Sherry Turkle, in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011), dives into a continuous theme within the contents of this comparative essay and the readings Prosthetic Memory by Landsberg and The iPhone Ehrfarung by McArthur. It is the idea that a progression of media and technologies has aided a prosthesis in the interaction between man and machine in what she refers to as the cognitive process of “tethering”. The machine becomes part of the identity of the individual, making them connected and alone. Both texts included in this comparison do not stray greatly from Turkle’s arguments. Prosthetic Memory and Erfahrung (to shorten) rely heavily on the idea of an expansion of the human. A tethering of external factors that impact how we define human experience. Although the texts initially seem parallel to each other, I would argue that they both give a collaborative account of how media and mediation create a continuation of the posthuman as a tethering to external factors. These two texts, however, differ greatly when discussing the parameters of reality and authenticity when discussing the nature of the human and the now posthuman. 

Landsberg’s text talks about the inclusion of prosthetic memory in the relationship with experience and identity. She illustrates this idea through different movies that relate to individuals who have a composition of memories not belonging to them. The prosthetic memory is defined as experiences never lived. An example is watching a film. A position where experiences become an imposition. She defines memory as the locus of humanity, connecting it to an aspect of experience. For her, memory is not specifically a recollection or authentication of the past but about impacting actions in the present. On this note, media breaks the notion of experience, and as such blurs the line between the memories that are authentic and prosthetic or simulated. 

Landsberg refers to Baudillard’s claim that, because of the proliferation of different media, this dichotomy between the real and simulated has been destroyed to the point that individuals can “no longer distinguish between the real… and hyperreal”. When returning to movies, identification is a critical point for this. She quotes Blumer on the emotional possessive effect with regard to experiencing films. This possessive effect leads to the decentering of lived experience as it intertwines with the emotional connection to fiction, constructing a sense of identity. They “become a part of their own personal archive.”. This connects to Kracauer’s conception of cinema having a bodily component but with a collective aspect. Memories then have circulation and don’t have a single owner, but rather prosthetic memories are circulated by mass media and worn by its consumers. The general argument she establishes is thus a synthesis of the authentic with the prosthetic and inauthentic as the creation of memory. 

McArthur’s text The iPhone Erfahrung follows authenticity in a different scope. As it is a text relating to Walter Benjamin, authenticity is referred to as being part of an object’s aurality. The text follows an analysis of the usage of Apple’s Siri as an explication of the preservation of aura in a mass commercialised form. The aura is regarded as a mystical sense of authenticity, and the posthuman aura created by this technology has created a hierarchical standpoint between the user and the assistant. The user has a feeling of power over technology while simultaneously being in awe of its aurality. Posthuman aura is defined as the coexistence of futuristic technology with human-like interactions. An extension of oneself or, in a sense, a prosthetic experience. Siri maintains this element of aura since its system functions on synthesis and translation rather than reproduction, which would break the aura. This awe and subjugation to the posthuman aura is then disrupted by what McArthur refers to as the auditory unconscious. A sense of critical thought through the ears that undermines the power hierarchy of this prosthetic relationship as being inherently capitalistic and an industrial extension of the unreal. Siri is a prosthetic tool. You utilise it for tasks and interactions that are revealed as regressive to human interaction and development. While prosthetic memories, on the other hand, are used for the development of experience and identity.

Landsberg argues through her analysis, argues that films create these states of prosthetic memories where the consumer connects to empathetic means in the creation of experiences that shape identity. In a sense, it diminishes the idea of the optical unconscious as it breaks through from the analytical sense of an awakened state and enters the stage of emotional possession. One can be critical, perhaps of the meaning and ideologies that are mediated through film, but the consciousness, or as Benjamin puts it, the shield for our deeper selves, is exploited by the emotional experience of prosthetic memories. Although McArthur argues that the optical unconscious has some limitations, she continues the thought of medium permeability into the sensory unconscious, arguing more for the auditory unconscious as a stronger force. One can’t block out shocking images but can easily block shocking sounds in the conscious mind, but while quoting Ryder, the “penetration and surroundability” of sounds creates a relationship of rejection of conscious reflection and an unnoticed internalisation into the unconscious. She exemplifies this with Christmas music that impels you to keep buying, which can be connected to memories, prosthetic or not, that affect decisions, actions and identity per Landsberg.

A shared theme between both texts is the Freudian concept of the uncanny. The uncanny, as described in Prosthetic Memories, is an encounter with something familiar and unfamiliar. Both Landsberg and McArthur agree on the idea that the lack of authenticity removes the uncanny. For Landsberg, the uncanny is connected to the prosthetic memories in the sense that an individual with prosthetic memories doesn’t necessarily experience this, since it doesn’t partake in their identity. Whereas McArthur agrees with this idea in the sense that Siri, through its mythical sense of authenticity embedded in its aura, creates an uncanny relationship with the user through its disembodied technological voice. The uncanniness then connects to Freud’s return of the repressed, as it places the user in a “shock of modern life that has been subsumed under the auditory”. 

A key difference between the texts is the synthesis and parallelism of the real and the unreal. For Landsberg, the different processes of acquiring prosthetic memories are a rejection of postmodern thought, as this relationship creates the absence of experience. Rather, she argues that there is no value in the distinction between types of memories since the expansion of mass media dissolves the divide between the authentic and inauthentic when it comes to memories. Authentic experience then is extended to the point where it can’t be identified for its realness. Although prosthetic experiences perhaps have a different medium in which they are created, they still have the same sensual and physiological impact as the “normal”, and we cannot create a safe position for their distinction. She argues that memories are utilised not for the reflection of the past but for the authentication and usage in the present. The culmination of an identity. When memories diverge from or to lived experiences, issues of identity arise. 

Now, a large counterargument to this relationship is the arguments of McArthur regarding Siri. She compares the relationship between the human nature of the user and the technology in some instances as a hierarchy of power between the user and their “assistant”. This could be interpreted as an extension of the posthuman, where these interactions can be regarded as a new form of thinking of the human experience as a collective between man and technology. However, she offers a counter to this argument when mentioning how simulated human conversation under the guise of authenticity emphasises interpersonal distance. Siri is created in a sort of black box by developers and utilises layers of translation and synthesis that create a feeling of closeness but a distance between the user and the recipient. 

McArthur argues that this relationship between the real and simulated doesn’t merge like for Landsberg but creates a human relationship bound under late-stage capitalism. It is also important to note that, considering the empathetic relationships with this divide in Prosthetic memory, the reality of Siri’s nature does not have the empathetic and sensory component that merges the dichotomy between the real and simulated. The sensory components, such as the auditory, and in terms of their unconscious, allow the separation between them. McArthur makes it clear that the process of interaction facilitates the awareness of the human distance and the fetishisation of the product, as well as the exploitative capabilities for and against the user. Another distinction can be connected to Siri’s lack of understanding of the uncommon or exceptional, where only the ordinary drives. In this sense, it cannot completely immerse itself into the identity of the user, as in terms of memory, human complexity is not ordinary. She argues that this is all a “revelation of the auditory unconscious: the intensely personal cannot be wholly conscripted in the service of capitalism”.

In conclusion, both texts create arguments for the nature of the human and posthuman as a culmination of external extensions that alter identity and experience. Prosthetic Memories argues for the inclusion of the unreal and imposed into the creation of an identity, while iPhone Erfahrung warns about the dangers of blurring the lines between the real and the unreal. What both texts can aid in the understanding of the present is the ability to divide the experiences that we process into our prosthetic memory, and the experiences we critically analyse in our unconscious. With the troubling rise of AI experiences in the visual and auditory have blurred the gap between our interaction with technology and the empathy and application we place on what we consume. Landsberg concludes in a form that is applicable to both texts. Memories cannot be for a self-conforming narrative, and we must have a set of ethics of personhood based on empathetic relations, which I would extend to the real in terms of the human. 

Ingold’s “Making” describes the experiential process of creating things as a project. An inceptive idea translated into raw materials, birthing an intention in the form of an artefact. This is the basic structure that Ingold uses to introduce the concept of hylomorphism. A longitudinal interaction where forms created by the mind are imposed on material objects, creating things under Thomas’ description of ´material culture´, “rendered cultural” (qtd in Ingold, 20). Ingold is particularly critical about hylomorphism as he details that the creation of things should not be looked at as projects, but in his argument of the experiential, creating things should be considered as a process of growth. The maker in itself is part of a process, but their involvement can’t ignore the ever-moving activity of materials and materiality. Creating is not an imposition but a synergy of the animal with its environment that is not sedentary, as the hylomporphic model would suggest. Now, what I found most interesting about this argument is the involvement of materiality in the process of making. 

In the second chapter, Ingold details the process and relationship between form and material, not only as a linear model by which a structure is followed in the same sense as a hylomorphic model, but as an interplay of the process of making as the creation of shifts in a material that already has matter-based movements. A modular dance, in Ingold’s terms, that disrupts predetermined material structures like grain or, in the case of iron, welding. Now moving towards the idea of materiality, Ingold divides theorists between the assumption of materiality as in the physical material and the potential interplay of the human, and the notion that materiality refers to the appropriation of physical material by human nature. Ingold connects this debate to the concept of human nature as a similar theoretical discussion. Human nature as a sort of brute, raw, instinctual material or that of adaptation and is placed on a higher level of being, more than natural. Ingold even states that “materiality, like humanity, is Janus-faced” (27).

Although Ingold argues that this debate does nothing to create a definition of materiality, the importance lies in the appeal of materiality in the actual process of becoming materials. That being said, I found the second argument to have a greater validity, both in what is considered to be materiality and in a slight psychological aspect if one thinks about the debate between nurture and nature. 

To support his explication of materiality as an appropriation of materials by human nature, Ingold refers to Cornelius Holtorf and his text Notes on the Life History of a Pot Sherd.  Holtorf is a German archaeologist and anthropologist working as a professor of archaeology at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, where he also serves as the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures. His main research focus has been in the areas of contemporary archaeology, heritage theory and futures. 

Ingold refers to Holtorf’s text as a counterpoint in the debate of the definition of materiality against Geoff Bailey’s definition, which states that a material’s cultural materiality precedes several lives of an artefact or ‘thing’ as being an amalgamation of material traces, but in the end, its materiality lies in the process of outlasting moments in its formation. In a way, it signifies a hylomorphic scale of materiality where the human has an interplay in the material, but the thing itself is determined by its physical structure. Holtorf, in his example of Pot Sherds, sees materiality from a different viewpoint. As quoted by Ingold, a thing’s materiality is “no more no less than the ways in which, throughout its history, it was variably enrolled in human

life-projects” (Ingold.28). Ingold sees Holtorf’s definition as a switch between a definition based on the physicality of matter and social appropriations to its form.  I would argue that, although Ingold, in a sense, criticises both arguments and theorises that the debate ultimately doesn’t give an understanding of materiality or material culture, Holtorf’s article, although inadvertently, connects to a lot of Ingold’s arguments, does in fact lay a structure by which material culture is defined by human interaction rather than the material by itself.

In Holtorf’s Notes on the Life History of a Pot Sherd, he recapitulates the process of finding a pot shard in the Monte Polizzo in Sicily. He goes deep into the process of seeing a piece of material, completely devoid of any context, being identified by one of the workers of the site as a pot shard. He describes the archaeological process of selecting what is potentially important and what is essentially garbage as a way of reflecting how materiality can depend on human perspective and categorisation. He then describes the process of analysing the shard through different layers of ethnographic research. In short, through the text, he details how the involvement of human identification and knowledge is the product of not the physical construction of matter, but as the material culture that identifies a ‘thing’s’ status as an artefact

In a sort of layman’s terms, Holtorf suggests that a piece of matter will remain an object, stripped of cultural materiality, until the human process of classification, analysis and knowledgeable assertions places it in its rightful status. For Holtorf, an artefact’s life cannot be assumed before its discovery. All the properties, including its material identity, are ascribed by the gradual process of research and exploration, creating a slow assembly of its form. He states that since the past lives of ‘things’ are a direct outcome of their present lives in discovery, material identity is attributed to elements not conjoined to their essential material properties but rather a product of the relationship between humans and things. If the pot shard was left hidden or discarded with the rest of the rubble, is it still an ancient artefact that can tell us about society? Or since it’s discarded, is it just trash? He states that “materiality is multiple and has a history” (Holtorf 64). This even connects to his idea of shifts in a thing’s materiality. If research is restricted to the tools and knowledge we have in the present, who is to say that a thing’s materiality won’t shift as these tools evolve?

I connect this idea if we contextualise it to the argument that Ingold brought up about the parallels to human nature. If one visualises humanity as the ‘thing’, it alone cannot evolve and progress. Yes, it may have a natural animal instinct in a sort of “raw material” form, but it is shaped by its environment and the environment in turn shapes it. It is an interconnection between the human and physical world that gives a sort of meaning to human life. It is looking at existential questions or navigations through human thought to be a product of the surrounding physical environment, as well as past experiences and knowledge we build. Holtorf quotes Thomas, a theorist also quoted in Making, when he describes how materials are identified as things depending on previous understanding, knowledge and prejudices. After the human process is done, if there is no interaction with a human or their understanding of a “thing”, then the thing is essentially reduced to the notion of an object. Something that just is. 

Ingold, perhaps inadvertently, uses a source that actually connects thoroughly to the argument he places in the beginning and throughout the book. Holtorf signifies a process of research that, in its source, is ethnographic. A scientific explanation as to what a thing is, rather than what it would mean. It does not follow the anti-hylomorphic rhetoric of the Ingoll text, but in itself, the process reveals a sort of anthropological study of the epistemology of materiality. By creating these connections between the material element of a thing and the material culture imposed by human research, this understanding is in itself an experiential study of how we define materiality. It is ‘with’, not ‘about,’ as Ingoll describes in earlier chapters. 

Sources Cited

Holtorf, Cornelius. “Notes on the life history of a pot sherd.” Journal of Material Culture, vol. 7, no. 1, Mar. 2002, pp. 49–71, https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183502007001305.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

The Inception of the Image

When did we make the first image? Was it two hundred years ago, when Niépce made the first heliograph of the view from the window at Le Gras? Was it sixty-four thousand years ago, when neanderthals hand-stenciled the first paintings in Maltrevieso cave? Or was it the moment we first thought in pictures; the first mental image; the first time we imagined, instead of seeing? 

To make an image is simply to take some part of our world that you saw, and make what it looked like, yourself, so that you can see it again. Centuries ago, with nothing but hands and clay or stone and paint, we first learned to take a part of our world and re-make it ourselves. Before we first painted a boar on the walls of a cave, we thought of a boar not only by its visual appearance, but by its entire presence, face-to-face – the way it looked and sounded, breathed and moved – everything it presented to us. We couldn’t think of a boar only in the abstract; only as what it looked like; we had to think of that time when we had experienced its presence. The moment we could re-make what it looked like as a painting, the boar could become something else. We could see it, even out of its presence; painted on the walls of the cave, or projected in our mind’s eye. We could think of it, not exactly as we had experienced it, but as a visual abstraction. No longer could something we had seen exist to us only as we had experienced it in the world. It could now exist to us as an image.

From the moment we first sculpted a human figure, we changed what it meant to be a person, literally. We could use that word, “person,” to refer to a living man, or to a heap of clay. We could point at a sculpture and call it a person, or point at a painting and call it a boar. Anything we saw could become an image. Anything we saw, we could make ourselves. After seeing a boar, we could see it again by painting it, even before a real one presented itself out in the world again – we could present it ourselves, re-present it, remake it, as a representation.

Image Reproduction and Consumerism

There have been many evolutions to the technical task of image creation. Significant evolutions include the mass production of coins via printmaking, the rise of private patronage of art in the renaissance shifting dominance from public murals to individual, movable property items in the form of oil paintings. These exemplify the commodification of images into individual articles as expressions of wealth. A current example is the development of artificial perspective using scientific processes to create images depicting real things from a humanly inaccessible perspective, marrying science and imagination and separating imagination from creative production. 

These shifts in image production mechanisms affect the element of artist labor, both physical and creative. As images become easier to produce, and further mass-produce, these images become less valuable under Walter Benjamin’s conception of artist labor as the process by which art is imbued with meaning. This perspective is reiterated in modern discourse through the dominant concept that AI art, produced relatively without human labor, is “soulless”. 

When analyzing these evolutions, it is important to avoid characterizing development as linear. Labeling the past as “traditional” or “ancient” and present as “modern” or “postmodern” is arbitrary, that key hypothetical moment in which image production and circulation changed mechanically, radically altering culture, has happened repeatedly throughout history and shall certainly re-occur, and progress does not erase production styles of the past. 

Media theorists apply moral judgements to these advancements, the default position being that mass production is destructive to the soul of the image, decrying many or most modern images as “kitsch” with only aesthetic value. A rebuttal lies in the national differences in image production, despite global access to the same or similar technologies. This demonstrates that the human element guiding the tools is still reflected in the final image, reaffirming a human-centric assessment of image value.

Thus, in an oversaturated world of image-production, the key human interaction from which to ascertain value is the second human transition in mediation: audience reception. An image is valuable for its capacity to elicit a passionate response. There are three active roles in the process of mediation: the artist/author, the image/media, and the audience. The mediation of images is bookended by human influence on both sides of the interaction.

The Paradoxical Relationship of Power

A theme within Wells’ text is the paradoxical relationship between media, images and consumers. He discusses contradictions, situating an image’s status as being everything and nothing. An interpretation of Wells’ arguments follows this paradox, looking at an image’s relationship to power. This paradox stems from an individual’s perception, the resemblance of images, and the relationship between progress and crisis. 

Looking at perception, Wells understands images as tangible objects that can be destroyed and as indestructible impulses of the mind. He argues that the mind can be regarded as a medium for image production, developing the underlying power of the image. He states that images and their power depend on the minds that perceive them and that “alongside images in media we have images of media that we internalise as subjective pictures of our own processes”. This physical process of image consumption is what creates an internalisation of their underlying ideological message. He quotes Hansen, who states that the perception of images can no longer be regarded as physical surfaces but must be seen as a process where information embedded is perceived through embodied experience. 

When looking at Wells’ definition of image as symbols of visual resemblance, there’s a focus on resemblance as the source of this “power”. The closer an image gets to a resemblance, the more powerful the reception is on perception. A resemblance is seen as the embodiment of God on earth or a connection that creates an emotional response.

When looking at images through the scope of consumption, one understands how imagery becomes idolatrous in this nature of resemblance. Images become a resemblance to ideological positivity and communal conformity. He mentions this point when relating images to crisis, where images spread faster when tragedy strikes and fear grows, contrasting the positivity in commercial ideology. In connection, Wells, with his paradox of the academic, sees the image as a constrictive way to reincarnate the masses into “ancient idolaters”. Images reduce individuals to irrationality and mass ornamentation, where the idol becomes consumption and is revered the same way an ancient worshiper sees drought as a message from the Gods. 

When placing the image under this scope of a reverential idolatry, the paradox of power becomes the longing for subversion and a rejection of it. Subversion becomes an inevitable process of fetishising images, hoping they guide individuals on what to think and how to act in ideological comfort. The paradox thus falls to the point of progress. Wells argues that the relationship between humans and images flares up during innovation. Especially when technology challenges the status quo. When new forms of image production emerge, their manipulation affects us like “microbes… infect(ing) the minds of consumers,” leading us to become scared of new idols and forms of subversion we enjoy. Societies take innovation as an organic inevitability when they create their own subversive power. Wells argues that if man was created in God’s image and was destroyed in man’s image, then it makes sense that man brings the end of man and image with the creation of something more powerful, like AI.

Manipulation Through Image

Images, especially photographs, gain this power throughout much of our modern society. They are often represented as explicit truth. This notion allows those in power to manipulate public perception by taking advantage of images. There is a certain image, that I find, represents both manipulation through the actual doctoring of images, and using iconography as a means to show political power. Raising a flag over the Reichstag. Is a photograph taken on May 2, 1945, which shows a soviet soldier flying the Soviet Union’s flag over Berlin after the defeat of the Nazi party in the Battle of Berlin. The image follows the classic imagery of victory in combat; the flying of a large flag, remnants of imagery that were popularized from imagery of the French revolution, for example Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix. 

One interesting thing about this photograph in particular is that the image that is more prominent is the doctored version of the image. In the original photograph, one of the soldiers is wearing two watches, suggesting he looted one of them off of a fallen soldier. Obviously this could cast a shadow on the victorious moment the image was displaying.

I think this image is a great real world example of how images can be used politically to present a certain idea. While also giving us an example of early image manipulation, something that has remained so prevalent, especially with the added, modern context of digital manipulation.

More recently the funeral of Charlie Kirk, ran rampant with all sorts of religious, and American iconography. As a viewer, this event came off as a tacky attempt of manipulation through images. A man carrying a large cross would be a physical feat with obvious biblical ties, if not for the wheels located at the base of the cross. This being said, the privilege of studying media theory is not lost on me as I see the direct influence these images have been having on a large base of the American public. Reproductions of biblical images, being directly associated with politics, a direct opposition to Exodus 20: 4-5, has a major influence on the opinions of an extremely large number of people.

Contributors: Daniel Schatz, Django Mavis, Sydney Wilkins, Matthias von Loebell