I don’t want my work to be justified by some sort of a product.

Controversy belongs to art.

Every time you offer another perspective you produce a controversy.

A lot of people don’t want to move their point of view; they don’t want to be disturbed by a new vision. People don’t like diversity.

So, every time you offer diversity you get into trouble.

                                                                                                 / O. Toscani  /

Atemporality and the creative mind

So, we are living a unique chapter of history in the present in which we are confronted with problematic post-industrial societies, with an era in which run-down political – economical systems and new inventions as digital social networks are simultaneously present alongside a fast paced developing technology.

We gradually grew into this present situation, in which we have a growing global disorder, a potentially failed global economic system, a world blinded by surreal advertising utopias stimulating the pursuit of some sort of material happiness, a transition to nowhere.

Human intelligence is not really advancing at the moment towards the summit, a definable advanced peak of civilization. Not yet, but I believe that this phase will pass and a new system will emerge from this atemporal social network culture. We won’t really have a choice.

Our world is changing and these changes are on autopilot. Systems controlling and driving systems and man needs to figure out the rules and values. We have to see where we are and where we are going.

Our discontent with the right now and right here brought us Atemporality where the past, present and future collided into each other, revealing time’s true nature as an abstract absolute paradigm.

Some people choose to dig their head in the decaying present to avoid unpleasant confrontations with reality and many are stuck with an antiquated analog mind frame as they try to hold on to a sentiment about past structures.

“History is not a science; history is an effort in the humanities. It’s about meanings, values, language, historical identity, institutions, culture. “

( Bruce Sterling on Atemporality at Transmediale 10 in Berlin, 2010 )

If we want to understand the dynamics of the Now and predict the trajectory of the social-technological expansion in the future accurately, we have to look at the events and their dynamics at the previous states. History is no longer a linear journey from point A to point B. The emerging network societies are expanding, mutating in all dimensions as the intricate system of information is becoming knowledge, which in return generates even more information within the same network.

So, what is Atemporality? And what does it mean to me as an artist?

Quoting Bruce Sterling one more time:

“Atemporality is best defined as a problem in the philosophy of history.

What we can know about the past, and about the present, and about the future. How do we represent and explain history to ourselves? What are its structures and its circumstances? What are the dynamics of history and futurity? What has happened before? What is happening now? What is really likely to happen next? “

“ What is really likely to happen next?” I find this question fascinating in regard to photography and art.

Seth Godin in his book, "Linchpin" suggests that information technology and globalization will lead to creative jobs being the only ones left in advanced economies.

“This is the giant unwritten headline of our post-industrial economy. If your job isn't creative/interactive or local, it's probably going to go away.”

Crowd founding financed photographer Aaron Huey’s documentary project “America’s native prisoners of war” and he is using billboards and other advertising platforms to call attention to the problems of indigenous people in the US and around world. Projects such as this are a good example of dealing with social- economical crisis’s in the present by using contemporary methods and media to target unsolved issues of the past. Which, are still creating tension within societies in the present and with that delaying progress towards new, more improved systems.

Now, more than ever before the creative power within photography must be exploited to reach and engage people and to stimulate the mind, instead of keeping it hooked on the delusive quest of pursuing happiness. As this project also proved: commercial platforms can act as unexpected channels of intellectual value.

Digital photography as a medium is not just a temporal, fashionable, choice of the time for me. It is a lucid language, which let’s me visualize conceptual ideas based on an atemporal mindset. Photography and especially art has gone through enormous changes in the past, but it always had the human mind as a constant creative factor at the base. Now, as we are discovering the potentials of the digital era the human intentionality is getting reduced or completely taken out of the process. Generative art and computer assisted digital photography is based on computer software, on operating systems. As you learn about the new generation of programs they also learn about you and about your methods of work. Ridiculous as it may sound, but we are on the way to humanize the computers and software we use.

If I have a question these days, I use search engines which are also becoming more and more personalized. There are intangible algorithms embedded already within Google, Youtube and Facebook, which are keeping a close watch at my behavior and silently learning about my habits and personal interest.

Art, and in some ways photography, is no longer about having talent or an eye for aesthetics. These days everybody is an artist or a photographer. Websites as Flickr have became visual data banks of the world. By now practically everything has been photographed. Talent and the idea of the artist in the traditional manner is the past and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

A creative society is the gateway to a future where a dynamic equilibrium between man and technology is maintained by a constructive society.

Practically everybody has a chance to participate. The tools are there. The information and knowledge is available, but even more importantly the freedom is there for the individuals to create, to express themselves in any which way. As for professional artists and photographers it all comes down to the content, to the underlying philosophy, intentions and the context within the work is presented.

By now we are accustomed to the once shocking visual language of art forms such as Surrealism from advertisements. We are no longer shocked by the ferocity of violence in the media or in computer games, let alone the imagery of wars in far away foreign countries.

In my opinion, right now, photography as a form of art matters more than ever.

It is no longer about simple one-way communication or about mirroring reality.

It’s just not enough. There is a need for good, non pre- digested art and for open artworks conceived by creative curious minds, which stimulate the situation awareness.

It’s this creative curious mind, which knows no limits and has the ability to look beyond the awe of the future that can help us to understand what’s going on in the present.

The digital age we live in has changed not only our image culture, but also challenged our perception of reality. We are freed of rigid structures and solid empirical reality. The digital medium is an adequate tool to reflect this new age, as photography has become a synthetic process again. Besides the decisive moment and the non-cropped frame of reality in front of us, now we can also present a constructed, synthetic reality, based on gathering and compositing information in the form of binary codes. This is an augmentation of photography with new multiple choices and not a limitation. 

Reality and the digital photograph

Our experience of time and matter is simply an illusion and our perceptions are based on assumptions. Yet, we still believe what we see and we believe our interpretation of what we saw. We don't even know that we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this interpretation is reality, but in philosophy it's called naive realism.

Philosophy has rejected naive realism in every century since Plato and yet most of the people still act on the basis of naive realism.

We guess at our best knowledge based on our paradigms, but as a matter of fact we are trapped in a shadow world. At the end our reality and our attitude towards this real world still resembles Plato’s cave with the only difference, that our shadows have depth, an extra spatial dimension.

Photography projects reality onto a two-dimensional plane. The resulting three-dimensional objects, the photographic prints, are showing us the two-dimensional projections of a three-dimensional world that exists in the fourth and higher dimensions.

However, the digital image, without printing it out, is virtually non-material since these pictures are based on electronic fluxes and on abstract binary codes running in the background. Our visual perception is behaving in a very similar way;

Our visual system allows us to assimilate information from the environment. The act of seeing starts when the lens in our eye focuses an image of the surroundings onto a light-sensitive membrane in the back of the eye, on the retina. The retina is part of the brain. It is isolated and it acts as a converter. It converts patterns of light into neuronal, electric, signals. The lens of the eye focuses light on the photoreceptive cells of the retina, which detects the photons of light and respond by producing neural impulses.

 

I guess, based on the non-material, binary character of digital photography we could theoretically say, that the digital medium is a more accurate representation of our visual perception and reality than analog photography. Where complex chemical processes were involved in creating a print of colors and forms, which themselves are simply different wavelenghts of electromagnetic radiation and vibrating particles.

Situation awareness

Man appreciated and feared all the power hidden within nature for centuries. Didn’t understand much of it, but what they did understand was a humble acceptance of the world, which wasn’t created by human hand, which needed to be guarded and taken care of. The imagery and its symbolism through out art history talks about this fearfulness, awe and hope. This was the state of natural awareness.

The discovery and stimulation of science and the birth of technology of the 18^th and 19^th century has transferred us towards the 20^th century modern, industrial and post- industrial society, which gradually moved away from nature and granted us the technical awareness. Meanwhile, man exhausted nearly all the natural resources by the end of the 20^th century.

With the arrival of the second millenium, the exponentially accelerating technology brought us the digital age, the last stop before reaching the Post-human era and singularity. This jump from analog to digital awareness means that there is no distinguished line between nature and technology anymore since they are both recognized as equal methods to create organic and non-organic matter. The characteristic of this period is that nearly every natural phenomenon can be explained by scientific models and can be replaced by a technical device.

Computers are becoming organic systems, which are no longer simply programmed, but are also self - learning. Microchips are using neuro networks to transmit information and, - to execute commands. The augmentation of human body, which started with adding simple, external hearing aids, eyeglasses and prosthetics to replace missing body parts, has continued with the experiments of implanting neuroprosthetics and with the usage of nanotechnology. The highly complex merger between technology and organic life forms has triggered a new step in human evolution.

We are becoming integrated with technology, beyond the medical needs to restore a healthy state, into enhancing our general capacity.

The first humanoid automata have been created by Al-Jazari in 1206.

Nearly 800 years later, since the early1960’s, industrial robots have been part of our life. But, the sci-fi concept of humanoid robots with artificial intelligence capable of learning, making decisions on their own, only appeared just now at the beginning of the 21^st century. These robots resemble humans in a very precise manner.

In a way the futuristic concepts of the past are becoming a reality.

Technology is granting us - with the dream or nightmare depending on the individual’s standpoint – God- like powers. Man is becoming able to create life from dead, non-organic matter.

Photography’s popularity, our addiction to family snapshots and our desire to be The Photographer created a market for mass-produced consumer cameras. The manufacturers picked up on the popularity and the democratic nature of the medium because it meant profitable investment. And with the aid of colorful commercial photography they sold us the dream. The plan worked and the consumers wanted more, so the camera manufacturers invested even more in the technology, which has stimulated research and development in media technology. At the break of the new millennium it became clear that digitalism is the way of the future, so we entered the next level, the age of digital photography, which ironically rendered analog photography obsolete.

The transition from analoge to digital image corresponds to the changes in our consciousness. It shows similarity to the changes that are happening right now as we are stepping over from an analoge awareness to a digital orientated mindset. To the analoge awareness the world really existed, for the digital consciousness the world means overflowing information provided by search engines and interconnected social- network societies. It means non material, online cyber-realities, which are in every bit mirror copies of our physical reality. Lovers now sit at seasides in a binary world to watch a computer generated sunset while believers can visit the 3D model of their church in Second Life to confes the sins they commited in the material world to a computer program, to an avatar of a priest.

Gradually we reached the extreme opposite of a state of natural awarenes.

Technology is here because through evolution we learned to use our hands, which gave us freedom to manipulate matter. Our techno journey began as the early humans started creating tools based on their needs, but by the 21st century this process has been reversed. Now we create new tools for which we are generating needs.

We can find purpose for them, we can learn to use them, but these new tools are no longer based on our needs and most of the users have no idea how their new digital devices work or how they were produced.

In the early 21st century the financial interest, the greed of a junkie is the drive behind developing the new tools. The multi billion dollar industries investing in research and development of new technologies are feeding on man’s desire for long, pleasurable life and on man’s vanity.

The question isn’t anymore whether technology is good or not, but how can we upgrade our awarenes to match up with technology and to maintain a positive status quo.

The situation has resemblence to driving on a raceway. We can’t stop anymore, because if we try to do that the system will become completely unsustainable. Human population has reached a magnitude by now, that has led to the point that our civilization could no longer be sustained without technology.

Alive in death

Well, the point is, that even though analog photography was invented in the mid 19^th century, it had to go a long way before it became the “modern medium” we usually mean when talking about photography these days.

The reason for this is not so much technology, but man’s awareness. People couldn’t relate to this medium for long time. It opened up an unprecedented world. It was magic, it was a shocking reality sometimes and it showed corners of the world, previously unseen by most of the people alive at the time.

It wasn’t only the piece of paper, the print itself, that they had to comprehend, but a whole new changing world.

Film-based photography has produced some amazing work and photographers during its lifetime, but in a way it was short lived since by the beginning of the 21^st century it was also more and less declared dead.

Of course photography as a medium lived on in the digital age too, but there was something really different about it. Somehow the magic was swapped for nostalgia.

Analog photography has grown to occupy a very important place in our culture and in our hearts, regardless whether it did or did not tell the truth. It established modern visual communication and has aided fine art to break free. It gave us the image that after centuries descended to the people. It meant the emergence of the millions of grainy family photos and the birth of the myth of the Photojournalists, as Capa and Bresson. It has created the cult and glamour of fashion photography with names as Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon.  These less than hundred years gave myths, glamour, adventure, and emotions to us, which have become in a way more important than the truth. It was something far away, out of reach, yet really close. These sentiments of the analog era are beautiful, but only one side of the medium however, because the very same photography was also the stimulating force for the advertising industry in the 20^th century which moved our society towards the unreal Barbie world of Holland’s Next Top Model in the 21^st century.

It is nearly impossible to imagine from our point of view in the present, what the world would have turned out to be without photography. Within less than a hundred year this medium, which still struggled to be accepted at the beginning of the 20th century, had in a way more impact on shaping our culture than the past centuries of art and this is especially true when we look at the first decade of the 21^st century, since its “death”.

Shifting qualities

Painted art has existed parallel to human civilization for long time, but it has been mainly the domain of the ruling classes, Catholic Church and,-aristocracy. The general purpose of paintings was not so much to mirror reality, but to create narrative illustrations of historic and religious events, of characters or to strengthen the position of those in power. Their composition was based on academic traditions, gaining meaning through their implanted symbolism. Their creators had been praised for their talents of mastering the medium; paint, colors, light and forms, but in fact, with today’s terms, they were the means to promote, to create a mystified brand identity for the elitist system. They represented some sort of manually generated reality. Paintings were composed in a memory state, based on the visual experiences of the real world, usually in the artist’s ateliers. They had been assembled as a composite of sketched up memories, the artist imagination and talent to organize the elements.

Photography as the newborn medium of the late 19^th century, had to face up against more than 1800 years of tradition in image culture.

The first daguerreotypes were cheaper and faster to make than paintings, hence they became widely accessible and immensely popular among the general public whom couldn’t afford a painting before this invention came about.

For the first time in history even the members of the working class could keep a visual memory of their ancestors, thus those who passed away could remain in a closer proximity of the living ones. In a way these personal photographs, through their emotional charge, could occupy a higher importance in the average family’s life, than some of the important public figures that had been portrayed in paintings. To us, living in the present, this might seem obvious, but these changes have brutally interrupted the traditions of seeing and depicting the world and of,- reading images. The general importance of the subject matter started to dissolve. The human eye, which has learned through thousands of years, to look in awe at art with embedded meanings, had to come to terms with the image that mirrored the world frozen in time without any particular importance, just as it was.

One of the fundamental characteristics of photography was that it directly dealt with reality. The mindless, soulless mechanical device, as it had been seen at its birth, did record, without any prejudice whatever had been put in front of its lens. As it seemed at the time, unlike what was the case in paintings, there was nothing more to it. Potentially everything and everybody had become an equally interesting target for the camera.

The classical methods of composing a picture have changed directions as well. Instead of working outward from the center toward the edges, with a conscious composition of all the visible and meaningful elements in mind, now the frame of the image guided the photographers. They were isolating a fragment of reality, based on a subjective selection, as they were recording an already existing composition presented by nature. The leftovers, the visual noise of the world falling outside of the selection around the edges, previously only known from Japanese prints, was disapproved by the conservative art world, which opposed against the photographic image as they saw it as a threat to the higher values of classical art.

Around the same time as photography started to fight for acceptance in the art world and as it started to mutate into new forms such as portrait, documentary photography, art and street photography, the world of fine art has also went through a major shift.

With the birth of Impressionism in France, painters left their ateliers to work in the open air as an attempt to accurately and objectively record the visual aspects of reality in terms of evanescent effects of sunlight.

These French artists, Monet, Manet, Pissaro, Degas and Cézanne among others were no longer satisfied with neither the rules, which the academy were trying to impose on art, nor with the topics they were expected to depict. The importance of the traditional subject matter was downgraded and they shifted their attention towards manipulating colors, tones, and textures as ends in themselves. Manet treated the subjects of his paintings as means to create compositions of areas of flat color. The perspective depth was reduced so that the illusory three-dimensional space of the painting wouldn’t distract the viewer from looking at the surface patterns and their relationships of the picture.

In the late 1860s, the impressionists started to paint landscapes with the main interest to record colors as they were in the natural environment at any given moment of the day. They abandoned the traditional landscape palette of darker colors and instead painted in lighter, sunnier, more brilliant tones. They began painting the dynamics of light and the reflected colors upon a variety of surfaces. They tried to reproduce the animated effects of sunlight and shadow as well as of direct and reflected light, which they observed. They abandoned the use of grays and blacks in shadows as they saw it as inaccurate and used complementary colors instead to reproduce the instant visual impressions as registered by the eye’s retina. Artists as Seurat and Signac started to build up their paintings out of discrete points of pure harmonizing or contrasting colors, thus evoking the broken-hued brilliance and the variations of hue produced by sunlight and its reflections. Forms lost their clear outlines and became dematerialized and vibrating in their pictures, just as they saw them in the actual outdoor conditions. Traditional formal compositions were abandoned in favor of a more casual and less contrived disposition of objects within the picture frame. The Impressionists extended these new techniques to depict scenes in a fashion that began to resemble the photographic vision.

Fine art broke completely loose of the burden of narrative story telling in the following decades and in fast progression, paintings had exploded into abstract forms and colors, introducing a vehicle for a greater amount of self-expression than ever before.

Meanwhile, the newborn photography, even though it had all the potentials we came to discover later on through the 20^th century, had to suffer decades of identity crisis. The early practitioners, in their attempt to gain recognition for the medium, copied the old standards and techniques known from academic art and graphic prints.

The general belief was that photography could exist only as an extension of painted art, as the true value of the medium was not yet fully discovered.

It wasn’t until the turn of the century that photography really started to find its own identity. It took another 15 years before photographers started to move away from the early artificial aspects of Pictorialism and proceed through Straight photography to a mature state with distinguished forms.

Nearly a hundred years after Nicéphore Niépce has taken the first photograph, photographers finally wanted their work to look like photographs in their own right, instead of mimicking paintings. They started to value the qualities that were unique to photography.

However, the era between the two World Wars produced another turn.

The emergence of Constructivism and Bauhaus introduced an entire range of new directions for photography. Photographers as László Moholy Nagy started to manipulate their images and experimented with developing and printing processes, with multiple exposures in such a fashion that these photographs started to resemble abstract paintings.

Pre- digitalism

The first decades of the photographic image falls in a socially instable era. The Spring of Nations was on the horizon with revolutions rising against European monarchies and a multitude of modifications transformed the foundation of European society during the first half of the 19th century.

Liberal reformers and radical politicians started to turn their attention to revise national governments. Popular press expanded the political awareness and at the same time the technological changes revolutionized the life of the working classes. New values and ideas such as popular liberalism, nationalism and socialism appeared. Modern society owes its social background to the great political and economical disruptions that had been taking place in the 18^th and 19^th century. These movements were the continuum of a transformation running through this age, which since the Renaissance and the Reformation created a path of development differentiating the West, from the rest of the world.

The rise of science, as a practical approach, has its roots in individualism and secularism. These new ideas climaxed in explosive events toward the end of the 18th century. Individualism cultivated the ground for political revolutions, while secularism stimulated a positive environment for technological innovations at the arrival of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

As mankind proceeded through the Age of Reason and the Age of Enligthment towards Modernism, during the period of 1842–43, Ada Lovelace – the daughter of Lord Byron- translated the Italian mathematician, Luigi Menabrea's essay on the English inventor Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. She added an extra set of notes to the article, which had eventually become longer and in time more significant than the essay itself. It described an algorithm for calculating a mathematical sequence ( Bernulli numbers ) with Babbage's invention. The world's first computer program had been written and Ada Lovelace is credited as the very first computer programmer. She was ahead of her time, since electronic computers haven’t been developed until the mid-20^th century. Unlike her contemporaries she maintained a vision, that one-day computers would exceed the simple task of calculating and they would become a tool of creation and be an essential part of life.

Even though pinhole cameras were mentioned already around the 4^th and 5^th centuries BC, by the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and by the Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid, photography as medium has been invented only in the early 19^th century. Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph ever with a camera obscura in 1826 and the first photograph showing a person in the picture appeared twelve years later, in 1838 made by Daguerre.