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1 - Media Temporalities and the Technical Image

from Part I - The Politics of Time: Ontologies and Metaphysics of Organization as Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2023

By
Timothy Barker
Edited by
François-Xavier de Vaujany ,
Robin Holt  and
Albane Grandazzi
François-Xavier de Vaujany
Affiliation:
Universite Paris Dauphine-PSL
Robin Holt
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Albane Grandazzi
Affiliation:
Grenoble Ecole de Management
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Summary

This chapter begins by unpacking the concept ‘technical image’, as explained by Vilém Flusser. The technical image is used by Flusser to describe the camera as the machine at the start of a new imagining regime, culminating in video and computer-generated images. My use of Flusser’s term is slightly different. I would like to use the method for analysing images given to us by Flusser, but use the term ‘technical image’ to unpack and explore the differences between synthetic images – images that present viewers with a unified whole – and images that break a pre-given unity into discrete pixelated elements. I try and go further than Flusser’s original formulation of the technical image by tracing its genealogy in much older media used for measurement and the particalisation of events: these are what I refer to in this essay as analytical media. I argue that analytical media, which pre-date the synthesis of the cinema, are now returning in the world produced by technical images. From here, I look at some contemporary artworks that further explore what it is to live in the conditions produced by these machines and how this produces a different temporality.

Keywords

Media temporalitymedia philosophymedia archaeologytime and technologytime and aesthetics
Type
Chapter
Information
Organization as Time
Technology, Power and Politics
 , pp. 13 - 35
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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