Review article
https://doi.org/10.59014/CRYQ6857
Algorithms and Imagination
Nadja Gnamuš
orcid.org/0000-0002-8051-0638
Abstract
In the territory of post-isms also visuality has been debated in terms of its postcondition, where it was essentially associated with the digital era in whichimages have proliferated to the stage at which everything must be made intoan image and is consumed as an image. Such image and information overloadand constant alertness have produced a certain “visual extinction” andinvisibility, not only as a form of resistance to prevailing visual politics butalso as a perceptual and cognitive response to excessive exploitation of (mediated)visuality. In contemporary visual culture the superficiality of the visiblesuperseds the concerns of pictorial and reduces imaginary and metaphoricpower underlying visual form.Digital media culture has made a fundamental shift in our relation to the externalworld, sensory perception and, most importantly, in our visual awarenessand understanding of images. The new phenomenology of the imagedecisively altered looking practices, the relationship between the observerand the observed and also cognitive and affective dimensions of images. Theimage has transformed from representation into a fleeting and instant visualevent which is in the ongoing convergence of media no longer ocular-centric.Automated processes of production marked by various image customizationtools, accelerated speed and immediacy by which images are produced anddistributed changed the concept of creativity and introduced »cut and paste«as a paramount model of image-making.Tech-aesthetics and cyber visuality not only change cultural and anthropologicalrole of images but also rearticulate the ontology of the image itself, its materiality and the way we experience images. Flusser claimed that whoeveris programmed by technical images lives and knows reality as a programmedcontext. I examine how the algorithmic logic of the programmable (screen)image affects other types of images, particularly focusing on aesthetic, phenomenaland representational properties and distinctions between contingentscreen images and other, mainly art image-objects. I argue that egalitarianapproach towards images and accessible image-making technologiesimpede our cognitive abilities to control and process images. This raisesfurther question of our capacity for critical reflection on visual systems andimage agency, specifically regarding complex connections between formal,material and technical components and the construction of meaning. Arange of issues arising in this framework are to be tackled. Do rapid changesin image technologies (assembling human and nonhuman elements) alongwith AI make images self-contained and human intervention eventually dispensable?What methods should we use in deciding which images should bearchived, interpreted and historicized? And last but not the least, how and ifdo images in the era of visual commodification relate to imaginary and makepossible, as Deleuze woud say, “thinking in images” beyond the legible signsand normative technologies?
Keywords
alghorithms, imagination, media, remediation, allegory, AI ima - ge generators, code, data
Hrčak ID:
326992
URI
Publication date:
17.1.2025.
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