"image" in critical terms for media studies W.J.T. Mitchell

p45   The numerical or "digital infrastructure" beneath the "eyewash" of analog experience remain the province of technicians, not ordinary users, who treat digital images in much the same way as analog images....... If the ones and zeros did not add up to an image that massages the familiar and traditional habits of the human sensorium, it is unlikely that the digital revolution would have gained any traction at all.


P45  quoting Mark Hansen
"It is not simply that the image provides a tool for the user to control the "infoscape" of contemporary material culture.. but rather that the "image" has itself become a process and, as such, has become irreducibly bound up with the activity of the body. Specifically, we must accept that the image, rather than finding instantiation in a privileged technical form (including the computer interface), now demarcates the very process through which the body, in conjunction with the various apparatuses for rendering information perceptible, gives form to or in-form information. In sum, the image can no loner be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience. This is what I propose to call the digital image."

I would agreee with everything in this passage except for the tense of the predicates; the image, I would suggest, has always been bound up with the body, but the interconnection is now made evident by the onset of digital imaging, in the sense of binary computation. Just as photography reveal unseen and overlooked visual realities, an "optical unconscious" in Walter Benjamin's phrase,.... digital imaging may be uncovering yet another layer of the perceptible cognitive world that we will recognize as having always been there.