 72.
[5] Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” in Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man, ed. Marshall McLuhan and Lewis H. Lapham (Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 1994), 8.
Bibliography
Azoulay, Ariella. "Photography: The Ontological Question." Mafte’akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought 2 (2011): 65–80. mafteakh.tau.ac.il/en/.
Bal, Mieke. "Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture." Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 1 (2003): 5–32. vcu.sagepub.com.
Bardini, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1981.
Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1972.
Bolter, David J. and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999.
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, July 1945, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/.
Coyle, Jack. “South By Southwest: 'Homeless Hotspot' Stunt Stirs Debate At SXSW.” Huffington Post. March 13, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/13/sxsw-homeless-hotspots_n_1342972.html.
Crossley, Nick. Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming. London: Sage Publications, 1996.
Crouch, Christopher. “Afterword.” In Visual Literacy, edited by James Elkins, 195–204. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: the Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Doane, Mary Ann. “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity.” Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 128-152. doi: 10.1215/10407391-2006-025.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Eglash, Ron. “Computing Power.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, 55–63. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.
Federal Evidence Review. “Authenticating Internet Screenshot Evidence under FRE 901.” December 19, 2011. http://federalevidence.com/node/1357.
Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion, 2000.
Fuller, Matthew. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 2003.
Gallagher, David. F “NYTSXSW.” March 11, 2012. Accessed March 12, 2012. http://nytsxsw.tumblr.com/post/19145988299/getting-a-decent-data-connection-at-sxsw-can-be-a
Gates, Henry L. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
Harwood, Graham. “Pixel.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, 213–217. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.
Harwood, John. The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Hayles, Katherine N. "The Materiality of Informatics." Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 147-170. http://muse.jhu.edu/.
Holly, Michael Ann. “Mourning and Method.” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (December 2002): 660-669. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177289.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Library of Congress. “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act.” Bill Summary & Status 111th Congress (2009–2010), H.R. 414. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:HR00414:@@@L&summ2=m&.
Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997.
MacKenzie, Donald A. and Judy Wajcman. The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985.
Malraux, André, and Stuart Gilbert. The Voices of Silence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. Self-Published: Creative Commons License, 2008.
McLuhan, Marshall and Lewis H. Lapham. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994.
"ob-, prefix". OED Online. December 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/129506?rskey=cYlCNW&result=13&isAdvanced=false.
Parikka, Jussi. “Copy.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, 70–77. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.
Plant, Sadie. Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture. London: Fourth Estate, 1997.
Screenshots of Despair, “About,” http://screenshotsofdespair.tumblr.com/.
Smith, David Canfield, Charles Irby, Ralph Kimball, Bill Verplank and Eric Harslem. “Designing the Star User Interface.” http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/designingthestaruserinterface. Originally published in Byte 4 (1982): 242–282.
Staiger, Janet. Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Stajano, Frank. “Security For Whom? The Shifting Security Assumptions of Pervasive Computing.” www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fms27/papers/2003-stajano-shifting.pdf.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.
Wright, Richard. “Data Visualization.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, 78–86. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.
