layering in TV and internet


see what i mean

Today virtually everything can be related to everything, a thing which hypotetically and partly practically already happens on the level of data anyway. So it is to ask what kind of influences this has on the process of signification for encoding and decoding ....and then again the process of recoding.
As already pointed out before here are different directions, which have to be taken into regard, especially the one of recoding from various sources and in very different contexts.
Thus at the same time, what comes as an image today not only is more or less pixelated, but has embedded signs or icons, texts or other markers, intending very different significations. These are ranging from textlines, icons and comic-like speechballons to cross-hairs of smart-bomb monitors or the time-code lines of surveillance camera transmissions. Partly they obviously ask to be objective signs of evidence. When before the screen of transmission was somehow equivalent to the the seen image, this now usually is not the case anymore.


1 in 'Schnittstelle', p.121
Esposito, Elena
Splitscreen, windows and various forms of information messages are not only common on computer monitors, but as well on TV screens, on surveillance monitors, and so on. 'Conventionality and artificiality of the inherent meanings to one segment of perception concerned with communication have been becoming that abstract and distributed that the change was unnoticed: the suspicion of manipulation is concerning the assumed intention of the informant and not the extremely unlikely colonialism of perception through a even more subtle and independent communication.'1


2 'Korrespondenzen', p.200
Holert, Tom quoting M.de Certeau

'russian scandal'


3 'Attas Weltsekunde'
Today the decision on which criteria of an image or better of its transmission (in the sense of performative strategies) perception of authenticity relies obviously has been becoming more important than its depiction. Thus the view on perception frames the depicted image. What to say with this?
Eventhough we are still mainly convinced that only 'that can be believed in what can be seen'2 , it is no longer easily to be said what can be seen. The delegation of perception has made it impossible to determine the evidence by the visible clearly.
The invention of various strategies to produce authenticity as some years agao amateurs, video activists, artists or filmakers (dogma) used to practice, now have been taken up by mainstream media.
Some similarity can be seen in the increasing use of videomaterial especially of surveillance cameras in various media contexts, which mainly show no other evidence then the imprinted timecode. (see check-in3 of the hijacker *911 or Spiegel 17/02 about Djerba*). Here also appears a correspondence to the scientific or operational imaginery, operating on a different level, but also usualy not readable and thus needing interpretation.
Even the news around 911 were not produced or transmitted in a single, eventhough many people claim, that those images just were convincing. But they probably did not recognize how colonized the making of our point of views has become.
Anyway it is exactly this same assemblage, this constant flow of images, which on the other side is asking for new modes of reading, for a new interpretation of the image. (movie)

More on this will follow in the further chapters.


and another bad and low tech evidence mov


(* no longer free accessible)

Besides the wellknown main media sources only a few links here:

The Manipulated Image
Timecode (a film)

further links on new modes for images follow in coded readings.