Reflections

Ex Machina

What the Medium Reveals

Ex Machina as a metaphor

Ex Machina is an interesting expression in Latin meaning: ex - from or out of, and machina - machine, contrivance, as well as a trick or stratagem. It is best known as deus ex machina (meaning 'god from the machine'), a device used in ancient Athenian theatre. When dramaturges such as Euripides could not bring a dramatic plot to a logical resolution through the protagonists' actions, they used deus ex machina to provide a satisfactory conclusion. In deus ex machina, a crane—a mechane—lowered a ‘god' figure onto the stage among the mortal protagonists, providing a supernatural or divine means to resolve the dramatic conflict.

Aristotle viewed this dramatic device as a defect of construction. Aristotle argued that a plot should unravel from itself, rather than introducing a 'machine' to inject supernatural or divine intervention.

I use Ex Machina as a metaphor to discuss what comes out of a camera as a result of chance in photographic images. Although a photographer may suffer the illusion that they have control over the machine to produce desired or expected results, there is always a high probability that some unknown and unpredictable element that seems to have no assignable cause is introduced into the process.

Every image-making machine is built to do one thing: capture the world as faithfully as its design allows. Yet every machine has its flaws, its limits, its ‘mood' on a given afternoon. A light leak floods a corner of the frame; a double exposure lays a stranger's face over a landscape; a cosmic ray strikes a sensor and leaves a white ‘scratch' across a sky. These accidents arrive uninvited, cannot be summoned on demand, and cannot be re-recorded precisely.

The accidental nature of photography

An accidental image results when the recording process is influenced by conditions the operator did not intend or control. The machine's physical nature—lens flare, film fog, the characteristics of photographic chemistry, sensor thermal noise, compression algorithms introducing artifacts— these are not malfunctions of the machine. They are the machine behaving exactly as physics and chemistry dictate, in circumstances nobody planned for.

Added to these hazards are the effects of the environment—dust, a smudge, stray radiation, a passing object, an unexpected reflection. The environment constantly contributes things the photographer did not notice or could not have known.

The photographer also adds a 'touch'—camera shake, imprecise shutter release, miscalculated exposure... all human glitches inviting a chance result.

The randomness involved is genuine, acting on conditions so numerous and delicate that no one can reproduce them. Try repeating the recording a second later, but no one can tame the universe. It has already moved on. The non-reproducibility is therefore a property of odd images, made vivid only when the result looks strange enough to make us notice.

Chance and enigma

These chance images may appear enigmatic, but one must recognize that the interest or meaning of an accidental image is never wholly in the image. The enigmatic quality has as much a human origin as a mechanical one. We are pattern-seekers, so any ambiguous field of ‘marks' invites interpretation. The machine supplies structure without intent, and the viewer supplies intent.

Accidents, but seldom garbage

Accidents have a distinguished record, and treating them as mere garbage would be a mistake. For example, photographic plates stored near uranium salts were found to have been ‘exposed', but what actually occurred was radiation exposure. Further examination brought radioactivity into science through what was, technically, a ruinous exposure.

In Louis Daguerre's 1838 view of a Paris boulevard, the long exposure allowed the moving traffic to vanish. However, a man who stopped to have his boots polished stayed still long enough to be recorded, becoming, by accident, probably the first person ever photographed.

Henri Latigue's photo of the passing racing car leaning forward while a pole leans backward is a curious image. Still, it clearly demonstrates the result of shutter travel versus an object's trajectory. And then there are images of floppy aircraft propellers that show another curious phenomenon produced by camera shutters. Such artifacts tell you how the apparatus works. Every glitch is a small confession by the machine, which is why photographers should be vigilant and cherish any unexpected anomaly.

Do these chance images correspond to reality?

In Charles Peirce's terms, a photograph is indexical: it is causally connected to something that was actually there. Accidental images preserve this property. In that narrow sense, chance images are entirely real. But they do not ‘reliably' correspond to the scene. They may record an event in the apparatus rather than the thing in front of it, or they may also witness an event or object "that-has-been", something unexpected that happened in front of the lens. As Roland Barthes states, a photograph is a certificate of presence. An ‘accidental' image certifies that something was there, but it may not certify what the viewer assumes.

Should they be evaluated on the same terms as conventional images?

Evaluating accidental images by conventional standards (sharpness, fidelity, accuracy) is like comparing how closely a jazz improvisation matches the sheet music. Impossible!

One can ask three separate questions of any image, accidental or not: What does it faithfully record? (evidential value) What can it teach us? (informational value, about the world or the machine) What does it do to a viewer? (aesthetic and emotional value)

An ID photograph scores high on the first and low on the third. A random accidental image may reverse this. Treating an artifact as evidence of an error, or dismissing a genuine discovery as ‘noise', does not do justice to human conscious understanding. On the subject of noise, any scholar of communication studies will tell you that noise is an integral part of any message transmitted across the channel between an emitter and a receiver, so any photographic image contains noise. The question is how much noise there is and what effect it has on the image's other content.

Aesthetic reward

A reward comes from embracing all images as legitimate information. What the accidental image creates is a problem of understanding, and perhaps one should view these images in a way that a planned photograph seldom is. Accidental images do reliably correspond to the scene photographed, but they can also record an event in the apparatus rather than just what was in front of the lens. One might say that conventional images are records of the world through the machine, and accidental images are records of the machine touching the world—Ex Machina—both are true. Still, each has a different ‘perspective'.

A warning

Because accidental images can have a marvellous quality, some practitioners of photography strive to create situations that produce Ex Machina images. I would remind you of Aristotle's warning. He argued that the dramatic effect should come from the plot (act of photographing) itself, not from a 'machine'. This is perhaps a warning we should heed in our contemporary context!