Description
Since the Industrial Revolution, daily life has become increasingly dominated by technical images, a term coined by Czech theorist Vilém Flusser referring to images made with mechanical devices. At the current moment, not only are the lion’s share of images produced this way (especially those that enter public sphere), but our means for experiencing, manipulating, and transmitting them has become highly automated, relegated to a sequence of nested, corporate-controlled platforms, even in the creative fields. That is, we not only live our lives among technical images, but also amidst the proprietary interfaces for their dissemination, which mediate our relations to humans and non-humans alike. The chief question is how do we as citizens and practitioners navigate this new terrain, while acknowledging the real-world effects on our environment, on our socio-political system, and on each other: in short, what are the ethics and possibilities of this oligopolistic world of automated abstrac