1. In Mark Hansen’s article, he starts off with the scene from Bladerunner in which Deckard manipulates a photograph in order to discover evidence leading to the whereabouts of the replicants. In his investigation, he operates a computer and reveals the invisible by walking through the image as if it is a 3d world rather than a flat image. However, this manipulation of photographs and the digital technology comes into question as he brings up William Mitchell. Mitchell grows wary of the present day digital manipulation of images and questions “the status and interpretation of the visual signifier” (57). Hansen proposes Mitchell’s guidelines limits the scope of digital photography and imaging. Instead of digitizing a hardcopy image, one can construct a 3d environment within the computer and take a picture within this environment. Game developers often such virtual worlds and take screenshots of these virtual environments. This may supposedly break Mitchell’s limits, however images within computers still relay the images back to in a 2d format. While Mitchell may worry about the implications of digital, digital photography acts as a quicker, perhaps more efficient tool in traditional photography, bypassing many steps of development.
2. Hansen later raises the question of the human perception versus the machine vision. Several theorists before the digital age criticized the human mind in operating in a camera-like fashion, taking snapshots of reality and missing out on true motion. As the technology evolved to present day digital media, Hansen brings up Florian Rotzer’s belief of “functional isomorphism.” “A person does not see the world out there,” rather “see[ing] the model created by the brain and projected outwards” (65). Hansen suggests that if the computer vision “abandons perspective entirely in favor of a completely realized modelization,” then it is possible to modify what our perspective. This poses the problem that human construction becomes as malleable and controlled like a photographic image. However, Hansen rebuts that the computer vision can only be an instrument or aid of human perspective.
3. The digital technology acts as an extension of our bodies or rather “embodied prosthesis.” Hansen then quotes architect Lars Spuybroek, suggesting that all thoughts and movements belong to the mind and within our body. These thoughts come to fruition when we will our body to move and operate in the “haptic” world. Hansen then interprets the computer to be an extension of our bodies, able to extend as a prosthetic into the virtual world. Suddenly our “body, in short has become crucial mediator between information and form: the supplemental sensorimotor intervention it operates coincidences with the process through which the image is created” (78). Our body acts as an intermediate between the mind and the virtual world full of data.
-Benjamin Louie
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4 comments:
Louie's response essentially sums up the main points of Hansen's critique of manipulation of photography. While people like Deckard are able to utilize a computer to enhance the senses, the emphasis on seeing through photography calls into question our dependence on technology. However, Louie asserts that while we use these tools, our bodies and our minds are still physically separate from technology and the "virtual world." None the less, while these elements are distinctly separate, they are also interrelated when trying to produce such a kind of manipulated reality through the use of the senses with the technology. Louie affirms these arguments by forming a succinct reiteration of Hansen's article.
Benjamin's summary is accurate, but one small part of Hansen I'd like to point out is when Bergson is brought up. Hansen says "Bergson goes on to insist that perception is always mixed with affection and memory, bodily faculties that mark the positive contribution of the body to the process of perception." Of course, I must disagree...I think the fact that the human mind relies too much on memory and "affection" is what makes it an inferior system in comparison to the computer. A computer is objective whereas the human mind is not. Benjamin says it well in the second to last sentence of his second paragraph, describing the human mind as "malleable and controlled". Although a photograph can be manipulated too, it does not alter itself on its own--only the will of the human mind can do that.
I thought that Ben brought up a very important point in the second paragraph about a person seeing the world as a model created by their brain. This brings into question the point in Hansen’s article that a “virtual picture taken by the computer is a data set, not a fragment of the real” (57). Perhaps the virtual picture taken by the computer is not so bad if we can’t trust the image that our brain projects as being real. The virtual image is on the same level at the image created by our brain, each being a false representation of the real. Perhaps the crisis created by visual technology is not so bad, creating an alternate form of vision rather than an incorrect form of vision.
Philip Schmidt
In response to the second paragraph it seems like philosophers are always changing their interpretation on how human perception works as technology evolves. When the camera was invented the mind instantly worked like a camera. Then the digital video came out and now our minds work like that. I think philosophers are sitting around waiting for a new technological breakthrough so they can compare it to human perception. They would have nothing to write about without advancement in technology, especially nothing to complain about.
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