Tuesday, March 27, 2018

The rigged imager

   Recently having purchased smartphone X from store.  M__ attempted numerous self portrait shots.  Numerous more than he could say, and all images seemed to provide a distinction relative to the image that were commonly viewed in front of the mirror.  Why is it always very similar?

Downcast and disheveled face, cheeks puffy and slightly discolored, M__ appeared tired and worn, he appeared haggard.  Obviously outdoor lighting seemed to provide greater improvement for his appearance.  Camera's don't lie, do they? 

The truth of the matter for a ccd imager an image is processed and calibrated in some representational way for all the incoming light, the imager is calibrated in terms of human visual perception.  It isn't accurate in some ways as it is calibrated in an average way to visual perception.  Some see colors differently, and some perceive the vibrance of some colors distinctly relative others...and some even see colors in sounds, and smells, as connected to other senses, that is, given a neurological crossing of wires mixing sensory states.

The truth of the matter is that even a compiled image from a smartphone or camera is likely to be processed whether a user likes it or not.  That is reprocessing an image potentially from a RAW digital format into other media formats which approximate original raw binary data through a number of mathematical transformations, and not permitting all the calibrations that supposedly are meant in emulating a perception like human optics.  The image is filtered, and so it is assumed that the image in a given instantaneous moment that is still image is gathered is representational of its subject matter, save the apparent snow that has gathered in the image...could this be the interference, for instance, of something like cosmic rays having perpetuated when not enough visible light should exist for the duration that a shutter had gathered whatever photons that could be had? 

The light were more sickly yellow than he would have recalled, at least, if it were his eyes, neither had he perceived so much white noise (snow) in the image of a room that appeared darker than he recalled, having shown him in unflattering ways. 

A clinical white wash of light shown overhead as M__ gazed into a mirror.  Yes, perhaps, I can see more a blemish here and there.  Signs of aging that he'd convince himself must have existed only having overlooked this or that, the camera hadn't perpetual misheard him, but looked upon the details in some objective way it would seem...don't we have a tendency to think of ourselves in continuity to a greater depth than extends beyond surface?

M__ noticed over the course of months and years that his face changed, as one might expect with years in aging.  Changing as in some mutability of self, that one would expect, irrespective of the continuity of the self "I" that M__ knew.  I being there, M__ thought. 
A slight shift in angle, a distinct head posture, a facial expression that essentially conveys something beyond a transient misappropriation of body languages that coincided for all purposes to bad timing, but just so happened to be the case more often than not.  So much less thought into that resident expression that betrays all other expressions. 

There is no grudge in that discrimination given by algorithms.  It is posited as certainly as facial recognition employs the framing of a face and has a spatial appropriation created so instantaneous that the tag box need be employed perpetually in the frame() method (until instructed otherwise).  That is where the eyes, nose, and mouth exists.  The curvature of that mouth alongside the topological models that would be instantaneously conceived following the smooth curvature of facial muscular structures.  A lifting of the cheeks, lifts the corners and creases  of the mouths...long since understood by those in art and medicine.  Turn that smile into a frown.  Cross one eye with another...a strange asymmetrical gait is more noticeable than one that is not.  Human minds by evolution discern such noticeable patterns right away, and in sensing discriminate one face from another.   Machine language manipulated all such data in a dizzying way.  Much more rapidly than any human artist could conceive, that is, in continuity of one thirtieth of a frame per second or 1/30 seconds a rendered frame with all necessary ingredients to convey what need be conveyed.

M__ wouldn't have better on a given day that he were apparently tired, wouldn't have felt better on a day that seemed haplessly the same as the day before. 

For the endless string of days, he were postured like a puppet in an endless choreography, all such social capital spent away, and where likely social credit should be less common place.  Restricting his travel was all part of the system, as in the litany and narrative, describing its own self continuity, to readers and onlookers so often far away. 

His mind traversed the image that would be his own self memory, self invention that surely was in his own domain as equally as it were removed.  Something that no one would see in a world where few did gaze so much at the faces of others really.

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