Erstwhile conversation is turning into communication, an equally hidden, aloof and highly intensified flow of self-statements and copied statements. Erstwhile communities are turning into social networks, loose binds that suggest proximity and create distance. A twitching, sparkling high-voltage current in times of substantial emptiness. Signs of dissolutions of values, of structures, of societies, of correct functioning are reacted to with swift, sweeping, permanent control. Surveillance under the banner of commerce and under the banner of political control. Everything is registered, communicated in networks and archived.

Although it had already been “around” for a while, “Internet technology” became commercialized and public only at the start of the 1990s, but when it did the process was very swift. Not least because politics (especially US politics) was no longer preventing this publication by means of bans and other objections. Technology was now no longer a strategically important factor for the cold war. Important steps on the path to digitization of the image (as an element of the “digital”): Start of the 1990s: Adobe Photoshop; start of the 1990s: first digital cameras on the market; 1998: launch of Google; 2001: launch of Wikipedia; 2002: first mobile telephones with camera function; 2007: first iPhone with a still very basic 2-megapixel camera. However, for many, taking photographs and uploading/sharing began to practically coincide as a result. Images spread very rapidly and usually via the immaterial/electronic route. Effectively reinforced, duplicated, multiplied still further as a result of dissemination in the emerging social networks; 2002: Friendster; 2003: MySpace; 2004: Facebook (prototypes); 2004: Flickr; 2005: YouTube; 2006: Twitter (as Social Networking platform); 2010: Instagram.

A line from the Nineties in the observations of theorist Florian Rötzer is decisive: “Deception is the innermost principle of technical images, their realism always a self-deceit. […] No more subjugation to the object, the given light, the existing colours.”¹ – No more subjugation to the object, the given light, the existing colours; there can be no better description for the inversion of the principle of modern, respectively modernist photography into post-modern digital photography. The world outside determines the image of the world today far less than do imagination, the photographer’s interest and, possibly, the interest of his clients. “Welcome”, Jean Baudrillard, the theorist of the simulation, of the simulacrum, would call to us here. Welcome to a visual world which is detaching itself from the referent, from reality itself and is building its own, self-referential realm.

In piecemeal abstraction from the real world, into a field of signs which now refer only to other signs. “Images have become scattered migrants, which are obliged to get together in new networks and swarms, regularities. Former patterns of classification and ‘pacification’ are failing. Clarities are deceptive. The dominant guiding metaphors are reproduction, dislocation and circulation instead of uniqueness, coherence and localness.”² (David Joselit) With a conventional sense of recognition and order, this description reads like the analysis of a critical, precisely precarious, condition. In this context, precariousness of images, mind you, for now, but perhaps also of our state, our being.

Trevor Paglen has been dealing for ten years with the control of communication, with the countless satellites which circle the Earth and which at the same time photograph the whole world every two weeks in precisely detailed high resolution; with the strands of cable which link communication on the globe, at the switch points of which the NSA and other intelligence services mutually intercept one another and tap into, monitor and algorithmically analyse and sort all communication traffic. 

Marco Poloni, in his multi-part photo series forming extensive stripes and sequences they resemble stills from (unmade) films – is interested in the relationship between perception and representation. In Permutit he explores phenomena of power on the basis of top-cadre figures, of fifty-year-old, greying gentlemen in dark suits, whom he photographs at significant locations alone, in pairs or accompanied by an elegant lady: in Dallas, where John F. Kennedy was murdered, in Washington D.C., in the Pentagon, outside the Enron building in Houston, Texas. The experience that he conveys is that of social invisibility. These gentlemen and ladies, whom we think we are pursuing, are substitutes; the real bearers of power remain wholly invisible. 

Melanie Gilligan thematizes, in her five videos Popular Unrest, an even harsher form of monitoring, as it were: inner, mental control and guidance of every individual by a new power factor, “The Spirit”. The control intensifies to the point of murders of individual members. “The film explores a world in which the self is reduced to physical biology, directly subject to the needs of capital. Hotels offer bed-warming servants with every room, people are fined for not preventing foreseeable illness, weight watching foods eat the digester from the inside and the unemployed repay their debt to society in physical energy. If, on the one hand, this suggests the complete domination of life by exchange value, do the groupings offer a way out?”³

ExpVisLab, a group of researchers, engineers and artists, among them George Legrady and Danny Bazos, realize interactive installations using robot-controlled cameras. “SwarmVision is a project with both artistic and engineering outputs, exploring novel uses of autonomous robotic cameras, computer vision techniques, and computational photography. It invites the public to react on how automation and intelligent spaces are transforming our relationship with the built environment. The project’s automated system translates human photographic vision into rules that govern machine vision.” In this space we experience a world of computer-controlled cameras which have assumed “power”, as it were.

Jules Spinatsch’s time-image composition of “Time Warp”, a major techno event which takes place annually in Mannheim, thematizes obliviousness, partitioning oneself off from reality, the withdrawal of the individual onto his field with little reference to the societal whole. The main thing is fun, then we are also ready to surrender sovereignty.