A Therapeutics of the Image

Among one of the inherited understandings of the photographic image is its relationship to time, which opened a new form of visual grammar that could intimately link the past to the present. The circulation and transmission of photographic images through different media marks what Bernard Stiegler terms the industrial time of cinema or new forms of tertiary retentions that are both informative and transformative of our way of being (see Introduction to Part 1). The digitization of the image marks a further shift in the flow of temporal experience, where images are produced, reproduced and circulated freely through a variety of digital devices. Through ubiquitous computing and development of digital cameras and phones, users become the labour and the resource of a form of digital visuality – its makers, its disseminators and its medium. This algorithmic regime, as defined by Berns and Rouvroy (2013), codifies and harvests a deluge of everyday experiences producing a new aesthetic sensorium. In Stiegler’s terms, such sensorial entanglement in such a regime cultivates forms of misery that are not merely economic but noetic, in that they choke off invention and new ways of questioning and understanding. For Stiegler, this is symptomatic of the neoliberal data economy that leads to ‘symbolic misery’, or a mode of aesthetic conditioning that impoverishes the senses restricting the adoption of new creative paradigms. However, this is but one side of the Stieglerean diagnosis and this chapter proposes that we, as image makers, recode visual perceptions, constituting new forms of distributed images that, although predicated on the interaction between different nodes of user profiles, personal data and algorithms, remain retractable and repurposable to intervention. In this sense, this chapter argues that digital images remain anchored to their analogue forbearers, indicating and transmitting through a multitude of indexical registers. By analysing the work of artist Ronan McCrea, I underscore the affective nature of the analogue image and the productive capacity of its materiality – a critical feature of the image genus. In concurrence with its digital offspring, the analogue image represents what Stiegler terms a new form of visuality. Additionally, the chapter turns to the writings and artwork of Hito Steyerl, arguing that through the digital image we become, in a sense, world-makers by the production and transmission of such digital images. I explore Steyerl’s claim that we should reject the idea of the digital image as mere visual information. Instead, we should invoke our roles as makers and interpreters of images and by doing so contest the politics of representation inherent within the digital base itself....