engleski

Post-Pictorial Condition. Ontology of Image in the Digital Age

According to Bolter and Grusin, the ultimate goal of virtual reality is unmediated visual experience. If pictures are epitome of people's visual experience throughout the whole history of human kind, the ensuing question is: what happens with the notion of image once the total immediacy of virtual reality has been achieved? While the fate of the concept of mimesis over centuries has been followed by the fate of mimetic sculpture and painting, the fate of the concept of image has taken completely different path. In order to understand the status of the notion of image in our digital age it is necessary to come to terms with the disconnected ontologies of mimesis and artistic practice. I will argue that high modernist non-mimetic, abstract and conceptual, art requires ontological reconsideration in relation to its “non- representational” pictorial status. This reconsideration is due to the on-going revolution in digital image production in which mimetic representation and utter truthfulness make of images transparent, immersive and potentially invisible entities whose representational character is now regarded to be lost. My thesis will be that the radical distinction between remediated images – paintings, photographies and movies – on the one hand and digital immediacy on the other, can only be maintained if we keep discernible the distinction between pictorial visuality and virtual visuality, which will eventually face us with the new situation I would like to call the post- pictorial condition.

post-pictorial condition ; pictorial visuality ; virtual visuality ; reality ; truthfulness

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