The Digital Image and Reality
Affect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema
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Book Presentation:
The media technologies that surround and suffuse our everyday life profoundly affect our relation to reality. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have sought to understand the complex influence of apparently simple tools of expression on our understanding and experience of the world, time, space, materiality and energy. The Digital Image and Reality takes up this crucial philosophical task for our digital era. This rich yet accessible work argues that when new visual technologies arrive to represent and simulate reality, they give rise to nothing less than a radically different sensual image of the world. Through engaging with post-cinematic content and the new digital formats in which it appears, Strutt uncovers and explores how digital image-making is integral to emergent modes of metaphysical reflection - to speculative futurism, optimistic nihilism, and ethical plasticity. Ultimately, he prompts the reader to ask whether the impact of digital image processes might go even beyond our subjective consciousness of reality, towards the synthesis of objective actuality itself.
About the Author:
Daniel Strutt is a lecturer in the department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches film theory and analysis alongside social, cultural and economic theory. Having worked on research projects with Creativeworks London, CREATe and the AHRC Creative Economy Programme, he also engages in innovative performance production work with contemporary digital audio-visual artists.
Press Reviews:
Digital technology in the hands of artists can engender new strategies of resistance to the systematizing effects of all technology by revealing the inherent plasticity of any worldview. [...] These same techniques will likely be available to any creator in the near future, and it is Stutt’s convincing optimism that sees in this powerful world-shaping tool an empowerment and a potential 'ethic of exploration in an unstable, virtual, and sublime world.'"
- Will Luers, Leonardo, Vol. 55, No. 5
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