Thoughts on K. Neilson's "Image"

Any image is a documentation. It is somehow an attempt to encode, represent, symbolize, or explain a desired concept. Much like as in a picture, an image uses composition and content to reveal a percieved (whether "accurate" or not) event that is grounded in real world cues. Neilsen talks of these lankmarks of understanding, saying "The icon is seemingly linked to the world by way of an inextricable and inexplicable recognition between visuality, experience and image, a recognition that we may perhaps never fully apprehend." That is to say we can subconsciously processes the provided information in images and though we may come only to a tentative or understood conclusion about their meaning, we have evolved to automatically sift through and put the pieces together automatically.

I do agree with Neilsen and her classification of various types of informational communication, however, concerning sight-based images it is simple to break down the meta-states she lists into "present" and "non-present." Again using photographs or digital based work, we know that the two-dimentional configurations infront of us are simply chemical compounds or a series of code to create a composition, but we are able understand what is being depicted as visual material apart from it's source being that of a computer screen or a photo or a canvas (Ittleson, Perception of Nonmaterial Objects).

The quote Neilsen uses from Régis Debray that "there is 'no degeneration of the natural into the artificial, of the true into the false'; 'it is a question of man's relation to artifacts from the very beginning' (Debray 1996, 166)" can be seen as equivalent to the human construct of beauty. It is not the object itself that holds the character of beauty, but rather the placement of the perception of beauty unto the object, as Ittleson explains, "beauty is a nonmaterial aspect of a material object, but is typically experienced as being a material property of the object. One does not cherish the internal sense of beauty, but rather the beautiful object. The object may be a painting, a play, a novel, a dance; it may also be a scientific theory or a mathematical proof. It is the beautiful object that seduces us, possesses us, and ultimately controls us." This is very similar to the idea of semiotics and language that "car" means what it does only because we ascribe the lingual term to the physical and perceptual object. So though much of the information we understand exists and is rooted in material archive, our ability to percieve the metaphysical concepts (i.e. emotions, social behaviors, idea) is what truly defines an image.

Daniel Bennett

Ittleson, William H. "The Perception of Nonmaterial Objects and Events" LEONARDO, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 279–283, 2007.