Gestell

Enframing: a way of revealing that turns everything, eventually including people, into standing reserve — resources on call, valued for availability. Read against figure/ground, the violence is in treating the figure as though it needed no ground. The figure does not become more stable through that apparent independence; it severs the reciprocity it depended on, and the ground goes silent. An archive of billions of uploaded images, weighted and rendered available on demand, is standing reserve in the most literal sense the term allows — except the resource was made of other people's faces, which is what makes the average as material a political material and not only a technical one.