The Entangled Apparatus: Cameras as Non-distancing Devices

Birk Weiberg 237 The Entangled Apparatus Cameras as Non-distancing Devices In her reading of the philosophy-physics of Niels Bohr, Karen Barad has proposed a new ontology based on the post-representational concepts of diffractions and material-discursive practices. In my paper I trace these concepts in the INTRA SPACE project from the perspective of reading the experimental system as an apparatus for the production of real-time technical images. I do so by comparing it to recent developments in computational photography and by contextualizing the project within post-photographic artistic practices. A central question herein is whether photography can be understood as a non-distancing technique. Birk Weiberg Image/Data In a provisionally furnished room on the ground floor of the former post office at Dominikanerbastei in Vienna, a large rear-projection screen structures the space into dedicated areas. The area in front of the screen is an open space surrounded by subordinated areas with seats for an audience, a table for technical staff, and a backstage area for the projection beam itself. A performer—or in the lingo of the INTRA SPACE project, a visitor—enters the void and stands still facing the screen. After a few basic movements the figure depicted in the projected CGI video adjusts its posture to the one of the visitor. Visitor and avatar are now linked in a similar way to puppeteer and puppet. However, there are no strings attached and both figures have about the same size. This apparently simple scheme then unfolds its very own idiosyncrasies of which the following text only surveys those related to the roles that images and cameras play herein. In the experimental system of the INTRA SPACE project we find two types of images—all of which exist primarily in real time. The first kind of images are found on the large screen. While they appear to be familiar in their mirror-like function, they are notable for their origin. The second kind of images only appear on the screens of a control computer and thus are not directly visible for performers and spectators. These images originate from a dozen small IP cameras distributed throughout the room and directed at the performance space. They provide what Harun Farocki has called operative images, images that are part of specific procedures, images that work, and that are recorded for machines rather than for human perception.1 They belong to a motion tracking system, which provides information about the posture of the visitor 1 Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images,” Public 29 (2004): 12–22; Volker Pantenburg, “Working Images: Harun Farocki and the Operational Image,” in Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict, ed. Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); and Aud Sissel Hoel, “Operative Images: Inroads to a New Paradigm of Media Theory,” in Image—Action—Space, ed. Luisa Feiersinger, Kathrin Friedrich, and Moritz Queisner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 11–27. 238 The Entangled Apparatus without the visual makers that are usually attached to the bodies of the performers. The extracted data then becomes an element for the rendered and projected images. Owing to their function to collect spatial data, the operative images differ from what photographic images usually do and, as I want to suggest, can be compared to computational photography as a recent development in the field of “technical images”2. Computational photography marks a paradigm shift that goes beyond the much-discussed digitization of photographic images during the 1990s.3 Traditional photography can be described as a semi-automatic technique for translating three-dimensional situations into two-dimensional visual representations thereof. Computational photography, then, is an umbrella term for various extensions of this technique by means of computations that are done within the act of photographing and that strive to “improve” representational qualities. Such improved representations provide a more faithful coverage of the original situation through the now digital apparatus as much as adjustments to conventional understandings to what “good photographs” are. Looking at the computational photography discourse of software developers, as it is shaped in scholarly articles and books, one finds an already canonized catalogue of useful features to increase image quality. Essential applications of computational photography are: • High Dynamic Range (HDR) algorithms that overcome limitations in reproducible contrast by combining several exposures with varying stops. • The flash/no-flash method merges two images with ambient and flashlight to capture a wider range of illumination. • Flutter shutter is a technique of collecting several images in random intervals with different exposure times in order to eliminate motion blur effects by understanding their causes. • Panorama stitching, finally, overcomes limitations of a camera’s field of view by combining shots made in different directions.4 Most of these techniques automatically extract information from the images as it is also done in the case of operative images but use the information in order to apply certain effects back to the images themselves. Contemporary smartphone cameras, for example, use algorithms to identify the silhouettes of persons in the foreground. This allows them to blur the image background and to give the entire image the appearance of a photograph taken with a camera with a larger image sensor and less depth of field. One camera pretends to be another one through modification of aesthetic features of its photographs. The first step of reading data from an image is the domain of computer vision as it is also used in the INTRA SPACE setup. While computer vision seems to mark a break in the operative ontologies of photographic images, the tech- Birk Weiberg 239 nique ties in with a tradition that is nearly as old as photography itself: photogrammetry, or what in German is called Messbilder (measurement images). The digital status of photographic images makes it possible to automatize this practice; the results may either be reapplied to the images or used in other ways. (In the case of operative images, reapplication often happens to make the process transparent and controllable for human operators by adding markers to the images.) What makes the entire process of extracting spatial information from flat images possible is the concept of central perspective as it is incorporated in the cameras. With the digitization of technical images, the depicted space has again become addressable as it has been in fine arts since the Renaissance. “Perspective is not interesting because it provides realistic pictures […] it is interesting because it creates complete hybrids: nature seen as fiction, and fiction seen as nature, with all the elements made so homogeneous in space that it is now possible to reshuffle them like a pack of cards.”5 Thus, perspective is perhaps less an instrument of depiction but one of remote control. Probabilistic Realism The algorithmic interpretation and modification of photographs within the camera itself opens up a new field of agency that is of special interest for practitioners and artists. In her e-flux essay “Proxy Politics,” Hito Steyerl refers to an unfortunately unidentified software developer who revealed to her what actually changes with computational photography as it is applied especially in smartphones. Their small and cheap lenses, which deliver essentially noise, have propelled the development of techniques to render images based on such input in combination with pre-existing images. “By comparing what you and your network already photographed, the algorithm, guesses what you might have wanted to photograph now.” Computational photography for Steyerl thus seems to be “a gamble with probabilities that bets on inertia.” 6 The resulting images are neither immediate representations of reality nor sim2 Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 3 Hubertus von Ameluxen, Stefan Iglhaut, and Florian Rötzer, eds., Fotografie nach der Fotografie (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996); Geoffrey Batchen, “On Postphotography,” Afterimage 20, no. 3 (1992); and William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 4 Brian Hayes, “Computational Photography,” American Scientist 96, no. 2 (2008): 94–99. 5 Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 8. 6 Hito Steyerl, “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise,” e-flux Journal 60 (December 2014): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/proxy -politics/. 240 The Entangled Apparatus ple inventions. The persistent, representational promise of the concept of indexicality in photography in combination with issues of statistical likelihood brings me to my question whether it can be productive to assess computational photography as probabilistic realism, i.e., a condensation of miscellaneous, computable sources that become relevant through averaging.7 Steyerl’s anecdote might be understood in a way that images have become mere reverberation of memories. But this is nothing new, as photographic culture always featured a high degree of conventions where people tend to reproduce images rather than make new ones. The difference is that more and more of these conventions are now black-boxed within the apparatus as proxies that Steyerl wants to call into question. An early example here are cameras with smile detection that enables a camera to trigger an exposure automatically once it recognizes that the subject lifts the corners of her mouth.8 We can read the resulting image as the representation of a smile or even of a happy person. We can read it as the representation of an either social or aesthetic convention which has found its way into software. Or we can understand it as an everevolving circle of causes with liminal modifications where effective factors have to be traced in between material and discursive domains. Such translations between the domains of humans and machines have also been the subject of science and technology studies. But as especially the actor-network theory of Michel Callon (1986), Bruno Latour (1991 and 1999), and others has shown, agency and thus responsibilities can no longer attributed to humans alone. What I consider more relevant than the leverage of specific actors, is the disappearance of the original or primary image, not in the sense of an authentic representations but as something that is close to the act of exposure and that makes all further reproductions derivatives. The before-and-after comparison of original and modified photographs has been a key rhetorical figure for pointing to human agency within the automatisms of photography. Without a real or even imagined original image the possibility for such a critique vanishes. One artist who has constantly questioned the idea of the original—whether in regard to photographic images or fine arts in a broader sense—is Oliver Laric. This is possibly best expressed in Versions, a video essay that he himself has altered repeatedly over the years and that demonstrates how deeply embedded such transformations are in contemporary visual culture.9 Therefore, one thing that has changed since digital photographs emerged in the 1990s and raised the question of whether and how they were still indexical or not, is that we are moving away from calling on an original image as a reference when discussing matters of visual representation. The original image has effectively been replaced by raw data as the primary trace left by reality once it has entered a camera. Raw data—as problematic as the term itself may be—in its inaccessibility, however, has structural similari- Birk Weiberg 241 ties to photo negatives and latent images of analogue photography. So, when Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis (2013) point out that digital images are always just one out of many possible visual representations of the underlying data, we can say the same with regard to the latent images of photochemical exposures. The fragile connection between data and image was already a point of interest in the discussion of the 1990s. Artist (and publisher) Andreas MüllerPohle, for example, translated a digital scan of Nicéphore Niépce’s famous first photograph into a variety of decorative data prints.10 What at first comes across as being in awe of large amounts of data, even today, still articulates our inability to establish a meaningful connection between the two ontological domains. Müller-Pohle’s title Digital Scores is possibly more revealing than the panels themselves as it suggests that data is both a trace or outcome and something that needs to be performed or retranslated into an aesthetic form. And again, all this likewise applies to the latent images and negatives of analogue photography, which were widely ignored by traditional photo theories. The technological change that we are witnessing might change our view of photography and the questions we are asking to a higher degree than the medium of photography itself. Computational photography makes us aware of a paradoxical situation: There is an indexical (in the sense of causal) relationship between the photographed subject and the raw data a camera collects. But this raw data—the noise that Steyerl describes—is of limited to no value (significance) for the beholder. Unlike the indexes that we find in Charles Sanders Peirce—the smoke, the weathercock, etc.—camera data can no longer be read by a human interpretant and thus its indexical character (as effect and sign) remains unaccomplished because of an opaque wall of numeric abstraction. The representational function of photography only becomes possible with a subsequent step of interpretation, combination, and other non-indexical procedures. This second step then also becomes the subject of scholarly critique and artistic inquiry. Such is the case with recent works by Trevor Paglen where he used machine learning 7 A computer that remixes our visual memories to provide us with new ones that are likely in a statistical sense; the sci-fi feeling that Steyerl’s anecdote comes with possibly also has to do with our inability to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithms she refers to. Overall, it remains difficult for humanities scholars to assess how photography actually is changing here. This caused not only by the technical nature of these changes but also by the fact that a lot of what is going on is hidden inside the black boxes of proprietary soft- and hardware. We are left with the resulting images and the user activities that bring them forth but both are only a part of the entire system. 8 J. Whitehill, G. Littlewort, I. Fasel, M. Bartlett, and J. Movellan, “Toward Practical Smile Detection,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 31, no. 11 (2009): 2106–11; a demonstration of the feature in Sony’s Alpha 6300 camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =Godpu72R2c4. 9 One version can be found here: https:// anthology.rhizome.org/versions. 10 See artist’s website, http: http:// muellerpohle.net/projects/digital-scores/. 242 The Entangled Apparatus techniques to reveal how computers translate data into rendered photographs. Paglen trained a neural network with images of the post-colonial philosopher Frantz Fanon and then asked the computer to render a portrait based on the features that the machine identified as distinguishing Fanon. In a similar way, he trained his systems to classify images associated with terms such as omens and portents, monsters, and dreams.11 The final synthetic images are created by using actual digital noise as raw data and increasing the trained model’s sensitivity until it sees something where there is nothing. Paglen thus produces artifacts that unveil the usually invisible algorithms. He speaks of invisible images here as they do not address anybody but represent a closed-circuit of images made by machines for machines. Loss of Perspective The translation of images into interpretable data is but one aspect of computational photography. Another less discussed one is the fact that many methods not only resolve the concept of a primary image but also overcome the singularity of such an image. Image data usually derives not from a single but from several exposures. HDR extends the dynamic range of luminosity by combining several exposures with different stops. Panorama stitching requires the photographer to point her camera in different directions to capture a wider field of view in a sequence of images. With single lens systems different exposures necessarily represent different moments in time. This has changed with more recent camera designs with multiple lenses that, owing to their different positions and perspectives, make it possible to extract more precise spatial information, as is also the case in the INTRA SPACE setup. We can speak of a collected or aggregated indexicality—but indexicality after all—that tries to overcome shortcomings of cameras in comparison to human perception. The fact that several images are combined into one does not yet distinguish current computational photography from the digital photography of the 1990s. But the notion of digital photography, as conceived then, refers to procedures applied to visible and identifiable images with image processing software such as Photoshop. Computational photography, on the other hand, develops its own dynamics as it is applied automatically by the apparatus itself—an apparatus whose hard- and software is, of course, designed by humans. A software that possibly marks the threshold between both paradigms is Microsoft’s meanwhile discontinued Photosynth. It was most notably used for CNN’s online project “The Moment,” which depicts the inauguration of Barack Obama as US president in 2009. In the wake of citizen journalism, CNN asked people who attended the ceremony and took photos of it to contribute them to a single, collective photomontage. The submitted images were then combined and presented with the Photosynth software, which allowed website visitors to Birk Weiberg 243 navigate between different viewpoints. The result is a hybrid form of testimony which at the same time affirms the documentary quality of photography in the accumulation of 628 witnessing photos and photographers but also creates glitches and tensions between these photos simply because, and in contradiction to the project title, it does not represent a single moment. William Uricchio, in his analysis of the project, has found that “there is no correct or authorized viewing position, no ‘master shot’ within which everything else is a recomposition. Instead, there is simply a three-dimensional space made up of many textures and granularities, and the means to move within it.”12 “The Moment” thus is also symptomatic of the loss of authority that single images in the context of traditional media have had. Taking Photosynth as a forerunner of computational photography inside cameras, we can say that one difference to earlier modes of photography is the dissolution of temporal and spatial singularities that find their way into an image. An image of computational photography no longer refers to a specific view of the camera, it aggregates points in time and space and thus overcomes the central perspective of the Renaissance. This not only affects the anthropomorphic viewpoint but also the virtual plane placed between the eye and the scene, as the raw data often preserves three-dimensional information. This is the case with the Kinect camera, which Microsoft introduced in 2010, and in Apple’s iPhone X, which uses 3D data for (among other things) post hoc lighting changes, where virtual illumination hits the spatial representation of a situation before it is rendered as an image. Another technique is light field photography, where the light from a situation is captured in a way that does not yet predetermine its rendering on an image plane. Other camera designs foresee the replacement of the single lens with multiple optics of lower quality, which in combination nonetheless can provide images of higher quality once their raw data has been merged. In all of these techniques, it is not primarily the image itself that becomes subject to interpretation but the situation and the point of view that finally transforms it into an image. In a laboratory setup with an object, a camera, and a single light source at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken it was possible to use the data provided by the camera to render an image from the perspective of the light source.13 “You can’t have a point of view in the Electronic Age,” as Marshall McLuhan said.14 Perspective has turned into an option, a convention, and it is interesting to see how, for example, Paglen’s renderings try to bypass the question of perspective. While technically they use a virtual camera for rendering, this camera however does not produce a situation that can be seen as specific. The specificity of these images is that of a typology. 11 See Paglen’s exhibition, http:// metropictures.com/exhibitions /trevor-paglen4. 12 William Uricchio, “The Algorithmic Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image,” Visual Studies 26, no. 1 (2011): 30. 13 Hayes, “Computational Photography,” 98. 14 “Marshall McLuhan: The World is Show Business,” YouTube video, 6:31, posted by globalbeehive, April, 27, 2010, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P8gUNAVSt8. 244 The Entangled Apparatus Coming back to the notion of a probabilistic realism, computational photography in many ways works against an understanding of realism that has to be conceived as subjective in the sense that it requires a point of view that somebody or something has to take and that can be called to name. A probabilistic realism, on the other hand, is the result of echoes and feedbacks in a distributed network or, as Rubinstein writes, a “rhizomatic assemblage of interconnected fragments.”15 Birk Weiberg 245 teract as self-sufficient entities, they intra-act and thereby (re)define each other. And it is this assumption that subject and object have no stable identities that allows us to develop a different understanding of photographic practices. In INTRA SPACE, we can witness this in the merging of the distinct photographic measurements, mapping them onto a single ideal skeleton, when the avatar’s movements deviate from that of the visitor, when limbs are bent in unnatural ways. This is when the resulting CGI image no longer remains an image but becomes physical as we tend to identify and feel with the twisted body. Embracing Entanglements For INTRA SPACE a plurality of images is provided by the small cameras dotted around the room. It is them that define a stage-like zone of computational visibility rather than the elements of physical architecture. Unlike regular video cameras that would require a power cable to receive electricity and a video cable to send images, the IP cameras of the INTRA SPACE system are merely connected via Ethernet cables, which provide electricity and transmit image data. The cameras are no longer connected apparatuses but extensions of a computer network.16 The multiplicity of cameras becomes necessary because of the insufficiency of the camera as a measuring device for representing comprehensive spatial information. Within the application of photography, the ability of the technique to make the world flat and portable is a vital feature. However, if one is no longer interested in the photographs themselves but in the data that can be extracted from them, this compression feature turns into a shortcoming, which has to be compensated for by adding to the now insufficient devices. What remains is the camera’s ability to capture/measure things from a distance. A technical challenge of the setup lies in unifying the various measurements. This is also the starting point of Karen Barad’s exploration of the “philosophyphysics” of Niels Bohr and his writings on quantum physics. She is interested in how Bohr’s careful analysis of measurement in science, a practice that I want to compare to that of photography, leads him to reject representationalism.17 A central question of quantum physics derives from the fact that the usage of different experimental systems results in different and even conflicting measurement results. Bohr’s colleague Werner Heisenberg saw this as a problem of epistemology, an uncertainty that we have when it comes to recognizing the features of electrons in a specific situation. Bohr, on the other hand, drew a more radical conclusion, saying that there is an indeterminacy of such features, that electrons may not even have a position or a momentum until they are measured.18 Barad’s take on this is not to fall into the unproductive trap of social constructivism, where signs ultimately win over matter, but rather to understand Bohr, his instruments, and the subjects of his research as entities that constitute each other. In Barad’s terminology they do not in- Explaining Bohr’s position on the dynamism of matter, Barad writes: “Moving away from the representationalist trap of geometrical optics, I shift the focus to physical optics, to questions of diffraction rather than reflection.”19 The necessity to find alternatives to geometrical optics as the basis of photography shows in critical, apparatus-orientated photographic practices which likewise often deal with geometry as a contingent property of cameras. Such practices that shift their focus from the image to the apparatus have existed for a long time but have gained a new momentum since the digitization of photography in the 1990s. Well-known examples of such surveys of photographic geometry are the camera obscura installations by Zoe Leonard. In 2011, the artist began a series of such installations that confront the geometry of optics with the specific geometry of the different spaces she used. On the one hand, she brings the visitor back to the very beginning of photography when images could not yet be preserved. On the other, these installations have a very post-photographic character being produced after Leonard herself had temporally abandoned the production of photographic images.20 The images one encounters inside her camera obscuras are ephemeral, fragile, and also function as a light source for the room itself and thus question widespread photographic concepts. More explicitly, the Israeli artist and theoretician Aïm Deüelle Lüski has constructed cameras as a critique of visual representations in the context of the political 15 Daniel Rubinstein, “Posthuman Photography,” in The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and Digital Self, ed. Marco Bohr and Basia Sliwinska (New York: Routledge, 2018). 16 In the science fiction movie Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) it is the network itself (consisting of a US and a USSR supercomputer) that calls for camera extensions to accomplish total surveillance of its operators and world domination. 17 Light in physics can be either understood as continuous waves or as discrete particles. Both models contradict each other and require distinct methods of measurement. 18 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 115ff. 19 Barad, 135. 20 Courtney Fiske, “In-Camera: Q+A with Zoe Leonard,” Art in America, November 2012, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com /news-features/interviews/zoe-leonard -murray-guy/. 248 The Entangled Apparatus Fig. 54 (previous spread) TheCaptury, screenshot motion-tracking software interface, 2016 situation in the Middle East. His viewfinder-less cameras document the convergence of various entities in a shared space while evading any purposeful and thus hegemonic visual representation. With his somewhat kaleidoscopic images Deüelle Lüski literally replaces reflections with diffractions as suggested not only by Barad21 but also by Donna Haraway,22 from whom she adopts this notion. Deüelle Lüski describes his practice as “distracted concentration,”23 a mode of perception that is still understood in relation to human consciousness where for Haraway and Barad neither the origin nor the target of light is fixed. What makes Deüelle Lüski, who works only with traditional, analog techniques, interesting with regard to computational photography is that he conceives the body of the camera as a threshold, a place where light turns into matter. What he strives for is delaying, nearly preventing the materialization of an image in what he calls “the ‘struggle’ inside the camera obscura and upon the emulsion surface.”24 The camera itself has turned into a discursive device, a phenomenon that also became more relevant with computational photography but remains difficult to grasp. The images of computational photography are figurative but can only be regarded as representational with a very open understanding of what they represent—subjects, expectations, norms, the technology itself, or the threshold Deüelle Lüski addresses. Between reality and an image, we now find raw data that is as inaccessible or even undetermined as the atoms of Niels Bohr. This threshold cannot be understood with the simplified model of analogies and brings Barad to her proposition of a shift from reflection to diffraction, which she at first derives from specific devices used in scientific practices: “In contrast to reflecting apparatuses, like mirrors, which produce images— more or less faithful—of objects placed a distance from the mirror, diffraction gratings are instruments that produce patterns that mark differences in the relative characters (i.e., amplitude and phase) of individual waves as they combine.”25 So while a reflection produces an analogon, a representation by means of similarity, diffraction creates complex patterns that are jointly caused by an instrument and its subject. This becomes evident when we look at the flutter shutter technique to reduce motion blur caused by relative movement between a camera and one or more of its subjects. In analogue photography there are basically two options to avoid this usually unwanted effect: we can reduce either the relative movement or the duration of exposure. Computational photography, however, provides an option that seems counter-intuitive at first Birk Weiberg 249 sight: the camera collects several images at random intervals with different exposure times and then infers relatively sharp images from them26. The fact that the images feature different degrees of motion blur means that those that are less sharp are deliberately out of focus. But the comparison between the images allows the software to ascertain the relative movement that caused the problem. It can compensate for the shortcomings of the hardware because it “knows” something about what the camera sees. Such a technical awareness of a situation was originally conceived by the inventors of cybernetics in the 1940s to improve the ability of missiles to hit moving targets. In the case of INTRA SPACE the closed circuit starts with the visitor’s body and its capture through a dozen IP cameras. It is then transformed into data and brought back into the space as a CGI image of the avatar’s body, to be seen by the visitor and an audience of spectators and technicians. Seen as a contemplation on representation by means of technical images this structure is not even necessarily computational but can also be traced back to the beginnings of video art with the installations of Peter Campus and the TV Buddha of Nam June Paik. In any case, such loops, just like cybernetic feedback structures, partially suspend the distinction between machinic and human agency. They constantly oscillate between software and hardware, between signs and matter, and thus circumvent any determination of primary agency on either side. The programmed camera is a device that persistently measures but is also measured in order to adjust its measurement values. Digitization was initially understood as a translation of matter into signs but meanwhile we have started to understand that the digital has its own material constraints and cannot be seen as a purely semantic but also as a material domain. The camera itself has lost its former stability with regard to its configurations and its position in the process of documenting the world as it can also be observed during the development of INTRA SPACE. There, the virtual CGI camera more and more lost its stable position that created a mirror-like image when it was attached to the body of the avatar to show how, for instance, the hand would see the rest of the virtual body if it only had eyes.27 21 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 29. 22 Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others” (1992), in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 70. 23 Ariella Azoulay, Aïm Deüelle Lüski and Horizontal Photography (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), 235. 24 Azoulay, 238. 25 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 81. 26 Amit Agrawal, “Motion Deblurring Using Fluttered Shutter,” in Motion Deblurring: Algorithms and Systems, ed. A. N. Rajagopalan and Rama Chellappa, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 141–60. 27 Regarding identifications of the camera with persons and objects, see Birk Weiberg, “Maschinenbilder: Zur postsubjektiven Kamera,” in Archäologie der Zukunft, ed. Heiko Schmid, Frank-Thorsten Moll, Ursula Zeller, and Mateusz Cwik (Friedrichshafen: Zeppelin Museum, 2014), 23–44. 250 The Entangled Apparatus Birk Weiberg 251 Steyerl, when writing about computational photography, has suggested viewing its intermediary processes as proxies. These proxies for Steyerl are considered the subject matter of critical inquiries because they might be informed by economic or political interests. Such a critical discourse, however, necessarily perpetuates the very idea of representation and of a proper closure of the gap between matter and sign. Barad and other critics of modernism, on the other hand, simply claim that originally there is no distance to be bridged. Identities are thus not recognized and represented but are the result of repetitions and variations. “A performative understanding of scientific practices”—and as stated before, I identify these with photographic ones—“takes account of the fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world.”28 As photography has been a vital contributor of constructing such distances, one question to be answered is what practices and studies of cameras as non-distancing devices might look like. A conclusion, I wish to propose, is not limited to computational photography but rather takes this most recent development as a starting point to read photography in a different way. From this perspective, photography has first been chemical, then optical, and now computational. The changing identities of photography herein are not simply ontological transformations by means of technical progress but also different modes of perceiving the medium. The optical has dominated our understanding of photography with metaphors such as mirror or window borrowed from the fine arts. It is analogue not only in a technical but also in a conceptual sense. The diffractive methodology that Barad has suggested, “a way of attending to entanglements in reading important insights and approaches through one another”29, provides a different approach to photography if we consider it as a practice that is a diffractive entanglement itself. Can we understand the camera as a diffractor and what do we win with it? Distortion would be an integral part of photography and not a defect of an otherwise ideal mirror. Different results from different apparatuses do not lead to uncertainty but complementarity. Any kind of translation, the proxies Steyerl writes about, does not estrange us from a situation but brings all its relata closer together: “Images or representations are not snapshots or depictions of what awaits us but rather condensations or traces of multiple practices of engagement.”30 Fig. 55 INTRA SPACE, virtual figure in the Unity scene, with supporting guides placed by Christan Freude to trace head movements in relation to virtual cameras, still from video, 2017 28 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 49. 29 Barad, 30. 30 Barad, 53. 252 The Entangled Apparatus Birk Weiberg Literature Agrawal, Amit. “Motion Deblurring Using Fluttered Shutter.” in Motion Deblurring: Algorithms and Systems, edited by A. N. Rajagopalan and Rama Chellappa, 141–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Ameluxen, Hubertus von, Stefan Iglhaut, and Florian Rötzer, eds. Fotografie nach der Fotografie. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996. Azoulay, Ariella. 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Movellan. “Toward Practical Smile Detection.” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 31, no. 11 (2009): 2106–11. doi:10.1109/tpami.2009.42. 253 Image Credits Image Credits Towards an INTRA SPACE Christina Jauernik and Wolfgang Tschapeller In collaboration with Christina Ehrmann, Drawings for INTRA SPACE, 2019. © INTRA SPACE Fig. 1 Cartography of Neighborhoods, INTRA SPACE, 2019 Fig. 2 INTRA SPACE Fig. 3 View of the project space with Projection Screen C Fig. 4 Biography of project space including all technical, virtual, engineered, and human contributors, their positions, specifications, and collaborative engagements Fig. 5 Zoom into project space Fig. 5a Body model, skeleton, and spheres; drawn based on the concept developed by Nils Hasler, 2017 Fig. 6 Detail (zoom-in): Overlapping field of views, 12 cameras J Fig. 6a Industry camera installed in the tracking area, 2017 Fig. 6b Virtual camera, INTRA SPACE Fig. 6c Figure shown with virtually placed camera positions, experiments, 2017 Fig. 7 Detail (zoom-in): Figures Fig. 7a Photograph, reenacting Venus Cupid Folly Time, Esther and Christina. Photo: Christian Freude Fig. 7b View from the tracking camera, screenshot of software interface. Esther and Christina with two skeletons (unknown-2; snapPoseSkeleton-6). Screenshot: Christian Freude Fig. 8 Detail (zoom-in): Skeleton Fig. 8a Four of the twelve cameras, motion tracking screen (monitor H), 2017 Fig. 9 The Virtual Camera Fig. 10 Jason, screenshot excerpt of programming language for the virtual figures’ behavior Fig. 10a Jason 283 Figs. 11–12 Experiment 1: Orthogonal camera as mirror with Carla and Esther, January 2016. Photo: Wolfgang Tschapeller; image editing: Markus Wörgotter Fig. 13 Experiment 2: Perspective camera attached to Christina’s right hand, working with Carla, April 2016. Camera: INTRA SPACE; image editing: Markus Wörgötter Figs. 14–18 Experiment 2: Perspective camera attached to Christina’s right hand, working with Old Man, May 2017. Camera: INTRA SPACE; image editing: Markus Wörgötter Fig. 19 Experiment 2: Rehearsal Esther, Christina, and two figures, Bob and Bob, perspective camera attached to Esther’s inner right wrist, May 2017 Camera: Ludwig Löckinger Fig. 20 Experiment 2: Rehearsal Esther and Bob, perspective camera attached to Esther’s inner right wrist, May 2017 Camera: Ludwig Löckinger; image editing: Markus Wörgötter Vital Technologies: The Involvements of “the Intra” Vicky Kirby Fig. 21 Jean-Martin Charcot, Autographic Skin, 1877 Dancing with Machines: On the Relationship of Aesthetics and the Uncanny Clemens Apprich Fig. 22 Stuart Patience, Spin Round Wooden Doll – Nathaniel dancing with Olympia at the ball. 2018. Courtesy of Heart Agency © Stuart Patience/heartagency.com Fig. 23 INTRA SPACE working situation, Dominikanerbastei, Vienna, 2017. Photo: Günter Richard Wett Body of Landscape Esther Balfe Figs. 24–41 Practicing Virtual Conditions. Rehearsal: Esther Balfe, Christina Jauernik. Video stills, 2017. Camera: Ludwig Löckinger 284 Image Credits INTIMACY LOSS SKINNING Christina Jauernik Figs. 42–46 Christina Jauernik, working with skeletons, October 2018, Sitterwerk artist residency, Switzerland Skin Dreams John Zissovici Figs. 47, 48, 53 John Zissovici, head shapes, 2017, Vienna. Video stills Fig. 49 Still from recording, experiments with hand camera. INTRA SPACE 2017 Fig. 50 Francesco Morone, Stimmate di San Francesco, 14th century. Tempera on canvas, 84.5 × 56.5 cm. Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona. © Photographic Archive, Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona Fig. 51 Philippe Lapierre, Untitled #155, 2020. Drawing Fig. 52 John Zissovici, The Door, 2017. Photo: John Zissovici The Entangled Apparatus: Cameras as Nondistancing Devices Birk Weiberg Fig. 54 TheCaptury, screenshot motion-tracking software interface, 2016 Fig. 55 INTRA SPACE, virtual figure in the Unity scene, with supporting guides placed by Christan Freude to trace head movements in relation to virtual cameras. Video still, 2017