The Nature of the Digital Image: A Conversation with Thomas Nail (original) (raw)

The Creation of Digital Art in a Post Digital World

As far back as the introduction of the Greek myths – and specifically that of Echo and Narcissus (where Echo is Sound and Narcissus is image) appreciation of the nature of art has been derived from archaic and classical values that promote the idea of interpretation as a meaningful metric of the value of an idea or an object. In his ‘Poetics’, Aristotle posited that diegesis (Echo) is the reporting or narration of events, contrasted with mimesis (Narcissus) which is the imitative representation of them: the distinction is often cast as that between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. Together with discrimination and comprehension, both of these functions are part of the mechanism of interpretation. When Gutenburg created the printing press which enabled the beginnings of the mass production of text, the concept of reading and interpreting gained even greater historical purchase due to the encoding of meaning in actual objects: books. ‘Interpretation’ was given even greater power within the rise of modernism with the intervention of the Frankfurt School, which fore-grounded the idea of the ‘interpretation’ of art as meaningful and significant. Walter Benjamin reframed and reinterpreted the medieval belief of the power of the relic of the Saint in his famous question: Can the aura of the original be found within its replica? This question is even more pertinent now when art is created within the digital realm and must be reframed once again: Can the aura of the original exist at all, given there is no difference between the original and its copies? By examining new ideas of ‘entrainment’, where immersivity, resonance, synchronicity and direct response become the factors that reveal the potency of art, In this paper I re-examine how art or media events can function without dependence on the idea of interpretation.

The Digital Image and Reality

The media technologies that surround and suffuse our everyday life profoundly affect our relation to reality. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have sought to understand the complex influence of apparently simple tools of expression on our understanding and experience of the world, time, space, materiality and energy. The Digital Image and Reality takes up this crucial philosophical task for our digital era. This rich yet accessible work argues that when new visual technologies arrive to represent and simulate reality, they give rise to nothing less than a radically different sensual image of the world. Through engaging with post-cinematic content and the new digital formats in which it appears, Strutt uncovers and explores how digital image-making is integral to emergent modes of metaphysical reflection - to speculative futurism, optimistic nihilism, and ethical plasticity. Ultimately, he prompts the reader to ask whether the impact of digital image processes might go even bey...

What do images want? Towards an Ontotypology of the Image in the Age of Digital Envisioning

2018

The technology of our private portable screens has silently engendered a new visual presence, a technical image, that reaches out to all other kinds of screens, including the traditional screen of painting. The way an image appears to us through digital formats, is more aptly described as an envisioning, facilitated by light emitting diodes that irradiate the eye, while at the same time beckoning touch through an interactive surface.Villem Flusser claims that these 'technical images' are technically not images, but symptoms of electronic processes driven by a convergence of visual observation, conceptual categorisation and computing touch. Consequently the technical image is not like anything that has preceded it, from the cave to the cinema, since envisioning is facilitated by a swarm of electronic points in a state of decay, closer to a yawning emptiness than a physical presence. In this paper I will develop an economy of the contemporary image by way of Flusser and Friedr...

Art imitates the Digital

Lumina Journal, 2017

Where is art in the digital era? This essay identifies the digital as an abstract, formal system. Since art has always relied on formal, abstract systems to carry and deliver itself, what are the implications for art in the digital era? Is the digital a site for art, or is it the other way around? Can there be digital art? Identifying limit and boundary problems as the crucial existential problems for the digital, the essay shows that art has always concerned itself with such problems. This prompts the question as to whether it is possible that human existence and art become the same thing in the digital. Because the digital is currently primarily manipulated in the service of globalist economics, this is clearly not (yet) the case, so what does this mean for art? The essay then briefly examines the self-declared movements of dada, post-digital and post-internet art, concluding that these movements are not capable of questioning the digital as digital, before going on to examine some artists whose practice may be providing guiding lights toward a genuinely digital art.

The Anatomy of an Image Painting in the Digital Age

2011

The expansion of digital media and technology is rapidly transforming our perception of the material world. Marginalising the tactile potential of an image to convey meaning, advances in new-media have emphasized speed and efficiency over weight and substance. In light of the digital paradigm, my research promulgates the concept of painting as a physical encounter. An encounter that negates the disembodied nature of digital technology and that initiates an important rupture within the established fields of visual representation and communication. In order to extend the relevance of painting within contemporary art and culture, this paper analyses the material dimension of painting; its potential to convey significant meaning through creating a visual experience that is both optical and tactile. As the invention of photography can be seen to have liberated painting from a mimetic, narrative role, the nature of digital media likewise offers painters a unique challenge – digital techno...

The Digital Image of Thought

La Deleuziana, 2022

This essay conceives a Deleuzian image of thought proper to the digital medium. I call this "the digital image of thought" (or "the digital image" for short). I begin with an introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work on the image of thought and the related concept of the plane of immanence. Here, I emphasize that images of thought not only incarnate in entities recognized as either intelligent (e.g., a human mind) or as the products of intelligence (e.g., a work of art), but in material objects and media. The digital image, I argue, does not precede thought, but pertains to the latter category, as it is realized in the medium of digital data. Taking a speculative approach, I consider its implications were it to indeed inform human thought, arguing that in this capacity it would structure thought to meet the technical criteria of digital computability. From there, I present the digital image as a mechanism which would subsume thought under the needs of capital. Insofar as it yields digitizable (and thus monetizable) mental figures, I claim, it would figure minds as ideal environments for the creation of commodifiable concepts. I conclude by suggesting that, although the digital image is not an actually-existing precursor to thought, this possibility is an ideal of digital capitalism. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari's attempts to conceptualize a radically novel type of thought-one which would defy digital capture-are allied with contemporary political theorizations of the relationship between information technology and the psyche.