The Reconfigured Eye

With the emergence of the digital image, many issues including moral and legal ones arose. In analyzing this phenomenon, it is imperative to first analyze the difference between photography and the digital image. While photography has prided itself on immediacy between the physical and the image captured, the digital image reverses this by enabling blatant manipulation of the image. With the lack of an artist’s hand in photography, it has been acknowledged as the most objective evidence of a physical reality. The creator of a digital image exploits this very quality of photography, and insidiously creates images to suit his own motives. One very interesting point that is being brought up is the power that these artists now possess. Digital images no longer require physical objects; digital objects can interact with each other to create new digital images. Thus, a whole new digital world can be created independent of a physical reality. Therefore, artists can now create a world based solely on their intentions and influence public opinion through the introduction of these images. These images will be perceived as legitimate, and this reveals how the emergence of such technology can be detrimental to the political climate of our society. While photography is been viewed as the most objective form of evidence, techniques such as framing and exposure has already enabled photographers to add a rhetorical element to their images. Works such as that of Jacob Riis prove that photography has the power to persuade. As such, the danger of the emergence of the digital image is undeniable. Seemingly innocuous, this innovation could have had serious political consequences if not monitored closely.

The Discrete Image

As there are only 3 pages of this article in my reader, I am unable to give a good analysis of this reading. However, upon reading the first 3 pages, one statement that caught my attention was “the mental image is always the return of some image-object, its remanence”. This gives the image a ghostly quality, and brings to our attention the relationship between the metaphysical and the conceptual. What strikes me most about this is that it reveals the interdependence between the two. The existence of a reality outside our imagination has often been denied; some believe that perceptions are the only thing we can be certain of. Yet, this statement questions the birth of a mental image. Where does the mental image originate from, if not from the visual experience of a physical object. This paradox reveals that we are perhaps too concerned with the separation of the material from the immaterial. They are intertwined, and are evidently building upon each other as seen from the statement above.