Active Perceptual Systems
The images that make up the project presented here are very much part of “the technical universe of images” Flusser has identified in his book [Into the Universe of Technical Images]. They were taken over a period of two years with an automated “intelligent” wearable camera called the Autographer. The artist wore the camera in various everyday situations: on a city walk, in a holiday resort, in an art gallery, in a lecture theatre, at home. The machinic behaviour was nevertheless influenced by the way her body moved, enacting a form of immersive, corporeal perception that broke with the linearity of perspectival vision and its representationalist ambitions, while also retaining human involvement in the multiple acts of image capture. The human element was also foregrounded in the subsequent editing activities: Zylinska was faced with over 18,000 images from which she chose several dozen. Active Perceptual Systems thus raises the question of whether the creative photographer can be seen as first and foremost an editor: a Flusserian in-former who provides structure to the imagistic flow after the images have been taken. Keywords: algorithm, Autographer, editor, surveillance, technical image