AYMERIC MANSOUX

Originally published in 'post.pic: imageboards, tagging, tool images, visual studies - a primer by practitioners', a publication from the research group 'Communication in a Digital Age' of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University. --- Tagging Florian Cramer, Aymeric Mansoux The most familiar form of tagging is probably still the graffiti tag: a hybrid of writing, calligraphy and images, typically used as a kind of signature by graffiti artists, mainly on buildings and trains. Graffiti signatures have existed since the late 1960s, when graffiti writers such as Cornbread and TAKI 183 first received media attention. The phenomenon was already widespread by the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the term “graffiti tag” first appeared in American subculture. In computing, meta-information and tagging are standard features of file systems and databases; on the most general level, tagging is simply the labelling of an information object (typically a file) using a name or other keywords. Meta-tagging entered the popular consciousness when it became a central feature of the so-called “Web 2.0”. On websites such as YouTube and Flickr, meta-tagging transformed digital image culture: visual elements could now be identified through the sets of tags attri- buted to them, such as “apple”, “green” and “photograph” in the case of a photo of a green apple. Meta tagging is also a key feature of web sites such as del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site where people assign keyword tags to web links (in the context of computers and the Internet, the terms keywords and meta tags are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable). But is there any actual resemblance between an urban graffiti wall, and our green apple in Flickr? Or is it merely some linguistic coincidence that makes us use the same word for both image cultures? Basic semio- tics might help to shed some light on this question. Semiotics (literally the study of signs) originated in the late nineteenth century through the pioneering work of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce; its main concern is the analysis of signs and signification processes. Peirce divided signs into three basic categories: icon, index and symbol. If we consider a photograph of the smoke caused by a forest fire, we identify the image as smoke because of its iconic resemblance to actual smoke. But if we are standing outside, looking at actual smoke, we inter- pret this as an “indexical sign” (a trace and an indicator) of fire. Finally, there is the symbolic sign, the simplest example of which would be the five-letter word “smoke” (which bears no iconic resemblance to smoke, nor is it an indexical trace of smoke). If we apply this classification to tagging, then the most intuitive asso- ciation would be to define tags as symbolic signs: whether they be calligraphic graffiti, or meta tags on digital files, they do not iconically depict anything, but rather resemble writing, as signatures and mark- ings. Or perhaps graffiti aims to be iconic, since it emphasizes visual form and visual associations with other elements of the signature. Yet such explanations are not entirely satisfactory. A historical analysis of graffiti tags, and of their evolution within electronic media, may perhaps give us more insight. In the opening scene of “Wild Style”, an early 1980s cult film about the old-school hip hop and graffiti scenes, we see a graffiti artist spraying a tag based on his own name (“Ray”) on a subway train in a tunnel. The tag is not merely a symbolic inscription of the name – nor is the juxtaposition of the symbolic sign “Ray” with the iconic footage in the film of Ray’s heads and hands. What the scene (and indeed most of the film) is about, is the marking of a site, using the subway train as a mobile territory which expands the inscription throughout the urban space. Another 1980s film, Dennis Hopper’s “Colors”, tells the story of two cops in gangland Los Angeles. In one key scene, they catch a gang member spraying his tag on another gang’s wall. They immedi- ately move him out of “enemy” territory and back into his own gang’s, even showing him a place where he can spray without getting himself killed. And indeed, his tag functions as a declaration of gang war, which further escalates as the film progresses. Tagging becomes an elaborate form of insult, “dissing” or verbal abuse, which is of course risky in any situation, besides gangland tagging conventions. Here the graffiti tag is not a symbolic or iconic representation, but an indexical territorial mark- ing. Likewise, early graffiti signatures often consisted of the tagger’s nickname and street number. Dennis Hopper’s “Colors” can help us understand one major cultural difference between Europe and America, at least regarding the way graffiti tags are perceived. In a city like Rotterdam, graffiti is seen as a mostly harmless expression of rebellious youth culture; whereas in contemporary America, graffiti tags are habitually associated with criminal gangs: the territorial marking of no-go areas. This is an actual claim (and not merely a symbolic one) that a group operating outside of state authority is in control of a territory; not unlike the way dogs will mark their territory with their urine. And so, beyond the symbolic and iconic elements of graffiti tagging, its most powerful aspect is clearly an indexical one. In the underground computer scene of the 1980s and 1990s, graffiti culture was more or less seamlessly expanded into an electronic graf- fiti culture among hackers and crackers. This manifested itself most prominently in the “cracktros” for illegally copied computer games: besides removing the copy protection of games on floppy disks, cracker groups (identifying themselves using pseudonyms) would add their own intro screen to the game. Not only did the intro symbolically tag the game with the name of the cracker group; the visual aesthetics of these screens quickly evolved from using plain text and display hacks, to visually emulating actual graffiti writing. Here the territory is shifted, from the city to the computer game and the distribution of media. The practice later branched out into several other activities, such as the “demo” scene, where cracktros grew into complex, computer-generative audiovisual animations. Another similar subculture was FTP tagging. For a brief period in the early 2000s, the Internet had become a vast jungle of poorly maintain- ed servers. These machines were leftovers from the late dotcom boom, when many of the new companies providing web hosting and server administration had little or no understanding of network security. For approximately two years this provided an extraordinary new terri- tory for amateur pirates, who made public FTP servers their playground. FTP taggers, once they had located the “pub” folder of these servers, used them for sharing their own files, including illegal material, cracked software, music, and videos. Once a “pub” folder had been found, it was tagged to mark it as the sole property of the individual or the group who had discovered it. This tag was simply a file directory path stating the name of the “pub” owner. For example: /tmp/.test/=-=/-/=-=Tagged by GT!!!!!=-=/-/=-=/Filled.by.S/c/a/r/f/a/c/e/for/(^.^)Y0FXP(^.^)/ Such tags were not plainly visible, but could be read by looking at all the subfolders contained in the “pub” folder. In the example above, the tag indicates that the folder was discovered by “GT” and that the files in the last folder were uploaded by “Scarface”, both of whom are members of the group “Y0FXP”. To prevent “pubstealing” and in-group vandalism, and to make it harder for anyone to get rid of the original “squatters”, a technique known as “dirlocking” was developed to make the tag impos- sible to remove (analogous to using a permanent marker for signing on a graffiti wall). To make things even trickier, it became common practice to upload thousands of variations of the same tag all at once, thus creat- ing a complete file-system maze on top of the lock. Eventually, pubstealing evolved from stealing storage space to simply deleting any uploaded content – just for the sake of it, or for the thrill and satisfaction of solving a tag maze or breaking a locked tag, in order to re-appropriate the territory and mark it with one’s own tag. In this subculture, tagging was not merely a matter of marking or symbolically describing a territory, but of actually creating it for a group of peers. The tag thus became a means of granting or preventing access and informa- tion retrieval – not unlike the function of tags in systems such as Flickr today. Tagging has become one of the core features of the so-called Web 2.0. Vodafone even advertises a mobile phone service with the slogan “Tagging, posting, chatting, surfing. And making phone calls” – thus recounting a history of media in reverse, in which tagging has become the most contemporary (and most important) form of telecommunica- tion media usage. Tagging the image of the apple with attributes such as “green” and “Granny Smith” could of course be considered redundant, given that we can already see the apple in the image. However, we need such words in order to be able to find the image at all. Without the tags, the image cannot be retrieved from any database, search engine or web site. Con- sequently, the so-called “Semantic Web” is nothing more (or less) than a standardized, comprehensive meta-tagging system for the World Wide Web, allowing for better and easier retrieval of information. The way in which we use computers to access images is predominantly linguistic. Even before the Web, before Google, YouTube and Flickr, we were al- ready well acquainted with linguistic tagging – giving images filenames such as “apple.jpg”, which are, of course, nothing but tags: in fact, the oldest system of meta tagging used in computers. We cannot use a picture of one apple in order to “google” other images of other kinds of apples – at least not without some prior human and computer tagging: a set of numerical pixel patterns common to several digital photographs of apples, and a human programmer who has identified this set as cor- responding to the English word “apple”. This should put into perspective any overblown claims of a “pictorial turn” in our culture, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. At the very least, we must reconsider the notion of images being in opposition to text, or being an entirely different medium than text. In our contem- porary visual culture, we can no longer separate one from the other. The three semiotic properties of images – symbolic, iconic and indexical – converge in these systems; much in the same way that indexical mark- ing of territory, symbolic writing, and iconic pictorial representation con- verged in the older visual medium of the graffiti. And so the leap from the graffiti wall to Flickr may not be so much of a leap at all.

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tagging.txt	11K