What Can an Image Do?

This piece is part of our series with Naive Yearly, a conference on the odd, quiet, and poetic web. Naive Yearly’s second edition was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in September 2024, and now we’re now publishing essay versions of the conference talks. Read Kristoffer Tjalve’s foreword to the series here.

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Last spring, I picked up a random library book that I became immediately obsessed with. It’s called In Enigmate, a title borrowed from a cycle of 100 riddles, the Aenigmata, composed around the third century by the Latin writer Symphosius. The book’s author, Erin Sebo, locates the Aenigmata as the first appearance of what she terms the “creation riddle,” a literary object that appears throughout early modern English literature.

A historian of riddles, Sebo treats the “creation riddle” as a singular object transformed through different literary, cultural, and religious lenses. The riddle itself varies in length and content (Symphosius’ original cycle is well over 300 lines), but the core conceit remains the same — in Sebo’s words:

The versions of this riddle are very beautiful. Symphosius’ original text passes through multiple interpretations and translations to reach a version short enough to reproduce here: riddle 66 of the Exeter book, one of the oldest manuscripts of Old English literature:

Sebo’s analysis uses the similarity of the form (creation as described through contradiction) to draw conclusions about the kind of society that different versions of the riddle had been constructed for. In these riddles, imagery employed to contrast the god-like and the earthbound provides detailed clues to changing attitudes towards religion and culture. For example, the playful fast/slow dichotomy used by the Latin pagan Symphosius is followed by a low/high dichotomy in the riddles of the 7th century abbot Aldhelm, who was anxious about the interpretation of Christian morality within his own belief system. By the 10th century this is transmuted to a great/small dichotomy in the Saxon Exeter book, a society where Christinanity was much more firmly established.

One of the remarkable things about Symphosius’ original cycle of riddles is that they come entitled with their solutions. Consider the third riddle in the cycle, titled clavus, or key.

The “puzzle” of the riddle is then to trace the meaning back from the words of the riddle to the given solution. This so-called “literary riddle” poses a more dreamlike question — why were these words used to articulate this meaning? Why not another object? How did we get here?

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As a young teenager, I had a poster on my wall of an artwork by the Swedish modernist artist Öyvind Fahlström, titled World Map: A Puzzle. Initially, I’d picked it up purely for its aesthetic qualities. The painting style is flat and colorful, I liked the text and the drawings, the puzzle-ness of the piece. It was only after having it next to my bed for a few weeks that I really started to read the text.

On each region — the area in the print included parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America — Fahlström retells the pain and suffering wrought by globalization, corrupt governments, and US Imperialism in a snappy shorthand, note-like form. I remember reading and re-reading stories about CIA interference in Latin America, wondering if they were real (they were) and how the people involved had been held to justice (they weren’t). The title of the piece starts to sound more like a question: how, when these crimes are known, when we can see these things so plainly, do they continue to happen? Fahlström’s colorful figures and jaunty text sits in a kind of smug, sobering disbelief.

I think about this artwork often. On a lot of levels it’s quite crude and simple as an aesthetic object. At different points, I recall chastizing myself for finding it so beautiful, this huge document to human suffering. It’s also a financial object — it’s sold in galleries, travels the world as a commodity. I feel that I’ve been changed by it. I like it a lot.

I spent a lot of last year working with a different kind of map — the satellite image. Specifically, I worked with the open-source investigative bureau Bellingcat on a guide to using techniques from the geological and environmental sciences to investigate mining operations.

The images that these techniques create are produced by a form of filtering. Satellite imaging datasets contain information about the surface of the earth encoded in different wavelengths of light, including light that isn’t visible to the human eye. Different materials reflect light in different ways — comparing between wavelengths can highlight the differences between the substances you care about being able to see. In this case, the images I am looking at are of bauxite mines. To highlight the mines, I construct a false color image using a mixture of infrared and visible light — each red, green, and blue band is replaced with a ratio highlighting different combinations of minerals. The more “official” and standard combinations of ratios are referred to as indices.  By knowing about the chemistry of the site, it’s possible to track changes to mining areas over time.

This timelapse shows the expansion of bauxite mines and smaller palm oil plantations near the village of Tayan Hilir, in the west Kalimantan province of Indonesia. A 2015 study of land grabs in the region directly linked bauxite mining expansion to the drying of a lake, as well as major pollution to the surrounding farmland. It also named bauxite extraction as part of a linked set of industries encroaching on indigenous peoples’ livelihoods.

This second image is of the same imaging technique applied to the Weipa bauxite mine in Queensland, Australia, visible to the center left of the image. This vast mine sits in aboriginal land that was handed over to the Commonwealth Aluminium Corporation in 1957, and is now leased to the giant mining multinational, Rio Tinto. To introduce their 2024 Q2 earnings call, Jakob Stausholm, the chief executive of the Rio Tinto corporation, began with a land acknowledgement to the Eora nation, and indigenous peoples worldwide, before moving to highlight the “strength of their Australian operations.”

The conflict I’ve felt looking at the Fahlström artwork I feel deeply in myself, here, too. There is something very jarring about creating a beautiful image that represents death and extraction, captured by a device floating above the landscape. Many of the imaging techniques I am using are themselves developed by the mining industry. When I talked to my friend Austin about how they use satellite images in their ecological work, they described satellite imagery as a way of making a material, environmental, and human process legible to different actors. A satellite imaging index thus becomes a technique for making something measurable from a distance, legible to computers and thus to a market.

In a way, mines have this quality too — they are sites where a very material, real physical thing (land) becomes abstracted into a commodity, something that travels and can be exchanged, is fungible with other commodities. The aluminium in the casing of the MacBook I am writing on will have been dug from the ground in a Bauxite mine, likely in Australia, Indonesia, or Guinea. Toxic, highly alkaline residue from its extraction likely still resides in a tailings lake in another part of the world. 

One doesn’t need to look too long at any technological object to see incredible violence. Many of the images I made for the Bellingcat project came from data gathered by the Landsat 7 satellite. This specific satellite was made by Lockheed Martin, currently the world’s largest defense contractor, and the manufacturer of the Hellfire missiles used to bomb hospitals in Gaza. Images of ourselves from space — Stuart Brand’s theoretically peace-inducing whole earth — have always been mediated through military actors. There’s a deep ambivalence inherent in this powerful change of perspective. In her essay “Situated Knowledges,” Donna Haraway asks, With whose blood were my eyes crafted?

“Situated Knowledges” talks about what Haraway calls the “god trick” — the lie of “objective science” that there can be a total view of anything. She takes the satellite image as a core example and proposes that we should instead approach it as a partial way of seeing: one of many lenses for extending our understanding of the world. To my mind, the satellite image is strongly a web object. My access to it — mediated through Google, by way of NASA, by way of Lockheed Martin — is fragile and ephemeral. It’s tempting to see it as a very powerful thing, which, in some ways, it is — but that power is at best ambivalent.

In a planning call for Naive Yearly back at the start of last summer, a fellow speaker, Daniel Murray, said something that I really liked: what’s interesting about the web is it’s good at being very big and very small at once. It's a simple thing to say, but I found it quite profound. It reminded me immediately of the creation riddle — this contradictory object, that contains everything and nothing, both ephemeral and totalizing, collapsing meaning on top of itself.

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When I was invited to contribute to Naive Yearly, Kristoffer specifically mentioned a piece I had made in 2019 with the artist Gary Zhexi Zhang, while we were both residents at the art institution Sakiya, located in the village of Ein Qiniyya, in the West Bank, in Palestine. Sakiya describes itself as an institution for Art, Science, and Agriculture, and explicitly seeks to preserve and renew the Palestinian relationship to the land, a relationship that has been repeatedly targeted and eroded by the Israeli occupation. Something I admire a lot about Sakiya’s work is the engagement with old and new technologies, an approach that holds the technological lightly, as just another tool through which to work in connection to the land.

The artwork is called Permaculture Network, and was originally intended as a web-based representation of a network of soil sensors installed in the farm on the site. In the end we never managed to install them, in part because of how difficult it is to get electronic hardware into the West Bank. The artwork was thus made as an experiment — a question, a puzzle if you like: on one of the most surveilled, extracted-from landscapes on earth, what are alternative forms of representation and seeing, a way to get a sense of the land without simply extracting from it?

In the end, what we decided should mediate the information about Sakiya’s ecology was the conversational aspect of the landscape. We made an agent-based simulation, drawing heavily on the game Dwarf Fortress, in which every element of the world has its own relationship to all other elements with which it interacts.

In the simulation, the soil and rock in each part of the map relate to nearby plants, people, and animals traversing the landscape. Narratives accumulate on different entities over time. The ecology of the simulation draws heavily on an agroecological survey of Sakiya’s site conducted by the geographer Omar Tesdell, using the technique of Makaneyyat to make an integrated study of the land.

In describing these techniques, Tesdell advocates for a view of the Palestinian landscape not as a system, but rather a formation: a political geography shaped and formed by time, putting forward a methodology that blends techniques such as GIS and open databases with interviews with elders.

My relationship to Permaculture Network is somewhat conflicted. It was an attempt to portray the beauty of Sakiya’s ecology and the work that happens there, but sometimes I get the feeling that it’s a little unmoored from the landscape that it seeks to represent. In the end, for example, we decided not to include the local weather in the simulation, as the two nearest weather stations are located in the illegal settlements of Givat Zeev and Psagot. Residents of neighboring settlements have repeatedly and violently raided Sakiya, stealing tools and smashing artworks. Sometimes there’s a violence in what’s there, and sometimes it’s in what is left out.

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For a few years now, I have worked in an art school, and when talking to students and colleagues, one often encounters variations on the question, what can an image do? If we see an image of a genocide, read newspaper articles about a genocide, march about a genocide but the genocide continues — why do we continue to make images? I think it’s an important question.

In August 2023, six Palestinian men imprisoned in the Israeli Gilboa prison dug a tunnel out with spoons, enjoying a week of freedom within the West Bank before being re-arrested. One might be tempted to ask, what did this achieve? Mahmoud Al-Ardah, who masterminded the Freedom Tunnel Operation, is quoted as having said of the state of Israel, 

We wanted to tell the world that this monster is nothing but an illusion made of dust.

There’s a joyfulness and a clarity to Al-Ardah, to the five other men, clearly visible even in their arrest, and to the Palestinian children showing spoons to IDF soldiers in the weeks following. 

There is power to be had in pointing out the gaps in the world. For a moment, we get to see a different world, just as real as the one we are in, existing in the same space and at the same time. David Graeber and David Wengrow, in their book The Dawn of Everything, make the point that “revolutions are rarely won in open combat. When revolutionaries win, it’s usually because the bulk of those sent to crush them refuse to shoot, or just go home.” Changes that take place in the world — cataclysmic, huge, liberatory changes — are rooted fundamentally in the choice of people to make an imaginative leap to a new reality.

In a short essay titled “Personal Aesthetics,” the game designer Stephen Gillmurphy (aka thecatamites) talks about a game he made called Magic Wand, in which you play as the wizard Radiget, who travels through a strange, confusing landscape.

Talking about this essay with my partner Kat, we were both really struck by the idea of a landscape of desire, a surface of inclinations that changes come to rest in, and the image of the post-revolution as a state of ambivalence and weirdness.

In the preface to Sebo's book, she talks about how her interest in riddles was born from work with the Child Ballads — traditional poems from England and Scotland where young girls typically face off with a character representing the devil. The riddle is a popular means by which a girl survives, a means of eliding the seemingly total power of her adversary. Often, this is done through her knowledge of the mundane, the everyday:

When preparing this essay in its previous form — as a talk for Naive Yearly — I spent a long time thinking about what it is that draws me to the web as a medium. I found this quite a hard question to answer, one that I’ve been grappling with in my own work. 

Most often, I tend to locate the web’s significance in something that feels concrete: in pirate libraries, censorship circumvention, collective knowledge projects, and open data. One thing I think the web does very well, to extrapolate from Daniel’s comment, is to collapse a lot of things — people, times, places, images, writing — into one place, together.

I recently heard Wikipedia described by the longtime Wikipedian Daniel Zargham as having created a new kind of knowledge — a frontier knowledge — that hadn’t existed before. This frontier knowledge was the idea of a massive collection of new thought being produced, that had not yet been afforded the formality of an encyclopedia entry. In a similar vein, I’ve also seen Wikipedia described as the world’s “largest anarchist project” — something that could “never scale,” “never work,” and yet tangibly exists. A door to another world through a representation of our own.

This is all well and useful, but the web has another, more abstract quality. In the essay “Spirit Surfing,” from 2008, Kevin Bewersdorf pays attention — in a similar way to Sebo’s riddles — to the power of the web to cast everyday objects as lenses for seeing the world anew: 

As I was writing this, I've been thinking about the question — what are images for? — and thinking it might not be quite the right one. Perhaps the question should be — what does it take for an image to mean something?

In the introduction to the book The Earliest English Poems, the translator Michael Alexander defends the works it contains from the often unfavorable light in which Saxon literature is cast: 

There’s a temptation to read into that quote the sense that meaning may be afforded only by a localism, an “innocence” that is no longer to hand. I choose to believe otherwise — I think there’s no going backward to that time; instead we can simply understand that there is meaning to be found in both the past and in the future. In her book Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi asks:

Spoons and forks, sacred and profane, high and low — the changing creation riddles show us a world made and remade by different events and geographies, still containing people, still filled with desire and change. There’s something both comforting and enlivening in encountering old words through the lens of the new. 

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One of the loveliest things about working with satellite imagery has been an email correspondence with the geologist James Aber, who along with his wife, Susan Aber, has spent the past 20 years using the same techniques I have been studying to image the Cheyenne bottoms wetland in Kansas, where they live, using a combination of kite-based and satellite imaging. They document their work in a website — geospectra.net, that contains over 20 years of images and notes, observations of the effects of climate change, and work with students, rangers, and conservationists.

The website is beautiful, treating as equal images taken from above and below, the text drawing attention to different details, each contributing to an understanding of the landscape as a whole.

Here, for example, are two color infrared images taken by kite in 2017.

The text of this section reads as follows:

Looking toward the northwest (left) and north (right). Fields of winter wheat are prominent (bright orange) in the background, but there are only small patches of active vegetation in the marsh complex.

Multitemporal and multispectral image of the Cheyenne Bottoms wetland, James and Susan Aber, geospectra.net

In the introduction to their work observing and studying Cheyenne Bottoms, the Abers include a multitemporal satellite image, which combines images taken over the course of years working on the site. 

The meaning of Aber’s images is located in their commitment — a lifetime’s work dedicated to a single patch of land, seeing it through different lenses and angles, wanting to show what is hidden, through a deepening and changing relation to a place.

These images contain a whole world.