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Abstract
Abstract
What kind of images are appropriate for the needs of a global informational networked society – the society which in all of its areas needs to represent more data, more layers, more connections than the preceding its industrial society?1 The complex systems which have become super-complex2; the easy availability of real-time information coming from news feeds, networks of sensors, surveillance cameras; more fragmented and limited access to the senses of any subject in a consumer economy – all this puts a new pressure on the kinds of images human culture already developed and ultimately calls for the development of new kinds. This does not necessary means inventing something completely unprecedented – instead it is apparently quite productive to simply give old images new legs, so to speak, by expanding what they can represent and how they can be used. This is, of course, exactly what computerization of visual culture has been all about since it begun in the early 1960s. While it made production and distribution of already existing kinds of images (lens-based recordings, i.e. photographs, film and video, diagrams, architectural plans, etc.) efficient, more importantly the computerization made possible for these images to function in various novel ways by “adding” interactivity, by making turning static images into navigable virtual spaces, by opening images to all kinds of mathematical manipulations which can be encoded in algorithms. This short essay of course will not be able to adequately address all these transformations. It will focus instead on a particular kind of image–software driven abstraction. Shall the global information society include abstract images in its arsenal of representational tools? In other words, if we take an abstraction and wire it to software, do we get anything new and useful beyond what already took place in the first part of the twentieth century –more than the new abstract visual language adopted by graphic design, product design, advertising and all other communication, propaganda and consumer fields?
