from the archives

Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 20

KATE STECIW

Queering the Technical Image

By: N. Hitchcock

Kate Steciw’s ongoing body of work is high gloss and high polish in its presentation. The works are primarily dye- sublimation prints on rectilinear sheets of aluminum, professionally framed in naturally finished or colorfully dyed wood that, despite the small reveal separating the aluminum surface from the frame, is incorporated into each work as a part of its image. The palette of each frame visually overlaps with the print’s slick surface, subtly illuminating the sculptural principals at play in the compositions.

Steciw’s latest works may appear, at first glance, to conform to the conventional language of photographic collage. In recent years, her practice has shifted from extreme interventions into photographic surfaces—the removal of digitally drawn shapes from their centers, then employing the removed parts as hanging components of an adjacent mobile—toward what seems like a more traditional wall-bound roll.

The series has roots in the period from 2003 to 2012 when Steciw worked as a retoucher at an well-known post-production company, one hailed as a high-tech and artisanal collage studio. The company primarily caters to high-power fashion clients but has branched out. Employing a number of highly skilled practitioners, each of whom is assigned mere portions of images and often signs substantial, legally binding nondisclosure agreements, the company’s work tends to create a sense of alienation in its employees. During this time, Steciw and her colleagues used iChat (an earlier version of iMessage) for inter-office communication. They shared technical expertise but the conversation also evolved. Perhaps it is unsurprising, since iChat offers image support, that a group of retouching specialists operating at an industrial scale would begin to insert images into their parallel conversations. What developed in the office was a situational grammar encompassing images, texts, and utterances. The textual and especially the pictorial elements expanded to the constraints of its software, whereas the vocalizations took place in the physical space of the office. To understand the ongoing conversation among colleagues would there- fore require knowledge of the interplay between a number of vectors. The images are morphologically situated—they have the same command over language as text.

The complete supplanting of text by images is now easily understood by those with rudimentary technological literacy, as images are in-built feature of the most common chat software1. In the post-production office, this literacy developed organically; physical proximity and technical knowledge led to these multivalent conversations. The employees’ work day became emblematic of capital’s “flexible forms of labor organization.”2

Philosopher Vilém Flusser, in Into the Universe of Technical Images, describes the final steps of images accelerating toward abstraction—the mediation of the world by text. Moving toward full-blown abstraction, he states, text “disintegrates into a swarm of particles and quanta, and the writing subject into a swarm of bits and bytes, moments of decision, and molecules of action.”3 Text loses its pictorial function and can only be interpret- ed through computation. The incorporation of images into textual conversation—placing them on the same footing as their written counterparts—is symptomatic of the loss of faith in syntax he describes. Yet we can move one step further by acknowledging this fungibility may hold a liberating potential —fertile ground for radical gestures. This realization, here happening in the workplace, is precipitated by what Flusser proposes as a collapse of orthographic rules. In a playful environment nested within wage labor, the delimiting of orthography and syntagmatic expansion to include images is a stopgap against alienation—and in this sense and context, may even be seen itself as radical.

At about the same time, Steciw’s artistic peers developed a new collaborative format for working with images; a number of groups emerged from a shared interest in consumer software—namely blogs—and connectivity. Now referred to as Surf Clubs, the member- ship of these groups included artists, curators, and activists who were at the time were “extremely online.” Marcin Ramocki tracks the earliest development of these groups to 2002–03. These environments of hybrid visual and textual images fostered conversational collaboration among artists separated geo-spatially but brought together by the internet. In simple terms, Surf Clubs are blogs dedicated to understanding what it means to “surf” the web. As Ramocki remembers in one of the few pieces of writing on the subject, these groups developed a playful, collaborative style of posting he describes as “language games.” As he writes, “Posts on a surfing club are statements of organized signifiers, which increase in complexity as the surfing club’s game continues. The older the club the more convoluted the semiotics of communication between surfers becomes.” They are “conducive to a very fast-paced conceptual exchange based on treatment and analysis of online material, or using the online material as a base of any kind of investigation.”4 Similar to the informal iChat community at the post-production studio, the speed with which an image must be constellated—the conversation- al pacing of image production— positions itself over a constantly shifting ground. The timing of a message’s release determines its meaning.

While her peers studied images transferred across networks, a pursuit more attuned to Hito Steyerl’s idea of the “poor image,” which recognizes hierarchies of image resolution, Steciw reflects on these circumstances from the vantage point of her artistic studio, where she maintains a conversational pace of production.5 For each artwork she materializes, dozens of images are discarded or archived. Her studio is a matrix of computer folders containing her source material—ranging from casual snapshots taken on her phone and low-resolution files copied from social media to print-ready stock photography she purchases from various outlets. Each folder contains image files that are cropped, arranged, layered, and re-layered. She neuters the images’ history—flattening them within the studio’s ecosystem while accepting their continued utility, each springing in several directions from its source. The images she employs enjoy a freedom that is only available in the contemporary context. She often sources them from publicly accessible archives or databases; they are either regulated by an open license, receive little to no piracy protections, or, in the case of stock photography, they may be sold ad infinitum and often appear in various public contexts after making their way into her compositions.

Steciw’s source images are but one component of her compositions. Their edges are also of primary importance. Within the rectilinear parameters of the series’ current iteration, the artist’s touch is present, even though it is mediated by software. “Brush” strokes placed atop and under the component photographs in her artworks deter- mine the points where each image comes into contact with the next. Executed with a stylus and touchpad, her marks are in essence drawing—a multimodal act proliferating through painting and writing, as much as the computer’s screen. Her marks’ curves suggest a subjectivity expressed by the speed and breadth of each given stroke, yet the repetition of their visual enclosures and their arrangement on an invisible grid allude to a deeper syntactic relation- ship. The grid on which they are arranged spans across the series as a whole and may not be apparent without viewing the works en masse. One must study the entire body of work to identify evidence of extensive patterning. Recall that Flusser’s final stage toward abstraction suggests text becomes incomprehensible, “collapse[s] into particles that must be gathered up.” Steciw’s language of images-turned-text become, as Flusser suggests, “in-graspable”—a “mosaic” of elements whose configuration crosses through space from picture to picture.6 Referring to the Latin origins of the world calculus, Flusser analogizes each piece of the information mosaic as tiny pebbles—describing them as the smallest possible elements that must come together to generate meaning among images. This essential shift in the nature of images comes, in Flusser’s musings, through technological mediation. His proposition places the human figure in a world of images, surrounded by projections in which we are engulfed. It is a place where all images, regardless of historicity, are superficial in their compositions and programmatic in their relationship to any who may behold them.

Steciw, who identifies as queer, positions her works against historical “straight” photography, which privile ges the skill of the photographer as situational arbiter and sole author of the image. Artworks predicated upon that “truth” may only be displayed by way of an authoritative masculinity—the straight, hetero-normative male gaze. The predisposition to centralize as interactions between capital and museological convention are brought to bear upon visual culture, establishing queerness in photography as cannon--pulling it away from the cultural margins towards its center where its forms are employed in the service of capital.7 Subjective manipula- tion of the camera’s output, a strategy of radical queerness, is now the modus operandi of post-production studios. As formerly decentralized forms are “mobilized by capital to narrowly possible futures,” it becomes obvious that queer strategies are now engaged in the service of capital as technical images, projecting their ideals across a horizon of hetero-normative desire.8

The wheelhouse of photographic post-production has been tailored to manufacture realistic representations— collages that appear as singular images. The design of Photoshop exudes this ideological and technical imperative. In contrast to post-production house’s fashion work, Steciw’s compositions are largely abstract despite the recognizability of their elements. In her works, the joints between one image and the next are infinitely small ruptures ; these are her marks. Their silhouettes are akin to the outlines of textual characters yet are also the bounding edges of a pictorial surface. That they sometimes appear in multiple compositions inhabited by different images further suggests these marks as lexical and their coordinates as syntactic.

In the context of post-production, each of Steciw’s visible source images are analogous to Flusser’s pebbles— the smallest possible forms of information—meaningless without being constellated en masse. Flusser describes this microcosmic scale as binary, the horizons of which are “inevitable” and “impossible.” The technical image is produced by human operators he calls envisioners. The envisioner’s role within this system is to take a snapshot of a meaningful composition of minute pebbles just as their configuration approaches the horizon of inevitability. This is the human agency within the process of generating technical images—what produces coherent architectural plans and develops negatives. Steciw does, in fact, play the role of the envisioner, yet she is able to short-circuit its function, boolean as it may be. She preemptively pulls the trigger, causing the process to grind to a halt. Steciw’s compositions embody a visual incoherency, or what she sometimes calls a “clumsiness,” that is the result of privileging the infinitesimal relationships between pebbles. She exposes the system of image formation by resisting its technical imperative to produce a realistic image. The projector is knocked off balance, skewing the image into an inconceivable keystone. There is not only a shift in the direction of an image’s projection, but also a foreshortening of the projective throw—a theoretical distance now sharing the dimensions of the space between her source materials. In the literature of another predictive art form—science fiction—the intentional foreshortening of its projective throw is exemplified by the cyberpunk subgenre. This subgenre concerns itself with socio-political and geo-spatial access to the future, which is actually an “unevenly distributed” present and for all intents and purposes quantifiably real and actual.9 From this perspective, Steciw’s compositions find themselves at constantly shifting coordinates along Flusser’s binary between improbable and inevitable. If Flusser’s binary reads as gendered, with straight photography at the horizon of inevitability, Steciw’s work offers an alternative by queering the role of the envisioner. To apply Judith Butler’s quotation locating the queer image embodied: They are at “the limits of intelligibility.”10