The Digital Index in the Simulacral World

As I was reading Braxton Soderman’s essay “The Index and the Algorithm,” I was thinking about the ramifications of the so-called loss of the connection between digital images and the objects they represent- the disintegration of the “true” index. The index creates a physical link between the image and the referent, it provides “assurance that out thoughts- and the mental images that populate them…link to an external world…[it] serve[s] to identify its object and assure us of its existence and presence” (161). But the problem with that in the modern world is that life now is not so easily conceptualized. While it is true that some digital images (or digitally altered ones) may not have a referent in “real life,” some “real” objects or concepts don’t have referents either. In the postmodern world, as Frederick Jameson has discussed, it is hard or impossible to position ourselves in the world. Everything is a representation of something else, things exist and are considered material (ie Facebook) that are clearly not, events happen digitally before happening in the world (ie hearing about an earthquake before it hits). As Jean Baudrillard says, there is no such thing as reality anymore; we live in a simulacrum, a hyperreality, and we are always perceiving simulations and models instead of real data/information.

So in this real-unreal world, it seems only appropriate that our images would be reflective of this state. Digital images may not act as indices to the objects they picture, but that relationship, or loss of relationship, is itself indicative of the relationships in today’s society. The nature of life has changed, and as such the nature of the image and the index has changed along with it. Soderman writes, “with the emergence of computerization and digital imaging, our “common environment” has mutated and thus indexicality has mutated” (161), and so I don’t know if his long attempt to establish proof of a physical index of digital photography through the algorithm is even necessary. Rather than sticking with the traditional definition of the index and trying to make digital art fit it, it may be more compelling to examine what this changing idea of the index means in the scope of digital technologies and human interactions with images and with each other. If the world has become a simulacrum, then this new simulacral index (depicting something that hasn't been experienced) can become an interesting new focal point for analysis.