Abstract: Our everyday environment demands to be seen. Moreover, we are born into a world of visual images, representations, signs and symbols that jostle for our attention. As such, the visual has come to play an increasingly central role in western contemporary society. This role has been underpinned by the omnipresence of visual technologies that offer us differing views of the world. From photography and film, video, digital graphics, television and even acrylics,1 the images these mediums present to us come in a variety of forms, including Television programmes, advertisements, family photos and Facebook pages, surveillance camera and military drones, in sculpture and paintings. Even the Photographers Gallery, London has responded to the broadening consideration of the digital image, within screen-based and networked cultures, by hosting an exhibition dedicated to the animated GIF.2 As such, the economy and availability of the image is central to its role as an object of desire, curiosity or knowledge. From the rarest painting, where the allure is to bear witness to the original in a gallery, to the use of gallery spaces, as a place to consider something so pervasive as the GIF signals, the depth of interest in the image related to medium specificity and specifically the emergence of ‘post-photographic’ research.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-10-10
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
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