Perfection

Ai and its agents offer photo enhancement, resolution enhancement, sharpening of blurred photos, removal of smudges caused by movement, retouching of dust and emulsion scratches, and masking of natural ageing processes of paper media. The tools offered are affordable and easy to use. All you have to do is tell the demon standing at your doorstep to come in.

It will come in and show what this soul-squeezing machine can do. It works like a wringer, on the one hand screwing in a wonderful, vivid photograph carrying 100% of the information, bathed in truth like a garden in the morning sunshine, then wringing it dry of originality, depriving it of subjectivity and spitting out a painted doll, a flattering cliché born of obsessive perfectionism and fear of unsterile, uncontrolled life.

What is driven by fear can be dangerous; some madness begins with the thought in one’s head that things are bad, that they need to be saved, improved. Let’s fix it – we’ll rearrange the world, taking only what is strong and beautiful from the past, what will strengthen us, while the weak and imperfect must be buried or disguised and painted over. I’ll stop now because it’s turning an ugly colour.

I was also ill, briefly, but during that time, with the help of AI, I committed the following sins: 1/ I improved the reference photograph for the Sensibilitas.p l website, even before I created the website as part of my penance, 2/ I digitally recreated Aunt Dziunia’s voice, wrote the text she was to say and created an avatar based on photographs. The generated clip haunts me to this day, and I will never touch Ai’s wringer for the purposes of correcting, beautifying, restoring, reconstructing, renovating, reviving, making more interesting, more intriguing, brrr, so help me understand in any, even residual, participation of mine in you.

The AI wringer takes a bit of energy, not much, a few Wh, but the numbers on the meters immediately signal a refreshed reading, the clink of coins like the strike of a gong starts the session, first there is the clatter of transistors setting themselves in their starting positions, the algorithm pumps start up and pump out streams of data, the speed of the cooling units increases and again you hear the clink of coins. The digital beast scans the photo, imperfections, unclear, blurriness, as desired by the troglodyte at the keyboard, are mapped as evil and cut out with a zero-one blaster to bare digital ground what lived in a natural process, digging up the soil for good and flanking perfection, legibility, sharpness.

Oh! How pretty this ugly photo is now. Pretty people look good in pretty photos.

If you want to be a pretty person just as you are, fine; if you want to be even prettier, fine too, but leave the imperfections, unclear, blurriness photo alone, even if you find it ugly and unacceptable.

There is no way to include an imperfections, unclear, blurriness photo in the decision-making process, to ask if you want a new, polished appearance. Therefore, any behaviour other than keeping it intact is not only insensitive, it is violent.

Renovations, relocations, insensitivity, changing tastes, historical turmoil will deplete the number of imperfections, unclear, blurriness photos in analogue archives.

I imagined a brave new world without a single imperfect photo preserved, and I felt cold.