The Ledger As Image

What photography can teach us about crypto

I’m not as interested in efforts to visualise data in “aesthetic” or “interactive” ways as I am in applying aesthetic theory to technologies to make sense of them. But first, the story of a tattoo.

❍ ❍ ❍

STALKING THE IMAGE

Some time in the heat of the summer, I accompanied my partner to the tattoo shop to get inked. The image about to be etched on his skin was the iconic frame from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, wherein the enigmatic “Stalker” brings a writer and a professor on a philosophical endeavour to an ominous place called the “Zone”. So ominous that, as art bled into life, Tarkovsky along with his wife Larissa and the actor Anatoly Solonitsyn (who plays the Writer), amongst other members of the crew, died from contamination from the set: Tarkovsky had insisted on filming scenes for the “Zone” in Estonia, in a deserted hydroelectric power station with a leaking chemical plant upstream.

Tarkovsky’s commitment to the image that he wanted to create was as undebatable perhaps only as much as the breach of production ethics. In the shot that became one of the most iconic images in film history, the veined columns of the building in dim, misty lighting bestowed a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, the mini-dunes projecting a surreal landscape in optical depth.

The film still sent to the tattoo artist… or so we thought.

At the tattoo shop, we spent several transfer papers making sure the aspect ratio of the image grabbed from Google Images matched the film’s actual aspect ratio, since the tattoo was a tribute to Tarkovsky’s commitment to the image itself.

But it didn’t matter how much we committed to the film’s aspect ratio, after all. When we returned home, inked, we scrubbed the film on Criterion looking for the shot that we had tattooed. We couldn’t find it. At no point in the film did all three actors look the camera in the eye while hobbling over mini sand dunes.

The iconic image wasn’t from the film. It was in fact a photograph that Tarkovsky had taken on-set, a square polaroid re-toned and cropped to different dimensions for the film’s poster (vertical) and the whims of cinema journal editors (horizontal).

Tarkovsky’s polaroid taken on the set of Stalker. Source.

(IM)PRINTS

Most tattoo images are grabbed from Google Images, which we save and send to the tattoo artist who opens it on an iPad, makes their modifications before printing its reverse on thermal paper which works like a stencil to be pasted onto skin. The result is a tattoo of a photo of some sort, but the experience of seeing the image transposed from iPad to stencil to skin over and over again had me thinking that we could also see the tattoo as a photo. In observing art of the 70’s, the art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss proposed a way of thinking about art through photography as an “operative model for abstraction”.

It is the order of the natural world that imprints itself on the photographic emulsion and subsequently on the photographic print. This quality of transfer or trace gives to the photograph its documentary status, its undeniable veracity.

— Krauss, Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America

Krauss drew attention to the photograph as index: a photograph has a quality of literal manifestation, a trace. Looking beyond the symbolic quality of the photograph (this is a photo of a pair of lovers in Paris), the photograph is itself a sign that results from the direct writing of the light, through a device (this is the spectrum of light that was captured by X camera in Paris on X day reflecting off X people positioned in X way wearing X clothes standing in X distance from the camera…). Times may have changed, but this reading still applies whether the camera is an iPhone or a film camera.

While this may seem to be a dry reading of photography (and art) stripping it of romance and imagination, Krauss was in fact putting forth reality as art; the openness in the relationship between images and the world they capture forming an infinite range of perceptual possibilities.

Why is this important? For example, we know that even though AI word-to-image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney are able to produce images in the style of photographs, they are not photographs in the point-and-shoot sense that we understand photography to be. However, looking through Krauss’ indexical understanding of the photograph, we might pay a closer reading into what data sets, which domains, whose algorithmic design are behind the images — for the resulting image points to a set of information, even if it takes much more than simply looking up from the iPhone screen to look at the reality that is being captured as an image.

IN SEARCH FOR AN UNDENIABLE VERACITY

Indexing, tracing, the recording of information… sound familiar?

When someone makes a transaction on a blockchain, the deed is timestamped and the relevant information is irreversibly recorded on the ledger, including the amount sent, the sender and recipient’s addresses, and the number of network confirmations at that particular time of transactions. In cases where the digital asset being transferred is stored off-chain (such as the media file of an NFT, which happens more often than you’d think), the ledger holds the metadata pointing to the material information of the asset. In either case, there is a lot of pointing and indexing and tracing involved. Krauss applied the indexing quality of photography to approach to all mediums of art, from painting to sculpture to architectural interventions. What if we were to look beyond art and consider the ledger as an image?

I’m not as interested in efforts to visualise data in “aesthetic” or “interactive” ways as I am in applying aesthetic theory to technology to make sense of it. In the case of blockchain and web3, technologies that will move us towards greater transparency of data, actions, movements and value flows, it is worth taking another perspective at the relation between the signifier and the signified — which, as Krauss quotes the author and philosopher Roland Barthes, may be understood as “quasi-tautological”, i.e. redundant outside of the realm in which that specific relation is discussed. Seeing the ledger as an image means understanding its necessary and default direct relationship with the transaction being made — the actions that occur in our digital public spaces — but not taking it for granted: how to give intelligible definitions and provide meaningful contexts is ultimately for the taking.

Krauss covers several other intriguing points in Notes on the Index alone, including using Barthes’ notion of photography as a “message without a code” to establish a connection between the features of that a performance and that the photograph, and the paradox of being physically present but temporally remote — but I’ll stop here for this entry. Those concepts are fascinating, and will take time to congeal into applicable questions which will be interesting to explore, but for now — what images are we creating through our (trans)actions?

The world is so big,

Jing

❍ ❍ ❍

Further reading:

• It is a different topic altogether but also interesting to consider: the first ledgers were really pieces of art. Read Nick Szabo on seals, via Kernel 🌱.

• More on where AI images comes from: Charlie Warzel’s concise report + Mat Dryhurst & Holly Herndon’s project Spawning.

• Astrophotography is a great example of how complex photography is, not only because of the technical difficulties but because of what we expect an image to be. Pippa Goldschmidt on the Webb telescope portraying the universe as we hope to see it.