The experience of visual images (looking at pictures) is not just an indulgence of the indolent and snobbish, although it can be that for the self possessed followers of fashion or the gallery squatters.
Such elitist groups of so-called connoisseurs, form an opinionated and exclusive clutch that anoints chosen creative’s that suit their agendas on the pretext that this minority has some indefinable qualification to discern quality in creative effect. However the image code cannot be so easily corralled. It is a gift of nature that is endowed on all individuals. That only a small number are motivated to express themselves in this medium is due to the ambivalence of the majority of society and the effective usurping of image spaces by the gallery squatters and commercial pressure for advertising space.
The reality is that for ‘sighted persons’ the visual experience is actually an everyday exercise, which is mostly unconscious and automatic, to the extent that most individuals are unaware of the essential processes that are being utilised. This was brought into focus when engineering academics turned from image reproduction to image analysis.
In this pragmatic world practitioners were able to capture animated images and convert these to electronic data and pass that information to another location. Also achieved is reconstituting the image data by reverse engineering the signal and displaying the initial image on a graphic device.
When engineers needed to give machines the gift of sight this image transfer model [ camera → data → monitor ], that previous was taken as a close analogy to the [ eye → optic nerve → brain ] format, immediately proved to be totally flawed.
In the course of investigating the problems of finding a ‘machine → image’ interface, what it means ‘to see’, became a complex rethink of what constitutes the image.
The resulting methods and the resolution of systematic problems have a fascinating and instructive set of lessons for the creative that cares to consider the implications and try to understand what it means for the image code.
These ‘learnings’, to use a clumsy and ugly, contemporary colloquialism, not only opens new avenues to creative images they indicate why images have been and will continue to be the most influential of all human experiences.
The academic based inquiry is curious to find the mechanism whereby things are perceived. Therefore the method as well as the assumptions about the nature of experience are those of logical positivism, which hold that the only kind of empirical knowledge is scientific; a dominant influence in philosophy since the last half of the 20th century. The creative armed with the image code has an alternative rational definition of the empirical evidence which describes the event of seeing from an internal reality. The difference is to distinguish between what can be said about an work and what the work really represents. For the positivist this is a nonsense, they are content with an ‘outer meaning’, which can be measured.
The image code supports another kind of meaning, purely sensory and non rational, undefinable in commutable terms but more real than the abstraction of the scientific method. The source of this sensory reality is the biological process of the [ eye → optic nerve → brain ] connection and the learned process of ‘seeing’, which is innately learned from first light for the individual.