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Because an integral aspect of the database as a medium is the comparison
and analysis of its components, the database necessarily assumes
an intelligent viewer who can navigate its infrastructure and synthesize
its data to draw meaningful conclusions. Vesna's "aesthetic
of navigation" is both a structural and temporal aspect of
photographic databases such as the Great LadyBug Animation and the
Visible Human Project-both projects animate their collection of
images to create the appearance of travel between and through bodies,
respectively. This sense of movement draws the viewer's attention
to the fact that he is actively engaged in experiencing the database,
and that it is the viewer's consciousness which animates the database,
transforming it from a jumble of data into a structurally coherent
tool for information-gathering. In order to gain a better sense
of how these visual databases alternately draw attention to and
obscure diversity, even how they contribute to the very definition
of what "diversity" is, it is necessary to look more closely
at the databases and their history.
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The Great LadyBug Animation is a database of photographs of ladybugs
that have been ordered in quick succession to create a short animation
that reveals the intrapopulational variation in the patterns of
spots on the insects' wing covers. Natalie Jeremijenko, a design
engineer and technoartist at Yale, photographed 200 ladybugs out
of a total population of 4,000 insects. She then scaled and color-corrected
the images before ordering them by similarity using computational
algorithms normally used in face recognition software. The result
is a fluid animation of the ladybugs' spots-while the bodies of
the ladybugs remain uniform, the spots on the wing covers alternately
grow larger and smaller, increase and decrease in number, and migrate
across the ladybugs' thoraces. There is no definite beginning or
end to the animation. Each image constitutes one short moment in
the overall representation of population diversity, which can be
viewed as a continuous loop. Having compiled the foundation of her
LadyBug database, Jeremijenko is now creating a flipbook using the
animated photographic database. The flipbook will demonstrate the
diversity exhibited within the ladybug population as a function
of time which can be manipulated by the individual operating the
flipbook. |
The photographic database originated at the end of
the 19th century as a disciplinary technology designed to assist
criminologists and eugenicists in positively identifying individuals
predisposed to a life of crime. Francis Galton, a British gentleman
and science enthusiast best known for coining the term "eugenics"
in 1883 and founding the forensic study of fingerprints, published
"Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different
Persons Into a Single Resultant Figure" in 1879, in which he
details the process of creating composite portraits and posits that
composite portraiture is capable of "extracting the typical
characteristics" of a group of individuals to create a realistic
"portrait of a type" (Galton 132-3). To create his composites,
Galton exposed between two and one hundred photographs on a single
photographic frame, giving "each successive image…a fractional
exposure based on the inverse of the total number of images in the
sample" (Sekula 368). Galton claimed that these portraits were
"generic images" which exposed the physical characteristics
of the criminal, the Jew, and the consumptive. The resulting images
were blurred photographs which revealed, upon careful investigation,
that the photographic subject has two distinct hairlines, shirt
collars, etc. Galton's composite portraiture was a surveillant technology meant to eclipse individual difference in favor of visualizing broad, archetypal characteristics. Galton assumed that the categories he was investigating were natural ones, and not determined by socio-economic status, racist thinking, or other culturally mediated constructions. Furthermore, he argued that individuals exhibited physical marks that betrayed their inner attributes. Whereas Galtonian composites collapse difference so as to emphasize a set of general signifiers, Jeremijenko's Great LadyBug Animation is a method for visually expanding difference within a population. |
In adopting the flipbook as the medium of the Great LadyBug animation, Jeremijenko combines the scientific, evidentiary purpose of the visual database with the mode of the flipbook, which is often associated with children's entertainment. Historically, the boundary between scientific experimentation and entertainment has often been blurred, most famously in the history of the air pump, which was used variously in the experiments of Robert Boyle and in the parlors of the Enlightenment elite. The same tension between experiment and play is present in Galton's composite portraiture. While Galton claimed his composite portraits were statistically legitimate and objective indices of population characteristics with potential scientific applications, Robert des Ruffieres points out in a response to Galton's article in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland that: |
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Both experiment and play are methods of knowledge-production carried
out outside of "real-world" conditions, whether from the
variable-controlled laboratory or the safe haven of childhood dissimulation.
I point out these similarities between experiment and play in order
to draw attention to the fact that visual databases tend to occupy
the productive area in which the two overlap-the medium of animation
exists comfortably in both realms. |
While the examples of Galton and Bertillon emphasize the eugenic
history of composite photography, the same theoretical assumptions
of archetypal classificatory schemata are still embedded in recent
databases which index human bodies. The founding supposition of
the Human Genome Project was that the sequencing of one "generic"
human genome created by combining sequences derived from numerous
samples would lead to a profound understanding of and mastery over
the genetic sequence found in every human (note that the project
sequenced the archetypal "Human Genome", singular). Similarly,
the Visible Human Project compiled "complete, anatomically
detailed, three-dimensional representations of the normal male and
female human bodies" by combining cryosection images to create
a fluid animation of the human body's interior (emphasis added).
This quote from the National Library of Medicine website betrays
the normative assumptions of the Visible Human Project, which Lisa
Cartwright characterizes as the exhibition of a "digital Adam
and Eve" (Cartwright 33). The Human Genome and Visible Human
Projects, the prime examples of modern bioinformatic mastery, are
predicated on an archetypal classification of the human body which
both projects suggest is not only accurate, but also medically salient.
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So too, Galton's composite portraits engage their audience in an
act of voyeurism, albeit more demurely. Because Galton posits that
an individual's external features are signifiers of immutable internal
characteristics, his portraits are not depictions of physical characteristics,
but of external reflections of internal conditions. The tension
in Galton's portraits exists not only between the individual and
the type, but also between that which is seen and that which remains
invisible. Furthermore, Galton's composites are not images of real
individuals, but of "ideal types," unrealized fantasies
of the prototype standing in for an entire class of people. The Great LadyBug Animation is singular in its representation of polymorphic diversity within populations. The theoretical difference between the Great LadyBug Animation and other photographic databases is best illuminated by John Taylor's definition of Aristotelian vs. prototype classifications (Bowker and Star 61-64). Whereas Aristotelian classifications are organized according to a "set of binary characteristics that the object being classified either presents or does not present," prototype classification operates by presenting us with a "broad picture…and we extend this picture by metaphor and analogy when trying to decide if any given thing…counts" (ibid 62). Databases ranging from Galton to the Visible Human Project are aligned with a prototypical classificatory schema which metaphorically expands upon the ideal to create an exclusive notion of the category "human". In contrast, the Great LadyBug Animation is a technology for visualizing an Aristotelian, polythetic (i.e. having several classificatory criteria) classification of the category "population" by standardizing characteristics such as color and size to reveal those variations which span a single population. |
It is not accidental that all of the visual databases examined here have living things as their subjects. The dialectics of individual and population, specific and general, visible and invisible are intrinsic to the very notion of "life" as a category of surveillance, investigation, and control. Foucault differentiates between the anatomo-politics of the individual body and the bio-politics whose site of application is the population in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: "the great bipolar technology-anatomic and biological, individualizing and specifying, directed toward the performances of the body, with attention to the processes of life-characterized a power whose highest form was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through" (139). The digital database, then, can be understood as a technology which "invest[s] life through and through" by allowing for translation between surveillance at the level of the individual body and at the level of whole populations.
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Current technologies for visualizing and classifying populations
render differences invisible while highlighting the archetypal features
that characterize the population. Such technologies abound, and
are so embedded in the way we classify objects and organisms, that
they are not readily apparent. A cursory glance at a biology textbook,
an Audubon field guide, or a trip to a natural history museum reveals
the prototype classification schema used to catalog plants and animals
into family, genus, and species according to their visual archetypes.
More importantly, humans continue to be slotted into racial categories
despite the fact that "race" as a biological category
has long been invalidated. Indeed, genetic research has shown that
the fundamental site of human genetic variation is within populations,
accounting for 90% of all human genetic variation. The amount of
genetic variation between human populations, in contrast, represents
a negligible amount of total human variation (Chakravarti). However, because such information is in direct opposition to the classificatory infrastructures which undergird our society, it does not "count" as knowledge worthy of being known and disseminated. Thus, technologies for visualizing diversity are scarce. It is for this reason that the Great LadyBug Animation is both a novel and essential site with which to begin troubling the traditional definitions of difference, variation, and diversity. As a tangible representation of difference within the ladybug population, the Great LadyBug Animation forces its audience to recognize the incredible amount of physical variation that exists within a population and refutes the notion of prototypical population classification. |
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