(12) Context Re-fabrication in Image Manipulation

One of my favorite past time activities is wandering around my neighborhood and visiting local shops and bodegas. I meander through different aisles, checking to see what chips and ramen flavors are in store each week. I like to stop by the produce section and imagine how I can use each ingredient, and if I should challenge myself to cook using a different vegetable. Going to the grocery store feels like frolicking at an adult playground. If I feel really generous, I purchase a new hot sauce, an extravagantly packaged tinned fish, or a little treat that usually ends up being a bag of Takis.

A few days ago, I was scavenging my fridge and pantry to conjure up a decent meal for myself and knew that I had to go grocery shopping. But in between my chores, work, gym, and projects, I didn’t have the heart to make a midday trip to Trader Joe’s and come home eggless. Conveniently, I had a few friends with Instacart, so hopping on one of their accounts, I decided to try this “fake automated grocery experience,” a phrase I would use and grimace to regularly tease my friends.

At first, I was excited by the wide selection of grocery stores that I didn’t have easy access to without a car — Hmart, 99 Ranch, even Costco without their membership… it felt like I was unlocking an exclusive experience. From hotpot meat and silken tofu to Korean pears and five different kimchi brands, I had access to ingredients that I thought to be a rare commodity. But as I continued to scroll, trying to maneuver through the digital aisles, I couldn’t help but feel a jarring disconnect with the produce presented on my screen. The images, neatly cut out and placed against a white background, couldn’t do justice to the sensory shopping experience that I love and enjoy. I couldn’t smell an apple’s sweetness or feel an avocado’s firmness. I couldn’t pick up two granola brands in each hand to compare their nutrition facts side by side. I couldn’t gauge the size of an iceberg lettuce when they were written in pounds (I usually get whatever fits and feels right in my hand). I couldn’t exactly resort to my impulse or lean into my desire to give myself a little treat after a lap around the store when I could see the list piling up with the total cost already added up at the end. Eventually, my grocery list got smaller and smaller to only order a few items that I found to be a desperate necessity (e.g. eggs). But after my purchase, to my tragedy, my shopper messaged me that they were all out of eggs, and I was still home eggless. I ended up making two grocery runs in person and made my peace with Instacart after that (the conclusion being I will probably never use it again).

Instacart’s shopping experience and particularly their curation of product images made me think about the appeal and growing trend of images photoshopped on white backgrounds. Compared to painted images or written type, photography on a white background feels strangely novel and unusual, even though it’s the same platitudinous blank canvas that we all know and start from when constructing a work of art. This perhaps comes from knowing that there was an implicit alteration of removing the subject out of the existing context through some type of digital intervention.

Presently, AI has made background removal effortless with a single click. Samsung and Apple are competing to incorporate a more seamless removal of photo selections directly on phones. Photoshop has reduced the photo editing learning curve through auto-remove and content aware autofills. Removing the background, often a landscape, of a photograph shifts the image towards a hyper-localization on the subject and its non-existent context. A realistic image neatly pasted on a blank canvas, almost mimicking a liminal or borderless space, offers an expanded opportunity for meaning making the narrative in which the subject sits.

This is also present when background context is filtered and reduced even more. A single coconut on a white background holds a different range of interpretation compared to a woman holding a coconut on a white background, or a coconut in a shopping basket on a white background. I also find this to be true and effective on social media. From “tag yourself” memes to Ssense’s brilliant marketing, a white canvas allows creators to generate and push new messaging by incorporating text with images that would have been difficult to adopt otherwise. I couldn’t help but wonder if there have been any methods or styles in the pre-digital times that mimicked this artistic style and intention of context re-fabrication for extended meaning making.

18th and 19th century paintings are, more so than not, doused with rich contextual backgrounds that it’s been difficult to find pieces with simple white backdrops or on blank canvases (unless they are semi-complete, quick sketches). I am no art historian, but perhaps neoclassicism’s strict and disciplined art style made even the remote idea of leaving subjects against a white background to be unfathomable, and thus unrefined or incomplete as an art piece. Even for simple portraits, the backgrounds seem to be filled with a soft mixture of overlays, solid colors, patterns, or detailed environments to provide context and atmosphere of the subject in the painting. Furthermore, these portraits rarely exist full bodied within the border of a blank canvas. If not assuming a regular bust portrait that leaves the frame, a full-bodied painting is accompanied by a contextual background that shares where, why, or how the subject was sitting, standing, or acting.

Even with these trends in the 18th and 19th centuries, I find silhouette portraits to be a particular craft that mimic modern background removal editing style; although here, the method is flipped in that subjects are pasted on a non-existing background to begin with. While silhouettes do not possess the realistic quality of a photograph, it seems to be one of the first crafts in which the background was purposefully left blank to emphasize the subject. Of course, there were probably restrictive considerations in the craft such as the silhouette being black to resemble a shadow, so naturally the background was white. However, I find it serendipitous and exciting that artists experimented with a landscape-less art style, something of novelty at the time, that perhaps most closely resembles what we know today as flat vector images or “graphic design.”

Surrealism was another movement that allowed for an expanded opportunity for meaning making, where the context of the background and the subject did not necessarily have to match or be coherent to be seen as a complete art piece. I can’t help but immediately jump to René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929), where the main object lives on a neutral background with accompanying text that fashions the context for interpretation — a formula akin to meme formats that we know today. Surrealist paintings were a call to challenge the existing rationality and narrative of a given context, or what surrealists saw as “liberating the unconscious mind.”

While many surrealist paintings do not have compositional or stylistic similarities to the aforementioned white background editing style, an imaginative and maximalist fabrication of unrelated images and concepts allowed artists to produce new meaning that subverts traditional thinking produced from fixed context. Melting clocks against a beautiful landscape (The Persistence of Memory, 1931), crinkled blanket as the ocean’s ripples (Ripples on the ocean), and a man rowing his boat on a wood-grained water (Current) — these hypnotic paintings have already achieved what we try to execute through modern day tools that clip, enmesh, refine, and generate various visuals into one. Now OpenAI’s DALL-E (literally a portmanteau of Pixar’s WALL-E and surrealist Salvador Dalí) and Photoshop’s generative fill perform the work of seemingly novel context generation, though “novelty” is just ever-repurposed pre-existing work reclaimed by machines.

Perhaps I am similarly reminded of surrealism in hyperrealistic-image-on-a-white-background editing style because the minimalist open space seems to blur the borders of the image’s frame that exist digitally and physically. Thinking about transparency grids or cybercore editing aesthetic, now I wonder if modern day surrealism hinges on image manipulation that blurs the line of the digital and physical divide.

When cameras became commercialized and widely accessible in the 1900s, photographic manipulation became common, including photomontage, a laborious process where multiple images were stitched together into one. Oscar Gustav Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life is known today as one of the most esteemed pieces to execute a photomontage. Portraying an allegory of a man being lured by vice and virtue, Rejlander took thirty-two separate negatives (!!!) to stitch them together into one seamless photograph. Looking at the final piece, no one would dare to think that each model and background were photographed separately. Yet, Rejlander’s laborious work successfully shares a seamless story, a context fabricated through each separate addition. Photomontage paved the path to modern photoshop, and now, technical artistry for digital manipulation comes in all tools and mediums.

Thinking back to Instacart’s digital aisles, I am unsure if a fabricated landscape would have made the shopping experience any better. A tree or a farm as the source of origin? A backdrop of wooden baskets housing the tomatoes? An interaction where a tub of yogurt is dropped into a cart upon selection? Perhaps the white background was the best it could do. Perhaps this is a reminder that no matter how much we try to cross the digital and physical divide, some things are just meant to stay separate, as is.

Throughout my research, I have been deeply humbled and in awe of artists pushing towards new limits to achieve their vision with their finite resources and technologies, compared to what is accessible today. It seems that limited frameworks often drive artists to challenge and experiment towards new foundations and movements, to even birth technologies present day. I feel similarly about modern day artists’ struggles against the existing framework of tools and platforms. These technologies were made to work for the artists, but the built context and foundation of existing tools often leave artists in a creative plateau. From the same video editing templates to viral background music, AI-generated stock photos, and pushing content for the sake of pushing, it’s difficult to break free from what is handed to us. I have found most wonder and novelty in artists who step away from the appeal of ease of technology and turn to a blank canvas for personal meaning making. I think a blank canvas doesn’t necessarily mean a physical medium, but more so ways in which artists are critically engaging with these limits to adopt the tools in ways that work for them. These artists stitch simultaneous motion, craft discomfort, frankenstein visceral horror, and alchemize black and white photos.

I am still figuring out what it means to find my own style of craft and break free from the existing framework, to have the tools work for me. And in many ways, ironically, I think the novelty I seek often turns to the past. I look forward to new experiments and ways to fuse the past and present, but in the meantime, I’ll keep exploring, making, and of course, writing, as always.

Thanks for being here.

— Eileen

My old and new friends, thank you for indulging in another piece of somewhat half-baked thoughts, as always. If you haven’t already, I gently urge you to read my piece, “My Biological Archive” on Reboot (!). Working on a piece for multiple months with a dedicated editor made me realize that I love and value the process of writing and spending a long time to sit with it, which is often difficult to do when I feel like I have an internal deadline set for myself.

I have always kept a loose rule to publish a piece once a month to sustain my writing practice and document my thoughts, but I have been finding it difficult to tend to my writing as regularly when occupied with other projects. Don’t worry, I will still be writing and sharing my writing! But my Type-A personality just had to make a formal announcement to give myself the reign of freedom that I don’t necessarily have to publish something every month.

I know that today’s piece had a lot of potential to evolve into something richer if I had more time to explore, but I felt nervous to publish now. On one hand, I was eager to share, but on the other, I felt anxious that I hadn’t shared something in February (which is so silly because no one is putting a gun to my head to publish something except my roommate!). I am unsure how my new schedule will change my relationship to writing — if I will publish more or less, if the essays will get any longer, but I want to follow my instinct and write when inspiration hits.

Schema Acquisition started as a project to simply document my thoughts and interests. I didn’t expect it to grow into a place of small community where people take interest and come with genuine curiosity. For this, I truly thank you all. I still have so much more to share, so I hope you all stick around! Lots of love. <3