Manufacturing the New
Manufacturing the New
In my experience, I learn more from the 'bold failures' than from the 'safe successes'. Mind you, in my case the baseline is pretty low. The trick to getting above it is not to keep doing the same old stuff, and seeing what happens.
This is a crucial point, I think. I've been thinking about this in regards to my line of work, semiconductor manufacturing (I know -- a long way from shooting film, but follow my line of thinking on this one.)
The science of manufacturing circuits on silicon is getting more and more structured. Higher degrees of automation, removing the 'human factor' (i.e. error) from the process flow. Operationally such factories (Fabs) are essentially totally automated; the main human involvements are: 1) start-up (of a new process: much more difficult with the new processes, tighter tolerances, fewer defects allowed, faster production ramp rates, etc); 2) intervention when a process tool faults out (i.e. recovery or scrap of wafers); 3) Planned and unplanned maintenance on the process tools. Most unplanned failures of equipment are now analyzed and an attempt is made to find 'root cause' and eliminate future failures; 4) Process Engineering - rather than tweaking the process, once it's been started and ramped to full volume, a well-designed process should ramp to full volume with minimal tweaks by the local Fab level process engineers; their job is to ensure 'Copy Exactly'.
This is all well and good from the perspective of the science of manufacturing efficiency. But I am reminded of how flash memory was invented: it wasn't invented. It was discovered, through a mis-processing event in an older memory Fab. Due to the common occurance in those older Fabs of misprocessing (due to human handling of process material and little automated process flow) a lot box of wafers was ran through the gate loop of the process flow twice, resulting in a double gate structure being built on the transistors on those wafers. When the lot got to sort/etest at end of line, it was found that the transistors retained their charge even when the devices were powered off. The 'floating gate' was discovered, the basis of flash memory.
My point is that new discoveries require a certain atmosphere of randomness and disorder, the variability within which allows sufficient permutations to generate new behaviors, new observations. The process may be chip making, or photograph making, I believe the truth is the same: the unexpected is often the place where new, original thinking arises.
This, I feel, is the biggest change that instant, electronic-based, photography has brought to the art: the decline of the accidental. Not that you can't botch a shot with a digicam, but the unexpected can all too easily be dispensed with (deleted) without sufficient cogitation required to appreciate some new aspect of what otherwise would be a botched shot. Almost as if the new technology has brought about the concept of the science of art-making: structured, highly efficient, extremely consistent. And lacking soul.
We need those old negatives (or image files), floating around in an album or drawer (or storage media), to rediscover some new, ephemeral insight about the phenomenon of seeing the world. They're our heritage of visual discovery, the detritus of being both tool maker and image maker.
~Joe
