Image-trouble: Rethinking Theories & Practices: Technology, Representation, and the Disciplines.

Especially in regard to images, "we've never been modern," as Bruno Latour would say (1). Despite the rational analysis of modern representation, particular images can occasionally strike a violent blow to our collective sense of order, belief, and propriety. Even now, we are reeling from the moral impact of the Abu Ghraib prison images that outrage us (or for reactionaries, the outrage itself outrages). The images provoke, as Susan Sontag suggests, not for what they are: technologically sophisticated pictures instantly distributed by digital systems (2). Instead, they outrage us for what they are "of": an unspeakable set of crude actions that cannot be disavowed in a haze of language and rationalization.

But even while certain images enflame our tempers, these streams of imagery go coolly about their business of representing demonstrating, explaining and modeling. In this more Apollonian set of functions, the modern power of images is plural. A single image may strike with a primitivistic certainty, but more often, multitudes of images act quietly together to build assumptions, points of view, and a variety of perspectives on the world. Moreover, kinds of images are themselves varied, sometimes covertly so, operating in accordance with different modalities and internal logistics. Modern theories of image-signs such as semiotics may help, but the theoretical field is itself a moving target as images and kinds of images proliferate with emerging technologies and applications in science. The situation is uncertain. The new field of imagery may not provoke the passions of an image war, but we are often troubled by a pronounced need to know. Perplexing questions arise about how images are formed and used across the disciplines of science, technology and culture. What are images? How do they produce knowledge?

In order to approach these fundamental (if not fundamentalist) questions, the conference, Rethinking Theories & Practices of Imaging: Technology, Representation, and the Disciplines, was held at the Rochester Institute of Technology on April 16. The conference was organized by Evan Selinger and Timothy Engstrom with support from the colleges of liberal arts, science, and imaging arts and various departments within RIT. In addition to Selinger and Engstrom's perspectives as philosophers, the presence of a multitude of disciplines fed the ambition of the conference to engage collaboratively in understanding the nature, scope, and significance of the imaging revolution. Accordingly, the conference speakers included women and men involved in the philosophy of technics, history of science, chemical engineering, film history and criticism. Commentators, also of considerable disciplinary variety, followed each lecture with alternative views that augmented the range of cases and issues presented. The diversity of information, opinion and insight supported the conference's overarching argument, in my opinion, that the power of images is plural: perhaps "hybrid," as featured speaker Peter Galison might say. I would add that the conference's refined dialogue and inquiry did not blunt the prickly sense of more image-trouble lying ahead.

The Epistemic Status of Functional Brain Images

by Megan Delehanty

Megan Delehanty from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Pittsburgh immediately stirred up some perplexing issues in her presentation. The trouble with perceiving brain imagery became immediately reflexive in her droll example of cocaine users looking at brain images of cocaine users through PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography). However, Delehanty did not intend her line of inquiry to spin in circular loops between brains looking at brains. Rather, her presentation was designed to look at operations underlying the construction of brain images: the mathematical routines and determining assumptions built into their construction. PET scans are not passively produced in an optically understood sense but resemble "number pictures" that rely on differential phenomena (concentrations of oxygen), conventional assignments of color or value, and elaborate processing schemes to filter out "noise" and to delineate significant features. Brainy stuff, indeed. But, what does one brain make of another when post-processing has extrapolated and applied predetermined "averages" between individual aberrations and more universal constants? In a final circular relationship, this time with text, a viewer of brains can only consult a caption to describe the contextual truth of the image, its relationship to its object, and what makes it "good."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This balancing of brains and their images places us within the mediating realm of models according to commentator Art Berman, Emeritus Professor of RIT's Department of Language and Literature. He surveyed basic notions and uses of models: cognitive, scale and those relating to visible or invisible, static or dynamic conditions. But, his deeper concern lay in how models can shape our view of objects in misleading ways. They often foreground expedient features and relegate to the background other critical characteristics that are more elusive to modeling. In brain images we see gradients of oxygen corresponding presumably to areas of heightened neuronal activity. But, how does this help us understand consciousness, which is an undeniable faculty of the human brain and certainly an area of considerable interest? According to Berman, brain images and models may skew and privilege model-friendly properties over existential characteristics of life and thought. These philosophical tangles on what models can and cannot capture set the stage for Patrick Grim.

Concrete Images for Abstract Questions: A Philosophical View

by Patrick Grim

For Grim, who comes from the Group for Logic and Formal Semantics at SUNY Stony Brook, the possibilities of scientific imaging are applied to abstract propositions. The reflective situation ascends from the problem of brains looking at brains to one of minds looking at mental concepts. In effect, imaging techniques let us see something that is not there at all. He initiated this possibility by manipulating versions of the liar's paradox with zigzag graphs of truth and falsehood states. The graphic patterns of oscillating logic became increasingly multivalent and subtle with the application of fuzzy logic with more truth-values lying in-between. The visualizations became even more complex with the computer modeling renditions of Prisoner's Dilemma where choices of cooperation and competition endlessly play out with favorable or unfavorable consequences. As narrow as these logical game worlds may seem, Grim conveyed the fascination with the power of images to suggest allusive patterns and twists in abstract worlds that may apply to real world scenarios. He asserted that the reach of philosophers should exceed their grasp, and he convincingly proposed that the grasp of imaging could exceed our intellectual grasp. This transcendence to the platonic realm was humorously undercut with the material form of images: mathematical models sculpted out of clay labeled as "Play dough."

Humorous or not, the "real stuif" of Grim's modeling concerned complex social phenomena that are difficult if not impossible to capture using standard methods of sociological study. His abstract computational tools and imaging procedures offered empirical tools for working with assumptions that might otherwise be impossible to put to the test due to practical limitations or ethical considerations. Grim actually presented a working form of "virtual sociology."

But using visual abstractions to attempt to re-create social realities was challenged by commentator John T. Sanders of the Department of Philosophy, RIT. He considered it a problem to see things that aren't there, especially when they relate to social realities (for example, Grim ran simulations of the increase or decrease of racial prejudice according to variables of segregation and mixture of populations). Often, Sanders continued, all we are doing with scientific visualization is illustrating, with lots of tweaking to make it evocative. Models mimic theory, not embodied human situations. Grim countered that the models are not "tweaked." They have explanatory value and may stimulate insight into complex problems that might otherwise be overlooked or inaccessible. Moreover, the models are geared not toward proof, but imaginative play.

Final Fantasy: Computer Graphic Animations of Humanity

by Vivian Sobchack

Vivian Sobchack furthered the dialectic of proof and play into the filmic terrain of popular culture and recent breakthroughs in computer graphics. Her starting point was Alan Cholodenko's intuition that animation uncannily has something inanimate about it (3). This reversal led her discussion through a tortuous course of double binds and tensions between liveliness and morbidity, mechanism and organicism that issues from the computer animated image. Rather than dwell on these binaries, Sobchack's real emphasis was on the wayward sense of development in this type of image production: increased perfection of rendition seems less satisfying; too much detail swallows the narrative lines. Ultimately, the lines of the image become hyperreal as the structural meshes of models metamorphose into overwrought strands of hair--living yet lifeless. The hyperreal image forces life out of the picture and leaves us questioning what we want from animation.

Cyril Reade's comments responded to this question through a juxtaposition of counter-practices in animation with a more poetic turn. The work of William Kentridge (especially the 1999 piece, Drawing from Stereoscope) provided the fulcrum of that counterpoint through an entirely different strategy of imperfection, iconicity, and the erasure of detail. In using drawing and animation to re-stage the coming-into-being of imagery, Kentridge magically moves, according to Reade, toward another scale of value and extra-filmic reality about the politics of everyday life in South Africa. What is surprising, in Reade's terms, is how it is possible for Kentridge to engage the world of hyperreality and not cede connections and commitments to fully lived social experience and conflicts.

Engineering, Entropy, and Art: A Tour through the Thermodynamics of J. Willard Gibbs

by Kenneth Jolls

Kenneth Jolls from the Department of Chemical Engineers, Iowa State University gave a guided tour of the pioneering work of Josiah Willard Gibbs, who built geometrical representations and solid models of the thermodynamics of fluids in 1873. Gibbs was in many respects the first modern scientific visualizer, and this designation was especially interesting coming from Jolls who is widely regarded himself as a pioneer in the field. He emphasized the pedagogical value of imaging in the study of thermodynamics and even suggested its power to impact basic understandings of the entire field, despite some institutional resistance. Jolls demonstrated how sequences of graphics could "tell you a story" that would otherwise be dormant in massively complex phenomena and data.

As a scholar of rhetoric, Lisa Hermsen has a vested interest in stories that go beyond the movement of molecules. The act of Jolls telling Gibbs's story exemplifies a larger narrative of science concerning "great men of science" who map new landscapes and bring back accounts of their discoveries. Images tell a story and also form a rhetoric of travel, a way to make a compelling argument and bring back conclusions from the realm of the unknown to the known. Images become the argument, and the process of making and using them successfully builds the reputations of scientists. In the rhetorical sense, images make science.

A Hybrid of Hybrids: Nanotechnology, Imagery, and Architecture

by Peter Galison

Perhaps few individuals have been as deeply and comprehensively involved in the multiple layers of image, history and rhetoric of scientific representation as the featured speaker, Peter Galison. His presentation brought a broad spectrum of historical development and a sense of culmination to a day of interweaving multiple issues of imagery. He made sense of the melange through the tabular progression of three time periods beginning with 1730, 1830 and 1920 that were cross-sected by modalities of persona, image, practice and ontology. At the intersection of mode and period, Galison would tease apart the mingling of theory and experiment, subject and object that moves science and the representational arts in hybridized forms. Hybrids are assemblages of integrated fragments that do not entirely loose their identity in complex systems. Galison is famous for his close examinations of the cool yet monstrous combinations of picturing devices and counting mechanisms within the imaging assemblages of big science (like the Time Projection Chamber in physics) (4). At this conference, he raised a "third hybridity" in nanotechnology that mixes representing and intervening. From this level of mixing, he used "a hybrid of hybrids" to mean a larger-scale combination of hybrid imaging technologies with the disciplinary crosscurrents at large: crosscurrents that are tenuously embodied and indicated by architecture.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Stefi Baum (the forthcoming Director of the Center for Imaging Science, where the conference was held) closed the proceedings in a way more drawn to wonder than theory by relating her field of Astronomy to the progressive fixation with the visible. Perhaps the root of the hybridity of images lies, as she suggests, in the evolution of thinking and seeing together.

The probing and questioning carried out in the conference was a thoughtful encounter with the plural power of imagery carried out with a necessary blend of subtle passion. We live in a time, as Sobchack stated in the closing gathering of participants, "in a frenzy of the visible." In context, I think she intended the frenzy to relate to the multiplicity of images as well as any provocative content that a particular image may have. In our frenetic visual culture, one image leads to another. Moreover, as the conference attests, one imaging system leads to another whole modality of producing images and rendering experience visible.

Obviously there is much to do in rethinking technology, representation and the disciplines. It is gratifying to know that organizers Engstom and Selinger are planning to come out with a book based on the proceedings of this stimulating conference.

The author would like to thank Tim Engstom and Evan Selinger for their help in the draft of this article before publication.

NOTES:

1. For an excellent overview of iconoclasm as it persists in the world today, see Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, lconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Karlsruhe and Cambridge: ZKM and MIT Press, 2002).

2. Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others, "Sunday New York Times Magazine 23 May 2004: 24-29.

3. Alan Cholodenko, The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power, 1991), and The Illusion of the Beginning: A Theory of Drawing and Animation," Afterimage July/August 2000.

4. Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Chris Burnett is the Director of Visual Studies Workshop