'How Do Images Think?' by Ron Burnett. 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Notes from Introduction

In a literal sense, images do not think. However, a great deal of intelligence is being programmed into technologies and devices that use images as their main form of interaction and communications.

I use the term image to refer to the complex set of interactions that constitute everyday life within image-worlds. The ubiquitous presence of images far exceeds the conventional notions that images are just objects for consumption, play, or information. Images are points of mediation that allow access to a variety of different experiences (Latour 2002). Images are the interfaces that structure interaction, people, and the environments they share.

Hywel Bryants Phone

The increased independence shared by humans and their machines has led to more and more intelligence being programmed into a variety of technologies. The boundaries separating humans from their technological creations have become thinner and thinner. There is no better example of this change than cell phones. The earliest versions of these phones now look as if they come from a distant past, rather than ten of fifteen years ago. As cell phones mutate into Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), video cameras, and game consoles, their use shifts the expectations that consumers have about human interaction and the communications process. Machines become the focus of a series of shared relationships that link technology to human need and vice versa.

HYWEL – GAZ

This means that the newer technologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are no longer just extensions of human abilities and needs; they are enlarging cultural and social preconceptions of the relationships between body and mind.

To the extent that a device can talk back to a human and images can mediate the conversation, some fragment of the thinking process is being moved from humans to their machines.

Pages xviii – xix

Chapter One (has some quotes that may be useful in considering ‘A Day in the Life of….’)

….images are both the outcome and the progenitors of vast and interconnected image-worlds. All of these elements may have been discreet at one time or another but not anymore. Pictures of a series of crises, for example, come from so many sources, that the parts become the whole and the whole seems to have no end or even any parts.

Page 3

Part of 'A Day in the Life of....'

Text, images, stories, news, and the organization of information combine into an image that no sooner appears on the computer screen than it becomes part of another page and another set of images. The parts fold together as if there were no end in sight – a continuum. The television version of this has converted the TV screen into a multidimensional map with any number of different elements trying to burst out of the boundaries of the screen.

Page 4

The pervasive presence of narratives of every sort told through the multiplicity of shapes and forms of modern media far exceeds the conventional boundaries of human conversation and interaction.

Page 4

Over the last two centuries, Western societies have built physical and psychological infrastructures that are dependant upon images or what I call image-worlds.

The images viewers watch are no longer just images; rather, as the great photographer Jeff Wall ([1998] 2002) has suggested, images represent a technological intelligence that shifts the way humans see themselves, from individuals to hybrid personae, where identity no longer resides in one particular place, object, or person (90-92).

….there is no such “thing” as an image divorced from a variety of media or social contexts of use and application.

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….events on the television are discussed as if the event and its depiction were one and the same or as if the screen that separates the viewers from the event were unimportant. “An airplane has been hijacked”, not “Those are images of an airplane hijacking”, or even “Those images are smaller than the event itself”. The viewers challenge is to describe events as if the visual field, artifice, and form actually move language from representation to visualisation. The event is internalised, personalized, and then discussed as if the images approximate “being there”.

Page 6

The challenge is also to map the connections and to make the experiences personal. The challenge is also to map the experiences of interacting with images into a process that is discursive, intellectual, and emotional so that it can be understood and applied to the viewing process.

The experience of viewing is, for the most part, about a struggle between proximity and distance.

Page 7

As I have mentioned, images are increasingly intelligent instruments that can be used for so many different purposes that a titanic shift may be needed in the discourses that are used to examine them.

….it is not possible or even desirable to talk about the social construction of meaning and messages without reference to images as sites of communication, miscommunication, mediation, and intelligence.

Page 8