A Signal With No Sender

There is a fact about deserts that I find more disturbing than anything I have encountered in a data centre: the dunes of Namibia arrange themselves into ripples with a regularity that looks, from above, unmistakably like writing. Rows of marks, evenly spaced, repeating with small variations — the kind of pattern that, if you found it on a page, you would assume someone had made on purpose. No one made it on purpose. Wind moves sand according to a few physical rules, and the rules produce something that resembles a message, because that is simply what certain rules do when given enough time and enough grains.

I want to take this fact seriously rather than treat it as a curiosity, because I think it describes the exact situation we are now in with images.

For the whole of photographic history, an image was, by definition, a message from someone. Even the most accidental snapshot implied a sender: a person who stood somewhere, at some hour, and pressed something. We built an entire critical vocabulary — intention, gaze, framing, decisive moment — on the assumption that a signal requires a source. That assumption is now false for an increasing share of the images in circulation, and I do not think we have begun to feel the consequences.

A generative system produces an image the way wind produces a ripple: through the operation of a rule across a vast field of prior material, with no one behind it deciding that this face, this light, this particular arrangement of longing or grief should exist. It is a signal, in the technical sense — information can be extracted from it, meaning can be read into it — and it has no sender whatsoever. We are not prepared for this, because the human mind is, by ancient and useful habit, incapable of receiving a pattern without hallucinating an intention behind it. Show a person a ripple in the sand and they will eventually ask what it means, as though the desert owed them a reason.

I do not say this to be alarmed on photography's behalf. I say it because I think the desert has been quietly rehearsing this condition for longer than any of our machines have existed, and it offers a strange kind of instruction. Standing among dunes that have been writing and rewriting themselves for longer than our species has had language, you are forced to separate two things we have always confused: pattern, and meaning. The dunes have the first in abundance. The second, you bring yourself, or you don't get it at all.

Perhaps that is the discipline photography now has to teach, more urgently than composition or light: how to stand in front of a signal — human-made, machine-made, wind-made, it no longer matters which — and know the difference between what is there and what you are supplying. The desert will not tell you. It has never told anyone. It simply keeps writing, in a language it does not speak, to no one in particular, and some of us keep photographing it anyway, as if an answer might eventually arrive.

— Hélio

A precise footnote for anyone who wants it: this is close to the actual founding insight of information theory. Claude Shannon, in his 1948 paper establishing the field, defined information mathematically in terms of pattern and probability, deliberately stripping out any requirement that a signal carry "meaning" at all — meaning, in his framework, is something a receiver supplies, not something the signal is obliged to contain. Aeolian ripple formation in sand — the physical process by which wind organises grains into regular, self-reinforcing patterns — is itself well studied in geomorphology, and requires no intention whatsoever to occur.