WRT: Writer Response Theory

Alpha, uploaded by mark(s)elliott

mark(s)elliot’s photoset “Art” contains many photos of paintings… and also a small collection of simple pixelated graphics that have the distinct appearance of being born digital - perhaps in Illustrator or Photoshop, perhaps in Microsoft Paint.

The ‘aesthetic’ is quick and dirty - stark fonts, primary colors, and clip art, sans gradients, sans anti-aliasing, sans anything to take away the edge. This stands in sharp contrast to the lush, million-color, high-resolution photography that surrounds it… but so what?

Barthes claimed in Camera Lucida that photography has a certain hold on us based on an ontological claim - that a photograph represents a real interaction with real light at some real point in the past. Whatever happens in the subsequent madness of development, editing, digitizing, morphing, or what-have-you, a photograph (in as much as it is one) bears this relationship to past light.

For example, one artist’s statement (“If you can’t touch it. Then it must be art.”) only required a single edit, while a comparable message by another artist (“Please do not touch the artwork”) arrives mediated by dozens of layers of successive computer manipulations. Yet it is the second image that retains an anchor in reference to the real. Even with digital cameras uploading files directly to a digital service, this gap between the image-of-past-light and the image-out-of-the-machine seems just as large and just as visceral.

One small crossover has been the One Letter project, assembling photographic characters so that the machines can semaphor with past light (as discussed previously). What would be a gesture in the opposite direction?