Image Emergency: A Psychogeography of Miami

Abstract

The project and proposed book entitled Miami Miautre: Psychogeography of the Virtual City present a theory of a logic of images, intended to be applied to Internet practice. The project is a collaboration among four colleagues participating in a group called the Florida Research Ensemble (FRE): Gregory Ulmer (media theorist), BarbaraJo Revelle (creative photographer), William Tilson (architect) and John Craig Freeman (digital artist). Working with the premise that the Internet makes possible a new relationship among the institutions of society, the FRE established the EmerAgencyan on-line, distributed, conceptual consulting agency whose purpose is to introduce a new voice into the collective pedagogy of consulting. A practice called testimonial is proposed as the basis for a virtual civic sphere (a fifth estate), in response to Paul Virilio's warning that the Internet and digital technologies in are destroying the civic sphere and thus threaten to bring about a general accident [1]. The invention of a practice for the Internet involves features generalizable to electracy (literacy in digital imaging) as such. An analogy to the history of writing shows that the Greek inventors of the practices of alphabetic technology invented a new kind of categorythe concept-resulting in a different way of classifying reality-metaphysics. The FRE experiment proposes to do for the photographic image what the Greeks did for the written word-