Wasting Time on the Internet (14 page)

The photographer Penelope Umbrico creates huge photo sets from preexisting images she finds on the web. In 2006, she began an ongoing series of collecting images of sunsets posted to Flickr, where she crops out everything but the image of the sun itself, prints them out as 4x6 prints, and arranges them in galleries in massive grids. The variety and
subtlety of images are stunning. What could be more banal and clichéd than an image of a sunset? Yet Umbrico's suns are all completely different: some are purplish, some are blue, and others are green. Some suns are tiny dots and others fill the picture frame entirely. Some have halos around them, while others are poetically obscured by wispy clouds. In many, the lens pointed at a bright object creates dramatic solar flares, making them look more like meteorites than suns. A search on Flickr for “sunset” reveals that there are more than twelve million of them housed there, a fact that isn't lost on Umbrico. Echoing Flusser, she states:

    
Perhaps part of the beauty of taking a picture of a sunset is that while you are doing it it's likely that a million other people are doing it as well—at exactly the same time . . . While the intent of photographing a sunset may be to capture something ephemeral or to assert an individual subjective point of view—the result is quite the opposite—through the technology of our common cameras we experience the power of millions of synoptic views, all shared the same way, at the same moment. To claim individual authorship while photographing a sunset is to disengage from this collective practice and therefore negate a large part of why capturing a sunset is so irresistible in the first place.

The artist Eric Oglander has an ongoing Tumblr called Craigslistmirrors, which features only images of mirrors that are for sale. On first glance, it's a bit perplexing why he'd
want to post a bunch of banal, crappy snapshots of mostly ugly mirrors, but it quickly becomes clear that folks selling their mirrors haven't always stopped to consider what those mirrors are reflecting. Some reflect vast landscapes and clear blue skies; others reflect curious pets and, in many, the photographers themselves unwittingly appear, oftentimes in various states of undress. “Either the photographer is going to be reflected in the mirror or the inside of their home will be,” says Oglander. “It's like an invasion of privacy almost, and I think that's why people bring the mirrors outside.”

Oglander's work references the seminal 1960s mirror constructions by artist Robert Smithson, which he called displacements. Robert Smithson didn't make paintings of the sky; instead, by simply placing a mirror in a grassy field faceup, Smithson literally displaced an image of the sky, dropping a square of blue into a sea of green. Blazing azure one day, smoggy grayish-yellow the next, Smithson's gestures were at once formal color studies, quiet mediations on nature, and political statements on ecology. The mirror is a displacement machine that appropriates all that passes before it. A preprogrammed automaton, the mirror employs no judgment or morals; it indiscriminately displays all in the most democratic manner possible. The mirror works around the clock, reflecting a dark room all night long when its inhabitants are sleeping, or an empty apartment all day long when its inhabitants are at work. Like its cousin the surveillance camera, the mirror displays scads of dark data, but unlike the CCTV, the mirror has no memory: every
image passing across its surface is ephemeral. Great crimes are committed before mirrors; no one is ever the wiser. The mirror, then, is closer to a movie screen than CCTV, a surface upon which images are projected—and then reflected in reverse. Like the CCTV camera, the mirror never goes dark. Smash the mirror; disperse the image. Toss the pieces in the trash; they continue to dumbly reflect.

Since 1996, a group of actors/activists called the Surveillance Camera Players have been staging subversive plays adapted from books such as George Orwell's
1984
and Wilhelm Reich's
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
in front of CCTV cameras. While it's not known if anyone is watching them, their performances—often interrupted by the police—are exhaustively documented by their own cameras in addition to being documented by the surveillance cameras. The Players' message is a political one: “We protest against the use of surveillance cameras in public places because the cameras violate our constitutionally protected right to privacy. We manifest our opposition by performing specially adapted plays directly in front of these cameras . . . Down with Big Brother!”

The cars festooned with cameras that capture Google Street View drive around the world sucking up images. Meant to provide panoramic views of neighborhoods and buildings to accompany their maps, the cameras often capture unexpected and bizarre occurrences, such as women giving birth on the sides of roads, drug deals in progress, or tigers caught prowling suburban parking lots. One artist,
Mishka Henner, scoured online forums where people share the whereabouts of sex workers. He then put those map coordinates into Street View, and indeed, on some of those corners, found images of scantily clad women standing by the sides of the road in isolated areas. He collected these images as a series of photographs that he calls
No Man's Land.
While one might presume these women are sex workers, there's no definite evidence to support that claim. Instead, it's a mix of conjecture culled from the forums with the visual evidence compiled from Street View that gives the story credibility, one that could easily be misconstrued by legal authorities to arrest these women on charges of prostitution. Henner's project underlines the Promethean social and political circumstances that arise when nearly every inch of the planet has been surveyed and posted online and acts as a warning for its potential abuses.

Other artists stage performances for the Street View car as it drives through their neighborhoods. Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett have staged seventeenth-century sword fights, hired marching bands, and dressed people up in giant chicken costumes, all for the sake of creating strange images that will be incorporated into Google's official map culture. One online video shows a Street View car approaching on a narrow, rain-slicked Pittsburgh street. The car is forced to drive through a parade with brass bands and baton-spinning majorettes. As the car approaches the parade, it is showered with confetti. Leaving the parade, the car encounters a group of absurdly dressed joggers who animatedly approach
it from the opposite direction. Undeterred, the car drives through the spectacle, continuing its recording, seemingly oblivious to the exotic circumstances. Until the car passes this street again, those staged happenings will be preserved on the Google Street View record.

The first popular photoshopped image was of a dark-haired topless woman in white bikini bottoms sitting on a sandy beach in a tropical paradise with her back to the camera. Her name was Jennifer and on that day in 1987 she was photographed gazing out on a picture-perfect landscape, replete with pale turquoise water and a lush tropical island floating to her left on the horizon line. Puffs of clouds hang in a blazing azure sky. This photo came to be known as “Jennifer in Paradise,” and was taken by a software developer named John Knoll of his fiancée while they were on vacation in Bora Bora. Shortly afterward, Knoll went on to create Photoshop and this image was distributed with early versions of the program. For many people using Photoshop, Jennifer in Paradise was the first digital image they ever manipulated.

Jennifer's inclusion in Photoshop was casual, even serendipitous. When the demo package was coming together and sample images were needed to digitize, Knoll just grabbed the nearest photo at hand—a 4x6 photograph on paper that happened to be his fiancée in Bora Bora—and tossed it on a
scanner. Spontaneously and unwittingly, an icon was born. An online video from 2010 shows Knoll reenacting the Photoshop demonstrations he used to give in order to show the power of his photo-editing suite. Knoll fires up an ancient Mac and pulls up the image of Jennifer. He runs some primitive functions on Jennifer: first he clones her; then he copies, resizes, and pastes a duplicate image of the island and drops it on the horizon. It's kind of creepy: you're watching a reenactment of the future of the image unfurl before your eyes at the site of its inception. And he's not cloning just anything: he's cloning his topless wife, who would be cloned endlessly by the first generation of geeks to get their hands on Photoshop.

Constant Dullaart is an Internet artist who has mounted exhibitions based on the photograph. “Given its cultural significance just from an anthropological point of view I thought it would be interesting to examine what values the image contains,” he says. “The fact that it's a white lady, topless, anonymous, facing away from the camera. [Knoll] offers her, objectifying her, in his creation for the reproduction of reality.” Dullaart suggests that the negative of that photo should be given to the Smithsonian, to celebrate the time when “the world was young, as it still naïvely believed in the authenticity of the photograph.”

As late as 1973 Susan Sontag could still state: “A fake painting (one whose attribution is false) falsifies the history of art. A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality.”
A decade later, Samuel Beckett said the same thing for literature, regarding Duchamp's readymades: “A writer could not do that.” Thirty or forty years ago, fakeness was still the exception, not the rule that it is in today's digital world. The binary of true/false art/reality bespeaks a less complicated time, before appropriation in the visual arts, digital sampling in music, Internet avatars, and reality TV was the norm. A photographic print was just that: an emulsified surface that clung to a piece of paper. Once out in the world, these physical artifacts tended to be stable objects like newspapers, photographic prints, and bound books. The only way to reconfigure them was with a razor blade and a pot of glue. But even then, they remained paper-bound stable artifacts. These copies often bore signs of their original context: a Xerox of a newspaper photograph, for instance, still carried benday dots and signature typefaces like Imperial in the
New York Times
. Photographs appearing on the pages of a newspaper had proper authorial accreditations and captions that made their sources readily identifiable and verifiable. Today, photographs emanating from newspaper websites are regularly reblogged without attribution or context; oftentimes the caption doesn't travel with the photograph, nor does authorial accreditation. These are free-floating artifacts, detached from the anchored signifiers and contexts that first birthed their meaning. A thousand new contexts and meanings emerge from the viral nature of photographic distribution in the digital age.

In “Jennifer in Paradise,” Dullaart sees embodied a more
innocent and hopeful time: a time before the Internet was steeped in surveillance, when few worried about the politics behind software design, the digital divide, the colonizing of the digital commons, and the invasion of privacy; a time before social media and all the venom that came with it. It's a complicated image. While there's something touching and pure about it in an idealistic web 1.0 way, it's also filled with blind spots in terms of race, class, gender, and colonization.

In his artwork, Dullaart often warps Jennifer beyond recognition, radically applying Photoshop's own tools to her until the iconic image becomes an abstraction. His 2014 online video “Jennifer in Photoshop” is a loop of step-by-step Photoshop filters applied to the image until she is nothing more than a blur, then in reverse until she reappears in full resolution, set to the strains of Bobby Sherman's 1971 easy-listening song “Jennifer.” In his artworks, Dullaart uses the image of Jennifer in Paradise without Knoll's permission, something that angered the developer when he found out about it. Knoll claimed, “I don't even understand what he's doing.” But it seems like Knoll is the one who is lost, seemingly unable to grasp the full complexity of the forces his software package has unleashed, which is exactly the subject of Dullaart's work. When Jennifer was asked about Dullaart's art, she was sympathetic, offering a more realistic assessment: “The beauty of the Internet is that people can take things, and do what they want with them, to project what they want or feel.”

A decade before Jennifer, a group of artists known as the
Pictures Generation critiqued the ways mass media images were reproduced and circulated. One of their primary tactics was to rephotograph preexisting photographs and claim them as their own. Inspired by the pop artists, who painted images of mass-produced consumer goods, the Pictures group wielded a camera instead of a paintbrush, entirely removing the hand of the artist. They called into question the nature of originality: can we say there is an original when it comes to an infinitely reproducible medium like photography? Their work was as much critique as it was practice. Long before the Internet, they questioned traditional ideas of authorship, setting the stage for today's image macros and memes. So you had Jeff Koons rephotographing billboards of brands like Hennessy and Nike and re-presenting them unaltered on the walls of galleries. Sherrie Levine rephotographed reproductions of Walker Evans's iconic black-and-white photos of Depression-era sharecroppers, then claimed she was the author of those images. Richard Prince did the same with Marlboro ads of leathery-skinned men on horseback in glorious natural settings of the American West. Simply by removing all ad copy and logos, and titling his series
Cowboys
, they were a sly reference to the dawn of the Reagan era, when the photos were made. All of these works asked the same question: if artists photograph an image—any image—aren't they the authors of that image? Certainly they pushed the button that created it. If blame is to be ascribed, perhaps the apparatus is guiltier than the artist.