[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 76, Issue 3

[Alex Gibson]

Drawing with computers has been something of an obsession of mine for nearly
7 years (http://alexgibson.com.au/image/tid/9). It's important to remember
that the computer is programmed. The machine carries out the logic, the
cause and effect, to the letter (and BIT). The concepts and relationships
developed in the program are considered, included or discarded by the
programmer, a human.

Agency is a strange idea, and one that is difficult to place. We rarely talk
about the agency of pencil and paper, but often we speculate on the agency
of code, circuits and complex machines. Computer vision algorithms are
breaking down an old specialisation that we humans pride ourselves on,
namely being able to recognise stuff within a field of vision and related it
to other stuff. But it is the viewer (a human) that places the image within
a complex symbolic or imagined system of language and culture, not the
computer.

Visibility is the organisation of sense data into inter-subjective and
social realities. We see what we know and what we are conditioned to see.
This is perhaps most evident in a life drawing class, where participants are
all making marks of what they know, and perhaps (as Zizek would say) what
they don't know that they know; anatomy, gesture, feeling, perspective,
proportion, etc. The subject is isolated, framed and rendered according to
the skill and limit of the artists. A computer drawing is no different,
except part of the mechanical act of looking is deferred. The wet camera of
the human eye and its relational brain to the dry obscura of the cam and its
various wares. The machine is programmed with the instructions of the
programmer, and these instructions betray prejudices', preferences,
aesthetic whims and other culturally conditioned limits that are visible, if
we decide to look.
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