network

Network, as we seek to use the term, as a set of shifting relations between cultural forms and technical systems, is complex enough, but so too is the term Image.

In the non-representational discourse of digital systems, image has acquired a number of highly specific qualifiers. Academic discussions of the post-photographic have reached for a range of adjectives to define the condition of the image more accurately in networks. The image is variously described as algorithmic (Rubinstein & Sluis 2008, 2013), computational (Beller 2017), operational (Farocki 2004), poor (Steyerl 2009), nonhuman (Zylinska 2019), transactional and even soft (Hoelzl & Marie 2015).

Such terms have led to significant insights into what the image is doing on networked screens and contribute to modelling its dimensions, as simultaneously a technological infrastructure and a dynamic of social relations. Undoubtedly images are materially incarnated as well as being present in consciousness as mental images. Images continue to represent, but now the processes of signification are reorganised under a non-representational system of computational capitalism through processes of extraction, abstraction and the financialisation of culture.

DEWDNEY, Andrew, SLUIS, Katrina and LONDON SOUTH BANK UNIVERSITY (eds.), 2023. The Networked Image in Post-digital Culture. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN 978-1-00-060394-1.