CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Søren Pold, University of Aarhus, Denmark
The (In)Visibility of Digital Images
Images have undergone a technological revolution, but in what ways have technological developments influenced the content of the images, the imaging process, and how we see things? If we look at pictures broadly and especially digital photography, it seems that the digitisation has changed only little and we still takes pictures of our children, celebrations and to witness other important events in private and public life. The digital character is more or less invisible and photography is still largely understood realistically as witnesses of the real despite the postmodern debates. This paper will discuss how images in algorithmic art can develop and contrast this apparent invisibility of the digital character of contemporary visual images.
Early algorithmic art like the mid-sixties' works of Frieder Nake can be seen as culture-historical condensation of a kind of structuralist visual basic research that experimented with making interesting images out of algorithms but also showed – as some of the first and as forerunners of later digital image forms – how we already perceive algorithmically. This double character of picturing algorithms and simultaneously reflecting how our perception is algorithmically structured is continued in Antoine Schmitt's still living series (2007) that can be considered a demonstration of the algorithmic-statistical imagery and its significance today. These ten different graphs depict developments and movements via the visual codes that we normally see in statistic representations and know from the news, but their movement is generated algorithmically and autonomously. They uses a visual language that we are used to decode as information that exudes serious analyses and grave societal trends, but their allegorical self-reference asks critical questions about the reality of such analyses and their visual language, which to a large extent govern our political agendas.Consequently, we see other kinds of imagery than what is shown by digital photography with great importance for our contemporary culture and society. And if we ask how photographic images function in our spectacular economy Logo Hallucination (2007) by Christophe Bruno is enlightening. It finds logos in images and thus reflects on the commercialisation of visual culture, where image elements become and are recognised as trademarks.
These art works reflect how our images are changing profoundly alongside with digitisation. The technologies of the image consequently work as technological, cybernetic and semiotically mediated layers that we often first notice when art shows us the function and effect of images.