Author: Joseph Amodei

This article made me think about human gait recognition and its use as a a means for biometric identification. This led me to stumble across this paper on free-view gait recognition which is an attempt to solve the problem of gait recognition needing to have multiple views to be effectively measured/identified, and the use of multiple cameras in city-wide security systems to build such identification. So this combination of using security systems and then deploying algorithmic identification to make the specificity of human beings by the ways in which they move through such surveillance systems seems like an act of “nonhuman” photography that arises out of the combination of smaller systems of “nonhuman” photography.  So I am interested in what other collisions of “nonhuman” systems of photography can intersect with each other to create unintended image portraits.

“Nonhuman photography can allow us to unsee ourselves from our parochial human-centered anchoring, and encourage a different vision of both ourselves and what we call the world.” I think that the above example concerned with gait identification is about trying to see something specific, and I am interested in the fragments and detritus that could be created from this (and other systems of collision). For example, in the picture below one can see the images compiled and the lines they create for the gait detection to be accurate, but this for me raises an aesthetic question of what does the imagery needed to identify people via their gate look like. What are the human portraits created out of surveillance and algorithmic identification?

In contemporary captures I don’t consider anything objective. After reading about the history and development of different photographic processes it seems like it never was objective. What seems to have been objectively present was the quest for a capture situation that would be objective. A desire, in the western tradition of the enlightenment and its relation to the scientific method, to make something verifiable by reproducibility and replication. So, while there may be tools that can now generally reproduce roughly the same image in a repeatable way, it is not that the process is objective, but more that the journey towards seeking something objective has resulted in something that is close to agreeable in a more generalized way. This idea about process in relation to identifying an objective image is different than a predictive one. While objectivity I think is inevitably wrapped up in the human-perception centric sense of the creators if the image technology, I think there are at this point chemical process for capturing light (or other capture techniques) that can be predictable, or likely to be repeatable. And is predictability what is tied to the veritas of objectivity? That is the question I would posit at the end of this reading.

In some of the speculative cameras described in the article, the user/operator and cameras/sensors relationship moves very much away from the traditional relationship that point-and-shoot cameras had between their user and camera. One way in which this seems to be happening is along the lines of agency of the situation. In more traditional photo camera’s the agency of the capture is at the behest of a user’s specific action and choice to engage with the camera – simply having access to the device does not allow for a capture to occur.  In some of the situations discussed by Ervin, the question of agency changes to one where the action switches over to one where the agency is at the beginning of the situation where the terms for a potentiality of photographic situations to occur are created. If one has a camera that can take pictures on its own, learn from its actions, an is always operating then the last opportunity for the agency of the capture (in the 20th century sense of the photographic capture) occur at the onset instead of the moment of the performative ‘click’ of the camera. So here we have a situation where the device is always performing at the user’s initial request, and performing on its own in a way that the used to require a union of performative relations between person and machine.

This question of the performative agency happening at the beginning of the situation opens up larger questions about the relationship to agency amidst  the user/operator and cameras/sensors relationship as cameras out in public begin to take on the computational qualities described by Ervin. What happens to the relationship when the consent of situational agency is removed by increased proliferation of these devices in an unregulated manner that arises out of the conditions of America’s late capitalism? When will this capture performance start? What is the Amazon Ring gonna do to us (performatively)?