Picture Book
Erik Davis
Visiting Lecturer, Art Practice, UC Berkeley
Picture Book
Even the most formal legal definitions of privacy assume a subject for whom privacy or interiority is a meaningful existential category. One way of defining this sense of self is that it maintains a degree of creative control over its own revelation, its exposure to others and its reification through representations—most certainly including visual representations captured by cameras and circulated through physical photographs and the ever-widening virtual network of screens. Indeed the submission of the expressive face or body to a photographic or video apparatus is a key site of this creative self- presentation, an exposure of affect or presence that simultaneously announces its own artificial distance, even alienation, from the subject.
The legal, technical and economic concerns with privacy and identity are mirrored by the transformation of this subjective space of creative self-revelation in the face the exploding opportunities and—let's be honest—compulsive pressures of private or amateur image production. This explosion is encouraged by consumer electronics manufactures and software developers, and must be seen as the public, or consumer, side of the "surveillance state." As such, its very ubiquity renders it a site of alienation and, quite possibly, the interpolation of antidemocratic forces into the comfort zone of the private self. At the same time, millions of consumers and closet artists are correct to recognize the extraordinary expressive and interventionist opportunities that high- quality digital devices, software productions studios, and web-based distribution channels offer. Indeed, the very act of expressing the self and its social networks is increasingly bound up with the circulation of images that, as flickr proves, blur the lines between private and public.
We misunderstand this epochal shift towards user-generated content if we see it either as a utopian locus of self-expression or an excessive interpolation of the machinery of surveillance. Crossing both of these extremes is the tricky feedback loop of the self and its representations: how the already mediated self finds and expresses itself within the ever-more-giddy circuits of image production and exchange. If we recognize that the shape of the self is at least in part a product of social and technical feedback loops—from Augustine to the Book of Common Prayer, "interiority" itself is arguably a product of textual forces—then how do the formal and social transformations of private visual production, from camera phones to flickr to the ubiquity of porn, transform the "shape of the self"? What crises and opportunities lie in wait as we plunge into a multiplication of imaging that shows no sign of abating, until, perhaps, our very experience and understanding of interiority fixates on the supplement that escapes, however provisionally, the camera?
Shadows of this transformation can be limned in Goodby, Silverstein & Partners' celebrated "Picture Book" ad campaign for Hewlett-Packard's digital photographic gear. The popular and award-winning campaign, which began in 2004, aggressively plays with the fluctuating status of the photo as it frames and flattens the flow of embodied life while itself becoming an active agent in that life, stimulating new deployments of beings while maintaining the fluidity and malleability of pure virtuality. By shifting between flatness and three dimensions, motion and stillness, figure and ground, this clever and technically brilliant campaign exploits the liminality of the frame in order to tickle the difference between virtuality, the material photograph (whose desirability is no doubt a concern of HP's own printer division), and the skulls and skeletons that adhere to these unusually labile faces and bodies. But the campaign also suggests that the new digital regime of images does not just reflect the facile and exuberantly self-circulating subject pictured in the ads. The amateur digital regime also produces that subject through the very intensity and ubiquity of these emerging networks of circulation. This is reflected in the "object-oriented" approach of a more recent spot from the TV campaign, in which a printed snapshot fixedly holds the center of the screen as it is passed through an ever-shifting landscape of bodies before fusing with the original scene which presumably produced the image in the first place.
Beneath the slick surrealism of these ads, which owe more than a little to Michael Gondry, lies a specific formal trick of framing and self-referentiality that generates a spectacular instance of mise-en-abîme—an infinite reflection or abyss produced through recursion and self-referential framing. Besides reflecting certain formal and algorithmic underpinnings of our cybernetic lives, such recursive loops also stage a crisis, or at least implosion, of the mediated self. On the one hand, the HP ads unconsciously intensify the traditional melancholy of the snapshot through the very multiplication of means and speeds to avoid evanescence ("Picture yourself, when you're getting old..." sings Ray Davies). On the other, these spots also suggest that the proliferation of self-representations—enhanced and produced through the "thin reification" of the digital image—almost necessarily empties the symbolic content of the subject, a content imagined as a substance or body that fills and shapes space, including the private space of interiority. HP offers us an intimate amputation, at once claustrophobic and giddily incorporeal, a self-emptying initiation into a circulation whose foundation we can neither recover nor resolve.
Biography
Erik Davis is an award-winning journalist, independent scholar, and "performance lecturer" based in San Francisco. He is the author, most recently, of The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle), with photographs by Michael Rauner. He also wrote Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum) and TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown), the latter a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages. His essays on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality have appeared in over a dozen books, including AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (University of New Mexico Press), Prefiguring Cyberculture (MIT Press), Rave Culture and Religion (Routledge), and The Disinformation Book of Lies (Disinfo). Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of publications, including Bookforum, ArtForum, Salon, Blender, Wired, the LA Weekly, and the Village Voice.
A popular speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world, as well as presenting his performance lectures at venues like Artist's Television Access, ArthurBall, and Abakus. He has taught workshops and seminars at UC Berkeley, the California Institute of Integral Studies, the New York Open Center, and Esalen. He was one of the original minds behind Planetwork, an organization devoted to cross-fertilizaing information technology and global ecology. He also appeared in Craig Baldwin's underground film, the SciFi media critique Specters of the Spectrum.
Hewlett-Packard "Picture Book," Goodby, Silverstein & Partners