Notes on the Margins of Metadata; Concerning the Undecidability of the Digital Image

This paper considers the significance of metadata in relation to the image economy of the web. Social practices such as keywording, tagging, rating and viewing increasingly influence the modes of navigation and hence the utility of images in online environments. To a user faced with an avalanche of images, metadata promises to make photographs machine-readable in order to mobilize new knowledge, in a continuation of the archival paradigm. At the same time, metadata enables new topologies of the image, new temporalities and multiplicities which present a challenge to historical models of representation. As photography becomes an encoded discourse, we suggest that the turning away from the visual towards the mathematical and the algorithmic establishes undecidability as a key property of the networked image.

This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an article whose final and definitive form, the Version of Record, has been published in Photographies, August 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/175.

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