Soderman's reformulation of indexicality

Not being a particularly computer/digital media-savvy person, I was initially worried that Soderman's article would be beyond me. As it turned out, his essay was well-organized and well-argued, with references to Krauss, Doane, and others that allowed me to get my footing in somewhat unfamiliar territory.

However, I was a little frustrated by the conclusion of his article. Soderman had used Campbell's work throughout to illustrate his ideas on digital art, and certainly the example "Frames of Reference" in his postscript was very interesting and pertinent. However, before discussing it, he issued a teaser that distracted me from the ending altogether:

"Thus, on the one hand, an index of an algorithm gives us an assurance that digital images are not free-floating entities, but retain links to specific modes of computational production; the algorithm leaves its trace on the digital image. On the other hand, this "assurance" must be interrogated: what does the algorithm manifest and what does it suppress?" (176)

This question, to me, lay at the heart of his entire argument, and yet he seemed to avoid it altogether, including it only at the end. In all his discussion of Campbell's works, he interprets them only as they serve to illustrate his arguments. The article is spent reformulating our conception of the term "indexicality" in order to include the digital, but he rarely comes out and says why this reformulation is necessary. Why do Peirce's terms maintain such relevance for him in the face of digital? Does he see modern theory as divided between universally panning the digital as the death of indexicality, and universally celebrating it as a way of escaping the limits of "real"-based representation? Is he somewhere in between the two, or does he want to use the desire for indexicality, making it apply to digital in service of a celebration of its possibilities? I am not sure, but one quotation, earlier on the same page as the above, was instrumental for me in thinking about his motivation:

"... a shift away from a perceptual indexicality as associated with “a section of captured rays on film” to that of the conceptual indexicality of a computer program and its algorithms also marks a movement from grounded, natural assurance in the "real" to a questioning of representation." (176)

These two quotations beg larger questions of the nature of digital, in areas that he alludes to but never fully addresses: namely, the functioning of ideology and human desire for "assurance" of "the real" that are both explicit and implicit in so much digital art (and its criticism). So, while I was interested in what he had to say, I felt I understood his point fairly early on and wished to explore more fully the implications it holds for theorists and spectators alike, in both artistic images and popular uses of digital media.