Of Making Images

Let me proceed in describing what I am seeing, and the various agents enabling me in the process. 

On my laptop screen, I am browsing Facebook. There appears a photograph after a click on the refresh button. I stimulate the machine (and the many technologies layered within and out of it) to fetch newer configurations of picture elements, their alignments producing shapes and hues. The shapes are, to my own semantic deconstruction, relatable, for my visual exposure to and knowledge acquired thereof, enables me to understand that a vertical stroke of a certain height and width is a 'l' and another similar one with half the height with a tittle on its top is an 'i'. The text has come in, and below it is the image. Even when I am trying to understand the image the newsfeed has regurgitated, for it is still pixeleted, still 'loading' (though the boundaries of the picture has been defined, the colours are yet to be put in, the curves to be traced and gradients to be set), the machine-learning intelligence has captioned it, for a brief moment - "This image contains: one person, outdoor, sky". And then comes the full image, in clarity, all pixels defined enough to evoke in me a sense of familiarity - of my friend posing in a serene meadow, her eyes squinting at the harsh sunshine.

The assimilation of various sensory and neural impulses and responses created an experience for me to view a picture on a social networking site. It is born out of my personal urge to reach to the world wide network to fetch a picture for me. I am hankering for an image – I desire to be informed about my acquaintances, and be acquainted to a visual. I command the machine by a click (or a sweeping gesture on a screen). My ‘self’ of flesh and bones, and more importantly, of urges, emotions and decisions, seeks out to find impalpable connections of my virtual self on the cyber-world. I wonder what my friends would possibly be doing this moment, or in that hour. The fact that I need to connect to those people, via their virtual selves, via the multiple images of them possibly engaged in activities or frivolities, is my semiconscious effort to ideate an image of my liking on the device screen.

Here I, by a sleight of my verbal abilities, try to sway past the immediate fallacy of the notion of ‘creation’ vis-à-vis ‘passive viewership’. I use the word ideate instead of create. One might argue that I have not etched a stroke on a physical surface or dabbed the paint a la creation, and I would counter the argument that I have lent my impulses do the formulation in the abstract signal processing and deciphering. My wish to behold what I sketchily seek is the dominant in this ideation. And that is precisely the objective of what I will proceed to term as quasi-passive image-making.  

The technology helps. Even if I be allowed a heuristic estimation, I cannot viably surmise what amount of 'I' went into creation of the image. An approximate percentage or a probably fraction will not draw the exact perimeter of synthesis of this person and the technology in which he immerses himself. I am, consciously, not engaging with the decision of what is the tangible material I should use to create the image or, the most intrinsic of them all, what constitutes the image – its components and message. Au contraire, I leave to chance and chance alone, what the network and the site's intelligence would bring forth. If one studies the deep machine learning possibilities that social networking sites explore, I can very reasonably provide me with the 'kind' of image I am mostly like to recognize myself with. The specific set of four friends whose photographs and posts I regularly pause to watch on my feed, are most likely to show up when I refresh the page, in want of newer pictures/ posts. I am lending a part of my being to create the frames I want my other reality to constitute of. My previous exploration of a commodity which I want to purchase on an e-commerce site on a side tab also takes part in the canvas of pixels (via suggested items in my feed). I have chosen a language in which the texts appear, and that is the part of the reality I want to acquaint myself with; any other would not be in my domain of appreciation.

These are the visuals which I have gradually constructed, not in the manner of precise selectivity but as responses to bias and likability. Even, a careful afterthought posits that what I claim as a construction is not a deliberate act but of my neural synapses reacting, feeding to its likenesses, favourites, avarices and ennui. I engage with them in rapid regularity and my creation on the screen right now is not a product of ideation of this instant, but of my past learnings, of wanderings and experiences. I sift through them, ‘like’ what I like, scroll past what I don’t, and thus create my own collage of visuals I want my future self to gain cognizance to.      

I am not the creator. But I have designed to my own tune the manner of images that will unfold before me. I am generating the image (in the sense of artificiality) of the real without the origin or reality – though deriving a snap out of it. The simulation of my consciousness is the sensibility of my engagement with images.