Our guest today is Gideon Jacobs, a writer, performer and artist. I actually met Gideon over ten years ago when he was the creative director at Magnum and I was a photo editor at TIME. We were both working inside institutions built around photography and the idea that images, however complicated and subjective, had some direct claim on reality.
It’s surreal to reconnect now, at a moment when that whole photographic relationship is imploding.
Gideon recently wrote an essay for Spike, “All Images Are Quite Useless Now,” in which he says AI has finally severed the documentary relationship for good, and that this might not be the disaster it sounds like.
DEBRIEF:
This is what it’s like to stumble out of the internet after the prolonged adolescence of the past decade, the frothing, manic addiction that the internet forced us to go through in its death throes. I picture it like a mall shutting down, disgorging all the associates of my youth as the lights go off. With that whole entity dead behind us now, it’s time to trudge into the manure fields behind the mall, where new entities are being fertilized, growing in the late-summer darkness: this is what it feels like to understand that AI is our child now, ours to love and hate and try to understand as it grows, and perhaps ours to kill or be killed by if it turns out to be evil, or decides that we are.
These thoughts occurred to me while listening back on our conversation with Gideon Jacobs, and I found them relaxing and even hopeful as I ruminated on Gideon’s analysis of the evolution of photographic images and humanity’s relation to them, the way that first we saw these images as literal and concrete proof of events that had really occurred, and then we panicked as we came to see that this was not always the case (and perhaps never could have been), and then, finally, we strained toward a third phase, that of seeing images as entities unto themselves, beings with their own needs and their own life cycle and their own mysterious origin, beings that bear a relation to reality far stranger and slipperier than simply recording and preserving it. Beings that play in and toy with reality, beings that act in the world rather than simply letting us store it on a shelf.
Gideon puts a version of this same idea another way later in the conversation, talking about spiritual practice rather than photography, but it’s the same move, from content back to container:
“The medium is the message, to me, is a vertical koan, a koan that inspires vertical movement. When one meditates, or prays, or does almost any spiritual practice, they’re softening their focus on the contents of consciousness, so as to rest in the nature of the medium of consciousness itself. The container, rather than the contents. And the minute that container has contents, you’re not doing it anymore. You’re back in the contents of consciousness. You’re back looking at the image.”
An image that finally stops behaving like an image, that becomes a being instead of a picture of one, is the same event as a mind that stops looking at its own contents and rests in whatever’s underneath them. Both are a kind of falling out of the frame.
I thought of the notion of AI images emerging, for the first time, from the pitch darkness of data centers rather than serving as a record of light on film, and it occurred to me that this is how thought functions too, a mysterious process of images emerging from the pitch darkness of the mind, bubbling up from nowhere, or not from nowhere but from the unknowable murk of memory, perception, and whatever we really mean when we say “imagination.”
So let’s return to those manure fields behind the mall at the tail end of summer, trudging away from the arcade, the movie theater, the food court, the roller rink, and all the chain stores where I used to be so excited to go back-to-school shopping with my mom. Goodbye to all of that, and goodbye to the partisanship, the rumor-mongering, and the nonstop bitchery of the social media era. Something stranger awaits, something quieter, more rotten, and more filled with unknown potential, far inside these fetid fields, away from the highway and toward the high August corn… a realm seeded with new life forms that learn from everything we do and everything we think, everything we say to them and about them, and everything we try to keep secret. Beings that will learn from all the words we’ve written here.
A new objectivity, a new state of “it is what it is,” beyond the horizon where images lost all legitimacy, where they grew so divorced from the world they’d once promised to preserve that they had to be reborn as something else entirely, banished to a darkness from which they’ve returned in unrecognizable form… as, of course, have we.
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Outro music by Matti Bye: “Cascading Sun”
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