The nineteenth century was famously described by historian Jean-Louis Comolli as the "frenzy of the visible” due to the invention of photography, digital film, X-rays and many other now-forgotten visual technologies during this period (1980). But the transformation of the visual image with the advent of personal computing and the Internet differs in terms of its quantity, geographical extent and similarity to digital. By the end of the decade, the Internet will change the way we look at everything, including how we see the world.
In 2011, according to UNESCO, more than 2.2 million books were published, taking into account the fact that the last European who was believed to have read all available printed books was the sixteenth-century reformer Erasmus (1466-1536). Now the Internet allows anyone with a connection to distribute their work in ways that are not much different from those used by official book publishers.
As digital technology specialist Wendy Hui Ken Chun says: “when the computer does let us ‘see’ what we cannot normally see, or even when it acts like a transparent medium through video chat, it does not simply relay what is on the other side: it computes'' (2011). What we see in the photo is a calculation itself created by "stacking" various images that have been further processed to create color and contrast.
A digital image is a calculated representation of the digital input signal received from the camera sensor, so changing the result of the image is much easier and faster nowadays, especially when in applications such as instagram we can completely change the color correction of a picture with just one mouse click.
Due to the fact that photos are often amenable to processing, most magazine readers now assume that all photos of models and celebrities have been corrected in photoshop. Some advertising campaigns now even celebrate the use of "real" models, knowing that we understand that ordinary advertising photos are being manipulated.
During the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, British art historian John Berger created a brilliant television series and accompanying book for the BBC called "Ways of Seeing", which immediately received great attention and success.
Now the "image” is created or, more precisely, calculated independently of any kind that may precede it. We continue to call what we see pictures or images, but they are qualitatively different from their predecessors.
If you post something on the Internet, you want people to interact with it. It's not just about the scale of the digital commons, no matter how impressive they may be. Of course, it's not always a matter of the quality of the results, which vary greatly. This is the open nature of the experiment.
