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Cubitt, Sean, Lury, Celia, McQuire, Scott, Papastergiadis, Nikos, Palmer, Daniel, Pfefferkorn, Jasmin and Sunde, Emilie K. (2021) Ambient images. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 30 (61-62). pp. 68-77. doi:10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127861 ISSN 2000-1452.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127861
Abstract
The digitization of the image has intensified the transformation of the relationship between humans and images. The proliferation of tools for the production of images and acceleration in their distribution has meant that a blasé attitude toward visual saturation, already prominent in the 20th century, has become more widespread. Writing in 1927, Siegfried Kracauer presciently spoke of a “blizzard of photographs.” In the first decades of the 21st century this grew into an environmental flood and the multiple streams along which people circulated images, challenged many of the traditional assumptions about the status and function of the image. Then came the pandemic.
Suddenly, the relationship between the personal image and the public image was reconfigured. People hung out on platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok with increased intensity and hunger. The platforms for virtual communication absorbed and at times aimed to compensate for the loss of events, meetings, face-to-face encounters and relationships. Confinement to the domestic sphere produced ever more mundane practices of co-present intimacy across platforms. For instance, while cross-generational practices of food photo sharing have long been a significant genre, photographs of home baking became an Instagram cliché, with “sourdough” becoming Google’s top food-related search phrase in 2020. The zoom boom soon became a new malaise—zoom fatigue. This adoption of virtual platforms was a profound incursion. It altered our sense of time and space as sense-making and social performance were increasingly aimed at and organised via camera and screen. Linear biographical narratives were cross-cut and spliced in novel ways. The image was less and less a document of an external reality, but more and more part of the new forms of mediated sociality. The diminution of physical engagements had an impact on how impressions were formed, what constituted the sensory triggers for memory, as well as shifting the markers for processes of understanding and decision-making. In this environment, images do not just multiply. Their increasing number also accentuates how they are stitched together to form new atmospheres, assemblages, iterations—or what we call the production of ambient images.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
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Subjects: | T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General) | ||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Image processing -- Digital techniques, Digital preservation | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics | ||||
Publisher: | The Nordic Society of Aesthetics | ||||
ISSN: | 2000-1452 | ||||
Official Date: | 2 July 2021 | ||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 30 | ||||
Number: | 61-62 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 68-77 | ||||
DOI: | 10.7146/nja.v30i61-62.127861 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 23 August 2022 | ||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 23 August 2022 |
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