Digital Media

When examining Jim Campbell’s illuminated averages the apparent lack of connection to physical referent becomes painfully obvious in the work’s status as the result of a process. The condensation of filmic imagery into a static moment is a degredation of the initial filmic process associated with the work he condenses. To me, the frozen illusion of suppressed filmic space becomes a separate entity bound only to itself. Without the accompaniment of the film showing the process of condensing, the picture becomes a mere shadow of the caption of the algorithmic process that Campbell intends to highlight. The empty white space within the center of the frame of ‘Hitchcocks Psycho 2000’ is the epitaph for the index within the evolving photographic medium. Speaking of the destruction of the mark of labor within the modes of production, the digital conceptual index is a vast expanse that proposes the inescapability of objectification.

The physical space that Soderman proposes is created by the algorithm’s production of alteration of image within the data chip seems a gratuitous glorification of the power of digital media. While the concept of the medium is something that artist’s continually look to escape and break from the restraints of materiality, the proposal that the work of digital art’s material nature is creating an index in and of itself seems nihilistic. However, in looking at the static image by itself it is impossible to see the transformation of memory space referred to by Soderman as housing the temporality essential the conception of digital index.

The argument I found to be the most interesting regarding the conceptualization of digital media was that of Lev Manovich who claims “that cinema is no longer an art of recording, but a particular mode of animation that uses ‘live action footage’ as one resource for digital manipulation.” But this foreshadowed my disagreement with the text’s argument for a reconceptualization of the index to fit the use of digital media. The idea that digital media is the creation of an indexical tie to the present is interesting in its contrast to the past-present dialetic of the traditional use of the term. Frames of Reference seems to be the most successful use of the concept in its many contrasting forms of index and the comparisons that can easily be drawn between the nail and the moving imagery of the reflection of motion in the present. However, without tying in the contrast between the photographic image’s use of indexiaclity I believe the work to be much less interesting conceptually.