Touch and See? Regarding Images in the Era of the Interface

Fiche du document

Date

16 décembre 2020

Type de document
Périmètre
Langue
Identifiant
Source

InMedia

Organisation

OpenEdition

Licences

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess


Mots-clés

Thomas Hirschhorn swipe interface hapticity immersion


Citer ce document

Martine Beugnet, « Touch and See? Regarding Images in the Era of the Interface », InMedia, ID : 10.4000/inmedia.2102


Métriques


Partage / Export

Résumé 0

Not only are we now surrounded by a plethora of images that derive from automatic mechanical protocols, “technical images” as Wilém Flusser would call them, but vision itself is controlled by technological processes—manually activated interfaces that condition the appearance of images in terms of size, quality and resolution, as well as duration. Our experience as viewers increasingly become that of “users”: we touch the screen to activate a menu and select a resolution, to choose and enlarge an image, zoom into it or reduce its size, to start or pause a video, to scroll through or superimpose images, to slow down or speed up their course, to make them disappear. Not that the involvement of the hand turns the interface into the equivalent of a tool, which is a prolongation of the body. Unlike the tool, touch screens belong to the realm of the programmed machine. To evaluate the effect of technology over the culturality of gestures as well as vision was one of Flusser’s key projects, one whose import comes to the fore with particular force in the digital era, when visuality appears to increasingly escape the realm of purely visual phenomenon. In what follows, I refer to Flusser’s far-sighted work, as well as concepts of the fold as derived from Leibnitz and Gilles Deleuze by Laura U. Marks, in order to look at the ways in which interfaces and gestures, that are associated with tactile display devices, determine the form and effect of image reception in the context of our contemporary “economy of attention.” To this end, I rely also on the description and critical assessment of a work of art by artist Thomas Hirschhorn, Touching Reality (2012), whose combination of classical video display with an interface, showing deliberately controversial images, brings the question of reception into sharp focus.

document thumbnail

Par les mêmes auteurs

Sur les mêmes sujets

Sur les mêmes disciplines

Exporter en