Digital Image and Reality

Description

The media technologies that surround and suffuse our everyday life profoundly affect our relation to reality. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have sought to understand the complex influence of apparently simple tools of expression on our understanding and experience of the world, time, space, materiality and energy. The Digital Image and Reality takes up this crucial philosophical task for our digital era. This rich yet accessible work argues that when new visual technologies arrive to represent and simulate reality, they give rise to nothing less than a radically different sensual image of the world. Through engaging with post-cinematic content and the new digital formats in which it appears, Strutt uncovers and explores how digital image-making is integral to emergent modes of metaphysical reflection - to speculative futurism, optimistic nihilism, and ethical plasticity. Ultimately, he prompts the reader to ask whether the impact of digital image processes might go even beyond our subjective consciousness of reality, towards the synthesis of objective actuality itself. Bron: Flaptekst, uitgeversinformatie. The philosophy of technology suggests that rather than technologies being simply useful tools, they also have an often relatively unnoticed or subconscious impact upon the way we live our lives - our interactions with the world, and the way we think. Seen in this way, all media technologies might affect our metaphysical sense of time, space and force through their relative ability to represent these concepts. In 'The Digital Image and Reality', digital visual technologies are examined through their radically different capacities for representation and simulation and the challenges that they pose to our understanding of the world. I analyse how digital images are well suited to graphical imagination and speculation about the nature of material reality. What is suggested throughout the book is that digital visual technologies offer a new sensual image of the world, subtly impacting not simply our subjective perception or consciousness of reality, but perhaps objective actuality itself.

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