A large format paintjet camera...

[Oren Grad]

...sort of:

http://www.strandbeest.com/theo_painting_machine.php

Meets the standard of indexicality, no?

[Amedeus]

Sort of ... long time exposure ...

[Maris Rusis]

Indexical? Yes! But there's no camera, no lens, no real optical images, no light-sensitive substances consumed, and no data processed. But there is illuminated subject matter, light travels to a detector, and an ink-jet print of sorts eventuates. So, is it a photograph?

[Amedeus]

It's a photograph in my book made by a 1-bit digital scanning "camera" and 2D scanned direct-to-print. There's data processing going, real simple, but it's there as there's somewhere a threshold set for black/white in function of the incoming analog signal.

Indexical? Yes! But there's no camera, no lens, no real optical images, no light-sensitive substances consumed, and no data processed. But there is illuminated subject matter, light travels to a detector, and an ink-jet print of sorts eventuates. So, is it a photograph?

[Oren Grad]

Indexical? Yes! But there's no camera, no lens, no real optical images, no light-sensitive substances consumed, and no data processed. But there is illuminated subject matter, light travels to a detector, and an ink-jet print of sorts eventuates. So, is it a photograph?

Yup!

[Struan Gray]

How is this different from sending a digital snap to Hong Kong to get it painted on canvas?

Indexocologicityness is necessary, but not sufficient, methinks. Photographers might get a little frisson of being in the presence of a kissing cousin, which I'm sure is part of the point of this piece, but it's not the whole point.

I'm fond of things I can do with my kids: http://www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac.uk/image/?tid=1984_076 With enough kids, rain, effort and ingenuity you could turn this into a pseudo-photographic medium too.

[Mike Anderson]

...sort of:

http://www.strandbeest.com/theo_painting_machine.php

Meets the standard of indexicality, no?

The image doesn't go through a double inversion, so it's really more indexical than lens based systems. Also, it avoids the tyranny of perspective inherent in lenses, so it ends up being a more moral method of image making.

[Oren Grad]

How is this different from sending a digital snap to Hong Kong to get it painted on canvas?

Indexocologicityness is necessary, but not sufficient, methinks.

I'm not sure what's left, other than that the recording intermediary be machine rather than human and perhaps that the translational process be deterministic at the perceptible level. And even at that, suppose the human were behaving like a camera-machine, converting incoming signal to print (or negative!) by putting down dots according to a deterministic protocol. Then, the only thing allowing us to sustain a distinction might be that such human camera-machines are so unlikely to ever be common that the pressure of overwhelming popular usage wouldn't be there.

[Jim Jones]

One problem with this system: the perspective is correct only when viewed from an infinitely distant point. I can't see that far.

[Struan Gray]

I'm not sure what's left,

The problem only occurs if you insist on hard boundaries to your definitions. I think in terms of a sort of density of characteristics. Once you get enough of them, or enough of one of them, you have a photograph rather than a painting, or a tapestry, or a synthetic image.

The ur-index in the few books I have read on the subject is usually a footprint. A wet footprint on hard rock is different from a footprint on sand, and the variety of footprints available in mud is effectively infinite. I don't see indexality as particularly prescriptive - it's a quality, not a mode.

The nice thing about the Strandbeest 'camera' is that it takes the conceptual algorithm of digital imaging and ploddingly applies it using analogue methods. That lays bare both the limitations of the method (for example, movement timescales become important) and makes it clear how real digital imagers have found a parameter space where the workings of the algorithm are effectively hidden. I'd love to do Tai chi in front of the 'camera' with a bunch of LEDs sewn into my clothes.