Glass exists simply not to exist. The impartial mechanics of the camera allow the images and words, from which electronic pulses detach, to convert and converge as pixels, bits of colour. Messages come in and out of the theatre of digits.
Latent variables lie hidden. They are not directly observed but are rather inferred through a mathematical model from other variables that are observed and directly measured. The advantage of latent variables is that they reduce the dimensionality of data. A large number of observable variables can be aggregated in a model to represent an underlying concept. In this sense, they serve a function similar to that of a theory. At the same time, latent variables link observations in the real world to symbols in the modelled world.
Optical scales shift values. The ground on which the men worked is a pattern created by Josef Albers. He noted that “just as colours enter into relationships with each other, the superficial forms we note with our fingertips and with our eyes enter into relationships with each other.”
To create mental images, we use the same neuronal paths that make up material sensory perception.
The representation of tonalities on the emulsion is continuous. The numerical code of a digital image, ultimately reduced to ones and zeros, is discrete. The analogue transcribes, making the image inseparable from the physical properties of the scene. The digital converts into pixels, exactly reproducible. There is the word or photograph of the “real” world. From that moment onward, the separation only grows.
Thousands of words and images will pulse through wires and populate servers. The archive, a machine-readable location, or the act of transferring data becomes a compulsion. Repetition produces what it repeats. This is the transmission of information, a sustained set of acts.
The last act: to hold the gigabytes of digital data as an archive. Is colour and form imbedded into the material object, in the way that the data is imbedded as ones and zeroes? The genetic code of an image, an archive of our desire.
We will never find an image of a face stored inside the human brain. Seeing something in its absence is far less accurate than seeing something in its presence. The vast pattern of neuron in our minds – were it simulated in a computer – would mean nothing outside of the human body. Whereas computers can maintain exact images of faces (signifiers) that can remain the same forever, even if the power has been turned off, the human brain maintains our mind only as long as it remains alive. The ultimate separation of consciousness to a material body is dispelled with a field of signifiers.
