Ingrid Hoelzl | Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) & University of Zurich (original) (raw)

Books by Ingrid Hoelzl

COMMON IMAGE, 2021

Weaving together image theory with environmental theory, counter-anthropology, feminist materiali... more Weaving together image theory with environmental theory, counter-anthropology, feminist materialism and ecofeminism, this groundbreaking book explores Western and non-Western thought, past and present, poetic and mythic in search for a common image: a sensus communis, an ethico-aesthetics implicating the mineral, the vegetal, and the animal.

WITH TODAY’S DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY, the image is no longer a stable representation of the world, but... more WITH TODAY’S DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY, the image is no longer a stable representation of the world, but a programmable view of a database that is updated in real time. It no longer functions as a political and iconic representation, but plays a vital role in synchronic data-to-data relationships. It is not only part of a programme, but it contains its own ‘operating code’: it is a programme in itself. Softimage aims to account for that new reality, taking readers on a journey that gradually undoes our unthinking reliance on the apparent solidity of the photographic image and building in its place an original and timely theorization of the digital image in all its complexity, one that promises to spark debate within the evolving fields of image studies and software studies.

The aim of this Cahier is to bring together contributions that, induced by digi- talization but n... more The aim of this Cahier is to bring together contributions that, induced by digi- talization but not confined to digital images, explore historical and contemporary image practices that are situated beyond the habitual definitions of photography and film. The first part of the essays traces the pre-digital history of photography as a time-image in early photography (Starl), the implications of using photo- graphic images for proto-cinematic optical toys (Tietjen) and Auguste Chevallier’s translation of panoramic images into a circular image which upsets traditional notions of photographic temporality as much as notions of the frame (Müller- Helle). The second part explores the historical legacy of the digital “moving still” such as the freeze effect (Røssaak) employed in the blockbuster film The Matrix (1999) or the ubiquitous Ken Burns effect (Hoelzl) used as a display feature in Apple iPhoto and other photo-software. It is preluded by a visual essay by Maarten Vanvolsem and Jonathan Shaw. The essay assembles and discusses their respec- tive artistic practice in relation to their chronophotographic predecessors such as Bragagila—in the unusual format of the photographic still.

Viel ist über das fotografische Selbstporträt geschrieben worden, dessen Popularität – ungeachtet... more Viel ist über das fotografische Selbstporträt geschrieben worden, dessen Popularität – ungeachtet der postmodernen Repräsentationskritik – ungebrochen ist. Eine eingehende Untersuchung der subjekttheoretischen Aspekte fotografischer Selbstreferenzialität wurde bisher jedoch nicht vorgelegt. Diese Lücke füllt der vorliegende Band.

Ausgehend von einer strukturellen Analogie des Ich-Verweises in Fotografie, Malerei und Autobiografie greift Ingrid Hölzl für ihre Definition des »autobiografischen Paktes« nicht nur auf die Sprechakttheorie und die fotografische Indextheorie, sondern auch auf die Autobiografietheorie und die Theorie des Selbstporträts in der Malerei zurück. Ihre Theorie fotografischer Selbstreferenzialität exemplifiziert die Autorin am Beispiel des zentralafrikanischen Fotokünstlers Samuel Fosso, der seit einigen Jahren im Brennpunkt der westlichen Rezeption afrikanischer Gegenwartskunst steht.

Papers by Ingrid Hoelzl

The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, 2021

In this article, we address the trajectory of the image from the hardimage (the painted panel) an... more In this article, we address the trajectory of the image from the hardimage (the painted panel) and its collusion to the regime of the visual; to the softimage (the image as software) and its collusion to the regime of the invisible; to the postimage as a utopian scenario where the point of reference is no longer the human(ist) machine of vision but the entirety of Earthly beings. The trajectory concludes with what we call the Martian Image (on Earth): not a human-made imagery of Mars, but a xeno-vision or alien image of Earth or... a non-human, hence alien way of relating on Earth.

In Knowing and the Known (1949), a collaboration between pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and so... more In Knowing and the Known (1949), a collaboration between pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and sociologist Arthur Bentley, the authors propose a ‘transactional view’ of the vital entanglement of humans, things and ‘milieu’ as cultural, social, commercial and individual parties of a ‘body of transaction’, arguing that ‘without this togetherness of human and non-human partakers we could not even stay alive, to say nothing of accomplishing anything’. This article aims to demonstrate that the ‘transactional view’ with its insistence on the transactional nature of human life (somatic, individual and social) as a continuous process of exchange with human and non-human partakers allows us to understand the condition of the image and of the human within digital networks in a new light. The networked image is understood as a transaction; as part – and party – of a continuous process of mutual data exchanges between human and non-human partakers in a complex interplay of sensors, antennas, software, hardware, data and users. I propose applying the term ‘image-transaction’ to this particular form of relationality and agency that the image acquires in digital networks, the term ‘transactional ensemble’ to the entirety of operations taking place in digital networks, and the term ‘intra-image’ to the transaction between the representational (on-screen) and the algorithmic (off-screen) function of the image, with the former acting as a ‘lure’ for the latter.

I will exemplify my argument with an artwork by Julian Oliver, titled The Transparency Grenade (2012). The open-source work consists of a faithful remake of Soviet F1 Hand Grenade presented in a glass box; the grenade's powerful wifi antenna captures data from nearby smartphones and its minicomputer mimes these data for information. IP addresses, images, websites, email fragments etc. are then displayed – with a slight time lag – on a digital screen. With this work, Oliver reverses the intra-image transaction between representational (on-screen) and algorithmic (off-screen) function of the image: the screen is no longer a lure, but a place where the transactional
image comes to represent its entanglement into processes of surveillance and control.

Multitudes 77, 2019

This article draws on the “transactional view” developed by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley in orde... more This article draws on the “transactional view” developed by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley in order to help us understand the images that circulate within our electronic networks beyond the representational figure appearing on the surface of our screens. To grasp their dynamics, one needs to take into account the multiple layers they are made of, from the materiality of electronic flows, through the strata of machine languages, the transfer protocols and the design of their interface. The image we identify and isolate in its representational features is a lure that obfuscates the multiple implications of the transactions that generate it. Taking stock of these transactions is a precondition to debunk some of the illusions carried by the images.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY, 2018

Invited contribution to POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, publish... more Invited contribution to POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, published in March 2018 with Bloomsbury Academic.

The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self, 2018

The closing chapter of the Routledge anthology Evolution of the Image: Political Action and Digit... more The closing chapter of the Routledge anthology Evolution of the Image: Political Action and Digital Self edited by Marco Bohr and Basia Sliwinska addresses the evolution of the image, from the hardimage to the softimage, and from the postimage (in its dystopian and utopian aspects) to the Martian image or xeno-vision as the logical telos of machine vision.

With the digital revolution, the photographic paradigm of the image has become supplemented with ... more With the digital revolution, the photographic paradigm of the image has become supplemented with an algorithmic paradigm. The result is a new kind of image capable to gather, compute, merge and display heterogeneous data in real time; no longer a solid representation of a solid world but a softimage—a program-mable database view. In today's neurosciences and machine vision, the very concept of " image " as a stable visual entity becomes questionable. As a result, the authors propose that the need exists to radically expand the definition of image and abandon its humanist and subjective frame: The posthuman image—which the authors propose to call the postimage—is a collaborative image created through the process of distributed vision involving humans, animals and machines.

In the last two decades, mobile, locative and wireless media have profoundly reconfigured our exp... more In the last two decades, mobile, locative and wireless media have profoundly reconfigured our experience of the image as well as our experience of the urban space. Based on a critical revision of one of the first accounts of this new experience of the city, Lev Manovich's 'Poetics of Augmented Space' (2006), and on Adrian Mackenzie's concept of 'wire-lessness' (2011), the authors define the urban as a data-space where physical and digital data, bodies and signals commute and connect via mobile devices and wireless networks. In this urban data-space, the screen, as our local access point to the networks, coincides with the image as the visual part of multitudinous data exchanges. In this Brave New City, where we are permanently assisted/monitored by a plethora of digital devices, software agents and sensors, the role of the image is no longer to screen the world but to screen our data, turning us into an ambulant real-time database, a mobile corps de données. The data gathered from each and every move in the city allows for infinite and invisible operations of surveillance and control by both government and commercial stakeholders. This hidden operativity is all the more powerful as it is dissimulated in the form of proliferating image-screens. K e y w O R D s augmented city • augmented space • digital image • image-screen • mobile screen • sentient city • surveillance • urban screen • urban data-space •

ISEA2016 Hong Kong CULTURAL R>EVOLUTION. Proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Arts, edited by Olli Tapio Leino et al., May 2016

This paper addresses one fundamental question: How does the relation between image and vision cha... more This paper addresses one fundamental question: How does the relation between image and vision change when machines are involved? We argue that with neurosciences and computer vision, the image as a stable visual entity no longer exists, but that autonomous (machinic) vision does not necessarily render human vision or imaging obsolete. Adopting a posthumanist point of view, we stress collaborative vision across species, and proposes to define the posthuman image, or 'postimage' as the gathering/exchanging of (visual) data between humans, animals, and, increasingly, autonomous machines.

Visual Studies 29 (3): 261-271, Oct 16, 2014

Via a close navigation of a Google Street View (GSV) scene in Oslo, this article investigates th... more Via a close navigation of a Google Street View (GSV)
scene in Oslo, this article investigates the role the
photographic image plays in what has come to be known
as ‘locative media’ – an entire range of image software
that runs on mobile devices using GPS signals to locate
the user, and that emerged after the United States
government decided to end the intentional degradation of
the public GPS signal in 2001, fostering the development
of navigable photo-maps such as GSV, photo-synths and
other location-based image applications such as
Augmented Reality. The authors first address the
temporal discontinuities and gaps of the GSV database,
which the user navigates as a spatially continuous image.
Second, they show that the city is experienced as one and
the same data space, simultaneously traversed both onsite
and on-screen. Third, they critically interrogate the
navigability of the GSV image afforded by real-time data
processing based on mutual data exchanges between user
location, hardware, software, network and database.
They argue that the GSV image is what Harun Farocki,
in an article on cybernetic warfare, has called an
‘operative image’, an image that no longer represents an
object but is part of an operation. In fact, the users’
trajectories feeding back into the database initiate a
reverse operativity, which proves to be the more
problematic side of ubiquitous locative media
applications such as GSV.

Digital Creativity 25 (1): 79-96, 2014

For his JPEGs series started in 2002, German artist Thomas Ruff used digital photographs taken by... more For his JPEGs series started in 2002, German artist Thomas Ruff used digital photographs taken by himself and from the web, compressed using the maximum rate, and then decompressed into large-scale prints. This method of hypercompression and enlarge- ment exposes the mathematical infrastructure of the JPEG image, i.e. the pixel blocks into which the image is split during the compression process. In so doing, Ruff turns a digital artefact (pixilation) into a default aesthetic, thereby exposing the JPEG as today’s default mode of viewing images: online and on-screen. Based on a thorough study of JPEG com-pression and its artistic use by Ruff, we show that with this shift from geometric projection to algorithmic pro- cessing, ‘photographic’ no longer denotes a specific mode of image creation, but rather a specific mode of image processing and that the new ‘architectural order’ of the image is the mathematical matrix used during compression.

The New Everyday, Feb 19, 2014

""THE OPERATIVE IMAGE" is a collection of articles exploring the new function of the image, which... more ""THE OPERATIVE IMAGE" is a collection of articles exploring the new function of the image, which, as Harun Farocki has put it, no longer represents an object but is part of an operation. With digital technologies, these operations occur not only in our everyday actions such as emailing, chatting, wayfinding, banking, shopping etc., but also in more specialized realms such as cybercrime, computer vision algorithms and medical imaging technologies. These operations are explored here by eight artists/researchers from disparate disciplines including critical software studies, cyberforensics, new media art and experimental visualization, as well as visual and medical image studies. By means of these crossed examinations, the cluster hopes to shed new light on the digital image’s entanglement in diverse fields of operation, where agency becomes distributed between devices, software, networks, “working objects” and (but not necessarily) humans.

Three out of five cluster contributions are co-authored by an interdisciplinary tandem, bringing together a research in digital humanities with research in new media arts and technologies.

*Ingrid Hoelzl, The Operative Image – An Approximation

*Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Pold, Manifesto for a Post-Digital Interface Criticism

*Aud Sissel Hoel and Frank Lindseth, Differential Interventions – Images as Operative Tool

*Richard E. Overill, Image Steganography: Digital Images as Covert, Subliminal Channels

*David Gruber and Daniel C. Howe, Language / Gesture / Mirror

*George Legrady, Swarm Vision and The New Everyday"

In Digital Continuities. From the History of Digital Art to Contemporary Transmedial Practices,edited by Nick Lambert and Ernest Edmonds, special section of Transactions. Leonardo Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. 45:5 (September 2012), 474-475., Sep 12, 2012

This article presents the theoretical framework, con- ceptual background, hypotheses and aims of ... more This article presents the theoretical framework, con- ceptual background, hypotheses and aims of my on- going research on the place of the image in digital culture. I am investigating how the new generic mode of display, the screen, affects the conception and the production of images, and how the myriad forms, uses and mobilities of urban screens contrib- utes to the constitution of the shared space through which images and citizens circulate and communic- ate: the augmented city.

David Claerbout’s video installation Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, reconstruction after Hiromishi ... more David Claerbout’s video installation Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho, reconstruction after Hiromishi Mine (2000) questions the “photographic now,” the present state of photography and its new relation to the present. The piece reproduces, or more exactly recomposes, a press photograph of an American airplane shot down by friendly fire. The Belgian artist travelled to the site of the accident and took a series of photos of the landscape. He then assembled these stills into a video animation onto which he superimposed the still image of the exploding plane. The result is an image whose temporality is hybrid and whose mediality is unclassifiable. My study investigates the process of digital reconstruction and animation, and the “becoming signal” of the image, and questions the possibility of reactualizing the photographic past through digital screening.

In Photography and Movement, edited by Ingrid Hoelzl, special issue History of Photography 35:1 (February 2011), 32-43., Feb 1, 2011

"This article engages the question of expanded photography through a study of Nancy Davenport’s 2... more "This article engages the question of expanded photography through a study of Nancy Davenport’s 2008 piece Blast-off Animation, part of her multichannel DVD installation WORKERS (Leaving the Factory).
The piece comprises digital photomontages, collages made up of hundreds of still images – then animated in very basic ways’. In this, post-production has become the principal site of photographic image production. Recorded and calculated images are merged into augmented documents that no longer display an (impossible) past, but a possible present.
Digitally animated into moving stills, and displayed in the form of continuous loops, these images meet less a desire for movement than a desire for (spatial and temporal) endlessness. In including within the frame the endlessness beyond the frame, expanded photography overcomes the spatial and temporal confinement of the still – but in so doing confines photography within its supposed deficiency.
By following the conceptual and strategic threads – and pitfalls – of expanded photography, the present essay seeks to clear the way for a new, fluctuating temporality of
images – a photographic now."

History of Photography, Jan 1, 2011

Photographies, Jan 1, 2010

While the early hybrid forms between moving and unmoving image have, with increasing historical d... more While the early hybrid forms between moving and unmoving image have, with increasing historical distance, come to be considered worthy of study, the growing presence of digitally mobilized photographic images in the present visual culture has so far hardly been taken seriously as an object of research - not only on the basis of its currency and its suspicious proximity to popular culture but also because its medial and thus academic classification is unclear. The matter-of-factness with which photo-, video- and computer-graphical recording and representation media are combined today, however, shows that the “expanded field of photography” (Baker) requires an expanded concept of “the photographic” between analog and digital, print and projection, still and moving. Taking the analog/digital debate as obsolete, the paper directly attacks the opposition of print and projection before exposing, with the Ken Burns Effect, a specific challenge to the still/moving divide.

COMMON IMAGE, 2021

The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, 2021

Multitudes 77, 2019

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY, 2018

The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self, 2018

ISEA2016 Hong Kong CULTURAL R>EVOLUTION. Proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Arts, edited by Olli Tapio Leino et al., May 2016

Visual Studies 29 (3): 261-271, Oct 16, 2014

Digital Creativity 25 (1): 79-96, 2014

The New Everyday, Feb 19, 2014

Three out of five cluster contributions are co-authored by an interdisciplinary tandem, bringing together a research in digital humanities with research in new media arts and technologies.

*Ingrid Hoelzl, The Operative Image – An Approximation

*Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Pold, Manifesto for a Post-Digital Interface Criticism

*Aud Sissel Hoel and Frank Lindseth, Differential Interventions – Images as Operative Tool

*Richard E. Overill, Image Steganography: Digital Images as Covert, Subliminal Channels

*David Gruber and Daniel C. Howe, Language / Gesture / Mirror

*George Legrady, Swarm Vision and The New Everyday"

In Photography and Movement, edited by Ingrid Hoelzl, special issue History of Photography 35:1 (February 2011), 32-43., Feb 1, 2011

History of Photography, Jan 1, 2011

Photographies, Jan 1, 2010

Journal of Contemporary African Art, Jan 1, 2009

This essay takes the work of Samuel Fosso as the starting point of my reflections—not in an attem... more This essay takes the work of Samuel Fosso as
the starting point of my reflections—not in
an attempt to reveal the genuine features of
African self-portraiture but to examine a work
that is exclusively self-photographic with regard
to subject theory and the logics of representation
that are at work in a self-photographic situation.

Still Searching, 2016

This blog series was written during a two-months “writer in residence” (March-April 2016) for Sti... more This blog series was written during a two-months “writer in residence” (March-April 2016) for Still Searching, an online discourse on photography hosted by the Fotomuseum Wintherthur: http://blog.fotomuseum.ch

In four short chapters, the blog series examines the shift from the humanist to the post-humanist program of the image, in line with the shift from the geometric paradigm of the image (based on the linear perspective) to the algorithmic paradigm (intruduced with digitalization). It discusses the central idea of our book Softimage, the image as a software, and opens on the status of the image in the age of autonomous machines – the postimage.

1. Image and Programme
2. On the Invisible (Image and Algorithm)
3. Softimage and Hardimage
4. From the Kino-eye to the Postimage