Algorithms and Imagination

Thinking in Images in an Era of Visual Excess

Sažetak

In the territory of post-isms also visuality has been debated in terms of its post
condition, where it was essentially associated with the digital era in which
images have proliferated to the stage at which everything must be made into
an image and is consumed as an image. Such image and information overload
and constant alertness have produced a certain “visual extinction” and
invisibility, not only as a form of resistance to prevailing visual politics but
also as a perceptual and cognitive response to excessive exploitation of (mediated)
visuality. In contemporary visual culture the superficiality of the visible
superseds the concerns of pictorial and reduces imaginary and metaphoric
power underlying visual form.
Digital media culture has made a fundamental shift in our relation to the external
world, sensory perception and, most importantly, in our visual awareness
and understanding of images. The new phenomenology of the image
decisively altered looking practices, the relationship between the observer
and the observed and also cognitive and affective dimensions of images. The
image has transformed from representation into a fleeting and instant visual
event which is in the ongoing convergence of media no longer ocular-centric.
Automated processes of production marked by various image customization
tools, accelerated speed and immediacy by which images are produced and
distributed 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 anthropological
role of images but also rearticulate the ontology of the image itself, its materiality and the way we experience images. Flusser claimed that whoever
is programmed by technical images lives and knows reality as a programmed
context. I examine how the algorithmic logic of the programmable (screen)
image affects other types of images, particularly focusing on aesthetic, phenomenal
and representational properties and distinctions between contingent
screen images and other, mainly art image-objects. I argue that egalitarian
approach towards images and accessible image-making technologies
impede our cognitive abilities to control and process images. This raises
further question of our capacity for critical reflection on visual systems and
image agency, specifically regarding complex connections between formal,
material and technical components and the construction of meaning. A
range of issues arising in this framework are to be tackled. Do rapid changes
in image technologies (assembling human and nonhuman elements) along
with AI make images self-contained and human intervention eventually dispensable?
What methods should we use in deciding which images should be
archived, interpreted and historicized? And last but not the least, how and if
do images in the era of visual commodification relate to imaginary and make
possible, as Deleuze woud say, “thinking in images” beyond the legible signs
and normative technologies?