1_b_73_PN_Titmarsh.pdf (4.42 MB)
What do images want? Towards an Ontotypology of the Image in the Age of Digital Envisioning
journal contribution
posted on 2018-04-18, 22:36 authored by Transdisciplinary image ConferenceTransdisciplinary image Conference, Mark TitmarshThe 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 Friedrich Kittler, arguing that technical
images have moved out beyond all previous means for
understanding images, cutting aesthetics, philosophy
and contemporary art off from the previous age of
images and their productive or communicative projects.
As such the contemporary image is caught somewhere
between being and non-being. The image as semblance
Mark Titmarsh
University of Technology Sydney
PO Box 123 Broadway
NSW 2007 Australia
mark.titmarsh@uts.edu.au
is less than a being because if semblance were to fully
resemble its model then it would no longer be an image
but that indicated being. At the same time any kind of
'appearing as non being' given by the image has its
own kind of being that cuts across the division of beingnon-being.
The result, by way of Heidegger is that
technical images bring all visualisation into an essential
closeness, a deseverance, that does not make images
more intimate or understood, on the contrary, images
become conceptually and phenomenally distant like
looking glasses, equipment to be looked 'through' but
not 'at'. By treating images in this way, as optical holes
instead of dithering presences, something of the
gigantic nature of our global technologies of envisioning
are revealed, bringing with them an annihilating
distance flung to the greatest point of removal beyond
embodied experiences and discursive formations.
