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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

a digital world means.... « Previous | |Next »
January 19, 2008

Kevin Robins in will image move us still? in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (ed., Martin Lister, Routledge, London,1995) says that the development of new digital electronic technologies for the registration, manipulation and storage of images is significant:

Over the past decade or so, we have seen the increasing convergence of photographic technologies with video and computer technologies, and this convergence seems set to bring about a new context in which still images will constitute just one small element in the encompassing domain of what has been termed hypermedia. Virtual technologies, with their capacity to originate a ‘realistic’ image on the basis of mathematical applications that model reality, add to the sense of anticipation and expectation.What is happening to our image culture–whatever it may amount to–is generally being interpreted in terms of technological revolution, and of revolutionary implications for those who produce and consume images.

He adds the interpretation of the new technologies associate them with the emergence of a wholly new kind of visual discourse. This, it is argued, has profoundly transformed our ideas of reality, knowledge and truth.

Robins then introduces William Mitchell, who says in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1992) that:

Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream.(p. 225)

And Jonathan Crary, who in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century,(1992) conceives of the new order in terms of a new ‘model of vision’:
The rapid development in little more than a decade of a vast array of computer graphics techniques is part of a sweeping reconfiguration of relations between an observing subject and modes of representation that effectively nullifies most of the culturally established meanings of the terms observer and representation. The formalization and diffusion of computer-generated imagery heralds the ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual ‘spaces’ radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography, and television. (p.1).

We are, says Crary, 'in the midst of a transformation in the nature of visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective’ (ibid.).

Robins says that according to this line of interpretation the technological and visual revolution associated with new digital techniques is understood, to be at the very heart of broader cultural revolution.

There is the belief that the transformation in image cultures is central to the historical transition from the condition of modernity to that of postmodernity. Digital imaging is seen as ‘felicitously adapted to the diverse projects of our postmodern era’ (Mitchell ibid, p 8). The postmodern order is considered to be one in which the primacy of the material world over that of the image is contested, in which the domain of the image has become autonomous,

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:22 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

John Urry has done some interesting research on imagery and cosmopolitanism in a globalised world. He doesn't mention Bourdieu but it's very Pierre in its conclusions. Visual mobility is, I think, the term he uses.

If it is a cultural revolution some will be left behind, and at that rate, is it a revolution?