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At the Threshold of Infinity and Comfort
March 2025

“sometimes I hate so much the very
edges of me fade
indiscriminate into nature”
– Keith S. Wilson, Processing Emmett Till (Uncanny Emmett Till #2)

       As the world continues its swift technological revolution away from analog and into the world of the digital image, so too does our relationship with self-perception and personal delineation shift. Even the pastiche remnants of analog photography, such as film cameras and the print magazine are entirely mediated through digital processing in the 21st century. This is where the paradoxical nature lies. Society was once content living in a world of low quality images: high grain, high contrast. This lack of quality subsequently provided more definite boundaries for photographic subjects and their sociopolitical constraints. This era was defined by stronger barriers between race, class, and gender. Our social systems were in place to maintain this segregation. However, our desire for innovation disrupted this order by transitioning the image into digital space – where a new realm of quality was possible. The capacity for a person to define themselves within their boundaries, and thus define their social unit and other relevant homogenic cells by grouping, collapsing and minimizing varied traits is an identical process to the one through which we process and make sense of a photograph. Despite the resolution of resolution already unfurling – though notably maintained at a distance where boundary remained perceptible – humanity reinvented the ascension of quality onto the computer. Although we had already achieved the highest quality in print, we restarted the conquest, only this time our sights were pointed towards the pixel.
        Now, consider a photo of a person in a black coat standing in a field of snow. Imperceptible horizon merging sky and land behind the crepuscular obelisk in the center of frame. If this image were incredibly low quality, with the clunky pixels clinging to each other clearly distinguishable, one would be able to determine the edges of the subject with ease, although there would no longer be a trace of the subject’s features in the image. Observing the opposite condition, if the image were rendered in high pixel resolution, the viewer would be able to point out the edge of the subject by sight, but if the image were to be zoomed in, the edges of our coat-clad protagonist would slowly become a gradient of black, then gray, then white squares. The virtual quality and the visual quality operate completely inversely at achieving the task of providing binary perception (paradox number two: the computer’s language is specifically that of binary).
       Whenever handed a photo of themselves on a mobile phone or computer, most people’s first instinct is to zoom in. Zoom into the imperfections and the graphical mistakes. Zoom in until the entire image is an array of squares. Only by looking at the trees, can they conceive the forest. Therefore, the visual understanding of images is equal in importance to the computational understanding. Especially considering the fact that the digital image’s impact transcends depiction, in turn constituting a simulacra of the human. Every image online depicts a different variation of a person, with lens length, filters, camera angles and even plastic surgery available to completely change a person’s appearance. If access to the culturing force of images is now sped up to an extreme speed, and mediated through digital augmentation, then the resolution determined by a pixel becomes all the more important. We make up our mental image of ourselves using parts of other images Frankenstein’d into one concise whole despite our source material having been corrupted. Any semblance of vagueness implied by the infinitesimally small gradient barrier proves to be the unraveling of definite boundaries for the imaginal self created inside the mind of the spectator.
Throughout history humanity has been fascinated with depiction – which some would call replication – of ourselves. This idea is best demonstrated by the earliest of human art: the cave painting. Exemplarily, Cueva de la Manos in Santa Cruz, Argentina, a 9,000-year-old pictograph site with the outlines of over 2,000 human hands on the walls of the cave. This pictorial style which is found in many prehistoric pictograph sites, where the subject of the drawing is depicted via its own edges is not only something that has continued into modernity in the Pre-K classroom come Thanksgiving, but is a fundamental tenet of human art. The use of the boundary is more important than whatever fills in that space, because it is the border that tells us what the figure is meant to be. It is also of note that the individual forms were used to create a combined mass of layered hand negatives which represents a cultural/genetic whole. From cave paintings to the invention of perspective to the creation of the camera, we have always relied on images in our society. These methods and their impact were once confined within the power of the brain to understand their verisimilitude. Only recently with the covenant of the computer has it become the responsibility of a machine to rationalize computational logic for the understanding and later the creation of our depictions of ourselves. With things like artificial intelligence there is a new realm of what can and must be understood and a new infancy for our approach to mastery. We rely on the computer to tell us where our boundaries are. An application that extends beyond self-perception and includes utilitarian approaches such as surveillance and warfare. In the present day, where we increasingly rely on images to make our self-perception we inadvertently depend on a new method to parse through information. When we approach the surgical process of image aesthetic digestion, we must be able to mentally cut ourselves out of the image and define the boundaries just as Photoshop’s selection tool uses a series of ray tracing and shadow detection methods to find the subject of an image. Unbeknownst to humans, the computer is simultaneously waging its own race towards a point of singularity. Artificial intelligence is quickly headed towards accomplishing humanlike strength at collapsing the multivariate data sources of an image and understanding its holistic visual aspects. Fortunately, the machine still finds itself lost in the endless forest of pixels, however one might find it foreboding that the standard of generative hands is quickly moving away from six fingers to five.
       The Israeli architect Eyal Weizman writes about the concept of the “threshold of detectability,” where a subject depicted in a film photograph is exactly the correct distance from the image for the entirety of their being to be the size of single grain in the final photo. Under this logic, the subject in question loses all identifiable aspects, and the material qualities of the photograph itself becomes an element of the understood representation. In context, the threshold provides a notable lapse in certainty for broader geopolitical applications. Weizman cites aerial photography as one of many instances in which a single unit that makes up a larger photograph can prove to be the difference between life and death (or alive and dead). Assuming that the majority of film photography in the last two centuries of photography have consisted of similar limitations for precision, then the threshold of detectability exists within a space of low visual quality and high computational quality. In modernity, the pixeled image is usually of a high visual quality, and a low computational one. In order to combat this inversion, computers are increasingly being taught to think like humans, so that a machine’s understanding of the threshold can become more accurate in the miliary field – notably for drone warfare. In an essay about a series of drawings of clouds, Pablo Obando Guzmán posits lying down and observing clouds overhead as one of the most abrasive and simultaneously cathartic experiences for a person, because it requires a completely release from the spectator to fall into the endlessness of that boundless white flurry in the sky. Any observer, when faced with such a sight that is both tangible but unquantifiable, may spend the entire day lost in observation in an attempt to find the cloud’s resolution. On the other end of this situation, the cloud and its panoptic electronic inhabitant observes the spectator as well, attempting to accomplish the same goal.
As the pixel grows in power, we see that humans are less accurate in their interpersonal determination of what makes a human: human. As well as what defines the ties and tendencies of visual culture shared between humans. In tandem, or perhaps to supplement this, computers are being trained to think like humans. This only furthers the creation of a skewed contemporary culture with a deep moral decay.
       Unfortunately, humans are not too fond of accepting a world without clearly defined boundaries. As the computational resolution of digital images continues to wane, and more and more boundaries dissolve into each other, a reactionary instinct in humanity is activated to push against such devolution of a once deeply engrained social order. Which is why the indeterminate nature of the pixel is especially pertinent in periods of instability wherein large transitions occur. Not only does a single pixel make up the difference between you and the enveloping void that lies behind you, it can also be the single division between you and your militant enemy. As the edge of a photographic subject becomes nothing more than gradient, so too does the boundary between normalcy and entropy blur.
      Just as observing clouds requires a release of inhibiting preconceptions pertaining to definite boundaries, so too will our anthropological future. Ideologically, abandoning our instinct to define everything by its boundaries is the only effective course of action in response to the militarized reality of the pixel unit. To resolve oneself to live within the boundary is to accept the revelation that one’s perspective, though once deeply rooted in a single ideological constraint, is negligent of another. One which must exist in order to validate the very existence of the primary. Within balance we find completeness. With empathy we cull out the arbitrary and find a new resolution for ameliorating the advancement of technology into indefinite space with the sudden transition of humanity into a larger unit, rather than a series of smaller well-defined parts.