Video Essay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV2zrtqz1Yo&t=1s

The green screen is pure visual potential. A stem cell yet to be differentiated as it becomes something else entirely. Skin, muscles, neurons; hair. Its surface upholds no opposition to the possibilities of its potential objects. There’s no tension in the production of its visual arrangements. As opposed to the limits found in the optical capture, of the self-organizing events, of the real. It contains a space so big that anything could fit inside its nothingness. But then, simultaneously, it also presents full opposition to every object, as it denies them all, in its emptiness. 

This surface behaves as an active canvas, whose logic promotes the end of friction, between a narrative and its documentation. All contradictions are to be replaced, digitally. A smooth and frictionless surface that even meaning can’t help but become a skid mark on it. An electric fence emerges around the territory of its narratives, as we edit out the nuance, that can only arise, from the integration of contradictions. Speculating with the value of meaning as a narrative real estate is enforced.

Before the first noun was ever uttered in this world, our oral cavity must have found itself often, transducing to sound; the deep electric signals of pleasure and pain as incoherent noise. As that echo reorganized itself inside a cave, a listener must have pointed at the scene with a finger, while looking at someone else, implying direction. An index finger commonly pointed at bones, celestial bodies, or at the source of a sound may it be rustle, creak or moan.

As time elated the spoken word came about, making it possible to point at things that weren’t immediate and close. Drawings, as a gesture, untangled themselves from the words and breath of people, and for the first time, objects could not only be described abstractly but also frozen in time; as an image only allows. Drawings then became words as they lost their visual intricacies by becoming more simple, practical and democratic.

Suddenly the camera appeared, standing in a field, surrounded by whatever exists, covering his eyes with both hands. An imaginary child experiencing the darkroom of his eyes shut. Until he lowered his hands, allowing, for a fraction of a second; a sliver of the world inside of him. Becoming a witness to an image developing in his mind.

After the revolution of nouns, photography was an opportunity to interact with something real. To bear witness at the solidity of things illuminated by a star. The optical interaction of glass and light allowed by a shutter; the chemical representation of a solar event.

From the index finger, to the spoken, to a drawing on a cave. From the written word, to photography; arose the prompted image. Today photography is produced with the same finger once used, to click a shutter or to point at the objects of the world. The caption becomes the image as we prompt a description of it, before it instantly appears. 

Technologies like Midjourney or Dall-e work by assembling them mathematically by an algorithm; processing language against a visual database with no human subjectivity in sight except that of the technology itself. The photographic image ceases to be a residue of our interaction with the real. What does this new process in photographic production articulate about us and our current time? It seems like the blank index of such non-optical photography fails to point at the visual raw material utilized to produce such goods. The invisible labor implied on the capture of the human production of images posted on the internet, that enabled the construction of such datasets. The diffusion of their sources is obscured in opposition to the reproduction and recurrent visibility of their past themes, representations, and aesthetics. As we enter a space, where the written instantly produces its own images, the human mind needed to decode them; becomes unnecessary. As these images are instantly rendered only their authors remain in the obscurity of a darkroom. The web seems to regurgitate our images back at us, behind a paywall. And the photographic index becomes redundant in the ecstasy of its productivity. The fever of the visual with its finger pointing at itself, only at the service, of instantaneous storytelling.

The most honest state of an image, is that which is able to describe its own potential to surrender, to any political narrative. The sincerity of the green veil as a blank input field. The stem cell as an ellipsis, one step before the manufacture of images so malleable, they become liquid. An image that is the vertigo of any image as any implied meaning, adapts to the narrative container that deploys them. In this regard, the photographic, acquires a volatile condition, as it’s subjected to the speculation of its narrative effect, in the marketplace of ideas. Its narrative surplus behaves like profit as they become convincing.

The liquid image is financial. Exit liquidity of meaning, as their circulation takes the place of the index. Are they empty like fiat money, backed by nothing else than their own logic and pervasiveness? An image bubble ensues at the inflationary practice of their overproduction. Will their indexical quality come crashing down like a stock now deemed useless? As society gets served its own images over and over, a narrative singularity emerges, as myth becomes available to the highest bidder. Impoverished at the helm of the deep fake. 

If the digital image is alive but nonvital, what could be told about the reflections it produces? Does Narcissus warrant a warning, regarding the reflection that so entices him? It seems like the real produces no reflection in our current information ecologies. Screens nowadays camouflage blindness as sight. As Narcissus stares at his liquid mirror he misses the most telling cue about its own reflective quality: the ondulation of the surface contradicting the stable condition of the image produced. As the water scrolls like a digital feed all he sees is the production of his own subjectivity reflected back at him. The shallow real maintained by the deep faked reality of a nonexisting other. Everything except contradictions are allowed to traverse this river. And if, in the event of ever experiencing them, will they only serve the purpose of affirming the self at the expense of the other?

Roberto Salazar
Nov 2022