Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

From the Digital to the Post-Digital

the Photographic Image

Digital technologies have transformed the photographic medium from being representational to performative. In this way, they introduced a new kind of affinity between the visual image and the world.  This paper suggests seeing two parallel models of the photographic image, derived from its new manufacturing, processing, preserving and distribution practices, characterised by the coupling of an ‘image surface’ with data structures and algorithms.

The first model is based on a networked concept of an image.  As a result of its linkage to computer metadata networks and the use of tagging procedures, images are innately embodied within political, social, economic and cultural contexts. These contexts are related to the logic of the database as a constantly changing mega-structure that, by its unique semiotic formulation, conditions the ways in which images become visible, and as a result, how they are interpreted. With this model we paradoxically witness the increasing prominence of textual mechanisms, at times when new interfaces are becoming more and more visual.

The second model is characterised by a new approach to the photographic image encapsulating essential inherent properties of the photographed subject. By this model, the image, with the use of generative algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence technologies, can be perceived as ‘the virtual’ which is conceived in Deleuzian terms as the ‘more real’. The photographic image in this respect, as a post-digital image, can be interpreted through biological concepts, returning the notion of ‘presence’ to the photographic act.