An essay about the worlding of digital images, and how we can exist in it.

Table of Contents

This is the world as seen by machines: a contiguous layer of images, media, and data. Do It Yourself, Mr. Bean. Source↗️

Citations

I. Procession

“A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” — Alfred Korzybski ([1] )

I see cameras popping up on every surface around me. Lidar cameras stuck onto self driving vehicles. Time-of-Flight sensor arrays in the ceiling of cashierless grocery stores. Automatic License Plate Readers perched on bridge toll booths. Further out, into the horizon, I can see infrared sensors mounted on drones as they fly over cropland, cameras mounted on factory lines to check for defects, and multispectral telescopes rigged onto satellites to snap photos of the planet's landscape. From the telescopic to the microscopic, the cameras have it covered.

Cameras are the canary in the coal mine for new modes of being in the future. In a rough translation of the history of image making, cameras have led the way, like a torch at the end of an outstretched arm, into new worlds. Since their inception cameras have intercepted and conceived emerging notions of reality. The images produced by cameras have enshrined, indexed, demeaned, abstracted, documented, archived, poeticized, analyzed, and engendered a single world into many. It has transformed the linear into the non linear. The image, and by extension the camera, is a predictive and a prescriptive force. The non linearity of the image came long before the non linear mode of being we have today. Our mode of being now is defined by a nonlinear patchwork of internet communities, international proxy politics, and interrelated ecosystem collapse.

The present day camera is shedding light on a new reality of emerging data worlds. Not only are cameras capturing this world of data but are themselves becoming embedded in it. They have shed their glass optical lenses and dispersed themselves as an ambient sensing layer of pure data. The cameras have become bigger than their subject matter. They have enveloped the world. If cameras predated our nonlinear existence, do they also predate our virtual existence?

Lensless Horizon is a photo series that documents seven data centers dotted across the Pacific Northwest operated by Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. It highlights the usurping of the camera by data centers. In each of these photographs the data centers graphically take the camera’s traditional place at the top of a tripod. Lensless Horizon, Tywen Kelly, 2021. Read more↗

Virtual existence is a mode of displaced and replaced being. It's a vaguery that can only be experienced. Flow states, ascendence, engrossment—these fall under the umbrella of virtuality. It is simultaneous destruction and resurrection of the self. This is the effect that images have had on viewers since the age of painting. When you look at an image you, the viewer, are first destroyed. If the painting has linear perspective, the painting then reassembles you to be at the center of its universe. A cubist painting on the other hand will barely reassemble you at all. The images today—coming from cameras distributed across the landscape and dispersed inside databases—like paintings first destroy the viewer. Unlike painting, these images reassemble us into the world of data. They amplify virtuality to a degree to which we must understand them as beyond "image", they are something more encompassing.

The camera of today are data cameras, which we can call "seeing machines". These cameras are at the forefront in a historical procession of image-making techniques leading away from material reality deeper into data worlds and virtuality. Before there were seeing machines there were the techniques of painting, photography, and coding. Just as a painter makes paintings by painting, and photographers make photographs by photographing, and coders make programs by coding, the new seeing machines make worlds by what I call "worlding." Worlding is a word to describe the encompassing nature of new images. Worlding is the handless process of making images in and of the data world.

<aside> ❕ In this essay, I used 'material reality' and 'the material world' to refer to the physical, atomic world. 'The data world' is the world of virtual bits and online networks. Both the material and data worlds are part of the singular 'real', or 'reality'.

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Worlding is a progression from previous techniques. Painting and Coding are handed productions, in that a skilled artisan uses their hands to manually create images. These handed processes are backed with intention, subconscious or not, and as such the resulting painting or program is imbued with a bespoke vibe of the auteur. On the other hand, photography is a predominantly handless process. Early conceptions of photography described it as an "imprinting" process. Images were seen as an imprint of the material world. Thinkers would later re-coin imprinting as indexing or archiving, but effectively it means the same thing. To this day images are still seen as an index of reality: they are used in the courtroom as evidence and in medical procedures to diagnose illness. Worlding is like photography in its ability to imprint the world, but the world it imprints is the world of data. Worlding images are made inside the data realm by seeing machines. These are software-based cameras—lensless—which can scrape and algorithmically congeal images from raw bits and bytes. More so than making imprints of the material world, seeing machines make imprints of the ecology of digital media. GANs, photogrammetry models, object detection systems—these applications are heavily software based and use as their base reference other digital material like user-generated selfies, food pics, and landscape photos. As such these images are best seen as imprints of that material, rather than an imprint of what the material depicts.

Images made by worlding are called worlds. Worlds should fundamentally be understood as data visualization rather than reality visualization or as an index. While a departure from the previous methods, worlding draws upon the common qualities of handlessness and world-imprintedness of painting, photography, coding. It is not an alien black-box system but a historically grounded concept. These worlds made without hands can be understood as a progression in image making techniques. The effect of this progression of technique is also a progression of being. This new being is virtuality.

In the following essay I will explore this new mode of being. I will trace the lineage of previous image making techniques and illustrate how worlding retrieves precedent techniques. By investigating worlding we can see what being in the future could be like. Overarching my argument, or rather underlying it, is a straddling of two minds. One mind has sympathy for the viewpoint of what some sects of philosophy call "informational realism", which is part of a greater study of the "nonhuman turn". Essentially these two movements point out an underlying logic to the world that is extra-human. Namely, that the universe is fundamentally composed of information, and matter itself derives from this. It is no averse to human subjectivity, but zoomed all the way out the movements understand information to be the more heavily weighted compass of change. Without getting too far into the weeds the gist of this movement is the intention of shifting perspectives toward ambience. It is to understand the world in a non-human-object antagonism but to understand the world as a whole in which people are a part of it. While informational realism is useful, I also ascribe to the belief that the experience of this foundationally information world is itself not foundationally informational. More specifically the experience of virtuality is disparate but not contradictory to material reality. Seeing images and using images are epistemically different that the methodology of making images. Being in worlds of information does not make the being itself informational. While images can be boiled down to pure information, people's experience of being cannot. The experience of being confers agency, and agency seems to ride against the tide of a predeterministic universe of information. Virtuality and reality are complementary, in my mind, which makes the exploration of worlding all the more useful, as it perfectly straddles the distance between the data and material reality. It is with these two disparate minds that I approach the concept of a world made without hands.

"Worlding VII", my visual exploration of manually reconfiguring a world made without hands. This image is 3D render of multiple photogrammetry scans derived from my personal database of images. They have been arranged so the small is big and the big is small. More↗

Worlding should be understood as a method of distinguishing between real and the fake images. It's a device to understand images beyond their face value and to see them as assemblages of data. My goal with this essay is to dissolve the "immersive magic" of worlds made without hands and emphasize the legibility of it. At the same time, I believe the long term purpose of fluency in seeing machine is one of cyboric "companionship" as Donna Haraway might say. Which is to say media literacy is a tool for finding seams and reveling in them. I want to reinstate a cosmic fascination with being in these worlds made without hands by offering ways of existing in it that still confer agency. A world made without hands is something to teach, regulate, play with, rather than ignore or shut down. It is paramount that we know how to speak seeing machine, because seeing machine already speaks us.