How Can You Talk About Images You Haven't Seen?

There are millions of images from the past that we have never seen, but whose digital availability forces us to ask the same question that was asked about texts fifteen years ago: "What Do you Do with a Million Books?" We all agree on this: digital technology can help us to "do" something with these millions of images that have been seen by others and not by us. Of course, in order to talk about images that we have not seen, we need to know what computers can “say” about them—or, rather, we need to know what kind of information from images is given and can be given to computers. Two elements can be given to computers: Textual metadata (indirectly linked to the image, such as the author and spatio-temporal context, or specific to it, such as a title, the medium, or a description of content), and computationally analyzable pixels. Does this allow us to talk about images, or about anything else? That is where the positions are not necessarily the same as to the computational approach to images: computation contravenes the ethics of art history according to which one does not speak of what one has not seen, and where it is ill-advised to assume that one is speaking of a reproduction and not of an original. “Distant viewing" is then easily relegated to the sidelines of social history, naive cultural analytics, art geography, or heritage engineering. My argument will be to defend the interest of historical and visual studies that speak of what they have not seen. Beyond the simple contribution of discussing forgotten images and artists and reconstructing the power dynamics in social and cultural exchange —i.e a contribution to the social and the global history of art—the computational approach encourages us to revisit questions that art history had put aside, such as the birth and development of style. Above all, it forces us to consider the political stakes of an aesthetic theory of images that would no longer prefer to discuss images in the singular. In the age of machine surveillance, building a theory about images that we have not seen, will not see, and that no one else will, is of dire importance.