Notes on Photography and Systems Philosophy
For a medium amount of time, scattered within various notebooks and furiously highlighted art theory essays; I have notes pertaining to my developing thoughts and feelings toward systems.
These notes belong to various authors and academics that have been either assigned or found.
Some of them are lost, hidden under my bed or left on the bus.
Although only Sontag, Burnham, Shanken and briefly Flusser will be cited, a loose thank you is too many forgettable essay titles and, of course, Death of The Author.
Late this term, I was assigned to read Muara Davey’s Notes on Photography and Accidents. I found refuge in her candidness, vulnerability and honesty. Here, I share her literary attitudes in the hope of an escape.
Sunday
It is 4:08 p.m., and I have just observed the streetlamp outside my house turn on. The light was dim and cool, but it is now a strong incandescence. The overcast clouds are covering any attempt to see the sunset. What is that system? The one of light in my metropolis. How does it interact with the ever-changing calendar day? How is it programmed? How essential does this system seem for the systems we rely on - How would we find our paths without that guiding light?
Reference:
For the last 5 years, the opportunity to study photography has, in my most absolute terms, been a test of my entire intellect. The seemingly cumbersome task of realizing a guiding philosophy in my art education and practice has proven a peregrinate. That is to say, a sort of solo adventure, an oppugn (a critical battle) with the self. This admission stems not necessarily from attempts at solitude but agrees with the most basic conditions of modern scientific thinking, in which the observer is the ‘elemental.’
Most essential on my journey has been the influence of peers and instructors. Each on their plane of reference, such as I, but with shared passion and motives, in a systemic brew - like a fictional wicked witch making magic out of the amalgamation of culture, identity, politics, semiotics, science and human agency.
Within the last three years, what has become more apparent to me, although its practicalities have proved earlier more subtle suggestions, is a philosophy that deals with context over content.
• A frame of consideration that emphasizes plurality and sees semiotics as coastal waves crashing onto land due to the complex interactions of oceanographic patterns.
• A frame of consideration that values connotation over denotation, holism over reductionism, organism over mechanism and process over product.
• That appraises environments wholly; physically, biologically, socially, politically and economically.
• That evaluates relationships as entanglements of shared experience, common motives and agreeing differences.
This way of thinking, both spiritually and logically, is one that, through recent research, acquainted me with a field of theory that has been developing most influentially over the past 60 years.
Ketoacidosis Dreams
My aunt had just gone home from her second battle with ketoacidosis, critically ill, her body in shock, she would later tell me she saw me in her dreams. Her biological system would stay in autopoiesis, she is alive.
I wish I could find a word to differentiate between socially constructed systems and physical ones. Then, I could describe the effect or reason why she dreamed of me and why I hold that close to my spiritual consciousness.
Ketoacidosis is a metabolic state caused by uncontrolled production of ketone bodies that cause metabolic acidosis. While ketosis refers to any elevation of blood ketones, ketoacidosis is a specific pathologic condition that results in changes in blood pH and requires medical attention. The most common cause of ketoacidosis is diabetic ketoacidosis, but it can also be caused by alcohol, medications, toxins, and, rarely, starvation.
Photographic Enterprise, and a Technical Image Universe
On the doormat of Susan Sontag’s book On Photography, within her first chapter of Plato’s Cave, we are introduced to a photographic ‘enterprise,’ an accommodation of all that the photograph participates. Sontag states an insatiability in which we interact with this new photographic apparatus, a new set of external systems that has radical responses to our internal systems of communication, value and experience.
“In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what
we have the right to observe”
“They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”
“Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us a sense that we can hold the whole
world in our heads – as an anthology of images.”
(Sontag,3)
Sontag, who wrote this in the 70’s, seems to recognize the intangible characteristics that are so hallowed by conceptual artists, theorists and curators.
I want to talk about the photograph as a system with a multiplicity of suspicions, interchanging between macro and micro perspectives.
As an object and an experience, as a cemented or “fixed” slice of time and place – which is always observed with complete disregard to prior.
As a simple pattern that is part of a complex system, a technical image universe.
These photographic objects of originally silver grain and now digital code have compounded to direct our spending patterns, match our lovers, and catch us speeding.
“Perception theory, ethics and aesthetics, and even our very sense of being alive are in crisis. We live in an illusory world of technical images, and we increasingly experience, recognize, evaluate, and act as functions of these
images.” Flusser, 38.
Tuesday
I have fallen just recently now into a relationship in which my brother and I seem to be more connected. I wouldn’t describe this feeling as normal, although it does feel radically familiar.
I guess if I could take a picture of serendipity. maybe that, maybe something else.
I am a little drunk.
Conundrum
For every single time, I am asked, “What do you take photos of?”
I find myself feeling uncomfortable. Without an unimpressive artistic didactic, I am left to ponder with honest intentions of answering the conundrum, but the answer always feels inadequate. Maybe it is because I am too concerned with labelling or that I find spewing words like sports, fashion, landscape and street photography hardly idiomatic.
Either way, a frequent response of mine would be,
“Ahhh, well idk… everything?”
“I guess my work is at a crossroads, between blank and blank.”
“I’ve been interested in this concept or system; how can I create a visual and conceptual discourse with so and so?”
What is hiding within these answers is not only a laudatory naiveness but a more specific attentiveness to how images work and why, rather than engulfing the conversation with cocksure energy, vis a vis that kid who wore too much axe body spray and one who wants most to proclaim their Leica inheritance.
Then, I might go on, if the participant is willing, to try and express to the extent in which I am enamoured by the systems photographs work within.
I say, “What else is so unmistakenly close to reality itself.”
•“What other than a family photo in your father’s wallet”
•“What other than digital depictions of war crimes”
•“What else could describe Ansel Adam’s Mountain valleys, or Sander’s Cook, or
Bresson’s leaping man, or Wall’s racial mimic.”
•“How can images hold our identities”
•“How could they prove our guilt”
•“or feed our fetishes.”
Note
It seems now like an appropriate time to shift from personal antidotes to begin to reference the history of systems theory that has been subtly and patiently waiting for its reading.
These may be difficult concepts to swallow; I hope my earlier interjections are found helpful.
System’s theory
I was always suspicious that the theory surrounding systems was present in our library archives.
They had been spoken loosely in class but usually with nihilistic undertones.
Here I found Edward A. Shanken, in his book Systems 2015, he outlines the history and applications of systems theory using a compilation of essays on the interdisciplinary topic.
Austrian Biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy proposed a general systems theory in the 1930s,
“As an approach to understanding open systems (ones that continuously interact with their environment or surroundings)” “..it shifts attention from the absolute qualities of individual parts and addresses the organization as a whole in more relativistic terms, as a dynamic process of interaction among constituent
elements.” Shanken,13
This initial definition of systems theory would become interlocked with the developing field of cybernetics; it is through this foundation of small, simple patterns and interactions that complex systems emerge (computers are fundamentally 1s and 0s, and organisms are built cell by cell). (interchange cybernetics and systems theory at will). I would like to acknowledge that applying these blanket concepts to photography can be daunting and will take a longer part of my life to do so.
“The first wave of cybernetics focused on how systems could maintain a steady state (homeostasis) through
feedback loops, which enabled self-regulation.”
(Shanken,13)
Homeostasis is a tendency towards equilibrium. It is not necessarily common within a system say, political systems, take the history of Syria’s power structure, for example. However, it is fundamental to biological systems of life and is replicated in many man-made systems. One could argue that Instagram’s algorithm is in a sort of homeostasis and requires, most importantly, the simple interactions of organic users uploading un-organic images. Shaken provides some examples of these homeostatic systems –
“For example, self-regulating control mechanisms consisting of feedback loops maintain human body
temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius).”
“Similarly, a home thermostat measures and responds to fluctuations in temperature triggering the climate control system to either heat or cool interior air in order to maintain the desired temperature.” (Shanken,13)
The Second Wave of Systems Theory would arrive, a poignant expansion via Von Foerster, who ultimately asserted the prose.
“..Including the observer as an inextricable part of the system – a second order phenomenon – thus introducing a radical sense of reflexivity.” Shanken,14
This was part of a huge paradigm shift in the Maths and Sciences, no longer was any observation purely objective, subjectivity was now a philosophical standard. (Shanken,14)
Defined as reflexivity the concept would cause radical shifts in conventional approaches to knowledge production in all academic disciplines. A circular relationship between cause and effect, with synonyms such as instinctive, automatic, and impulsive. Reflexivity, within the confines of analyzing semiotic systems, pushes toward the importance of critical and analytical thinking, especially within one’s perspective and the differences of others. (Shanken,14)
The Third Wave of Systems Theory was identified by the literary critic N. Katherine Hayles, which dealt primarily with the behaviour of complex systems, focusing on how to interact within a system to get it to evolve in new directions. (Shanken,14)
Within the third wave is the position necessary for fair critical thought and for means to affect any system you may be concerned or invested in or embedded inside. Here is where I suppose within our art systems, great contemporary artwork does not necessarily require all knowledge and didactic intention but at least curiosity, openness and a keen sense of sociological systems.
Here, in all hope, I have helped situate systems theory as a critical approach to the widest range of ecologies, economies, social and cultural phenomena and computing apparatuses.
Trees
For a while now I have fallen upon a fascination with trees.
What appears now as a symbolic and visual representation of my intrigue in networks and systems, the tree trunk has provided a comfortable and relatable silhouette for an oftenoverlooked appreciation of systems.
Systems theory can most effectively consider the relationships between organic and non-organic systems. I did this my way by seeking out a position at a utility arborist company. Here, I was at the precipice of the relationship between communications and electricity infrastructure and the natural, unruly world. Each was a complex system, and the balance between both was litigated by men with chainsaws, smoking cigarettes and receiving overtime.
System Aesthetics
Rising from the earlier concepts of systems theory and cybernetics, Jack Burnham wrote System Aesthetics;(1968), he attempted to develop a larger vocabulary to express the paradigm shifts earlier provoked in math, humanities and science, which swept through the new world of conceptual, contemporary art. (Burnham,113)
“Increasingly, ‘products’ – either in art or in real life – become irrelevant, and a different set of needs arise: these revolve around such concerns as maintaining the biological livability of the Earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding the growing symbiosis in a man-machine relationship, establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and deifying alternative patterns of education, productivity and
leisure.”
“We are now in a transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture.”
“Here, change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.”
“A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable, ongoing relationships between organic and nonorganic systems, be these neighbourhoods, industrial complexes, farms, transportation systems, information
centers, recreation centers, or any other matrixes of human activity.” (Burnham,113)
What is being felt is a radical shift of value within a larger society, maybe not so obviously within a closeminded examination of fine-art auctions, but as a broader change in the systems of art education and art communities that before donated value primarily within its craft is now within its systems of culture and its conceptual framework.
“The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environments.” Burnham,114
The word didactic, I am a bit skeptical of. This is because, within the art that speaks of systems, the importance for me is the inquiry, the attempt to learn, not to teach.
Where, for me, systems count for art is here within Burnham’s words.
“relations between people and between people and the components of their environments.”
This seemingly unassuming incomplete sentence helps me couple with the guiding philosophy I am trying to mature, it helps me frame my life, my choices and reactions; it helps me frame my
art.
Note
I do realize that there are many other topics of photography worthy of essays and discourse, and that this is not a traditional final essay.
I was asked to consider Sontag’s on Photography, and I practically departed from the first chapter. I did read Sontag’s essays, and I did absorb them. What I have already written about her sense of photographic surrealism is because I am interested in the ethereal aspects of photographs. These, too, will prove to only be understood by systems in time.
But by fate of chance or by reaction of my system to others, I found myself here, writing my notes on systems.
Works Cited
Burnham, Jack, ‘Systems Esthetics,’ Artforum, September 1968.
Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Shanken, Edward A. Systems. The MIT Press ; Co-Published by Whitechaper Gallery, 2015.
Sontag, Susan. Susan Sontag on Photography. Penguin, 1989.