Abstract
In the age of digital media how might we speak about images of torture, and how might we regard the pain of others? Using the examples of a short film by Alejandra Canales which recounts the experience of torture, and the Abu Ghraib photographs, this article seeks to repose the question of the function of the image and its relationship to epistemology. How do we know what we see? And how might we rethink the orthodox function of the image in the age of digital technology? In attempting to answer these questions, I argue that the production of virtual experience is a capacity of the human body, and that image making, like all genres of communication, is a practice in virtual community.
Highlights
‘[S]eeing things’—a phrase that hovers disturbingly between two senses
In the age of digital media how might we speak about images of torture, and how might we might think about regarding the pain of others, to cite the title of Susan Sontag’s book?3 Through reference to a short six-minute film on torture, A Silence Full of Things[4] by Chilean film-maker Alejandra Canales, and the Abu Ghraib photographs, this essay addresses the coextensive function of imaging and viewing, and the need to rethink the relationship between media and the human body especially in relation to the concept of virtuality
It works with the thesis that we don’t see the world in the image, but that the image sees the world in us—in other words, images are not solely the visible features of objects that fall before our eyes, but are inflections of the outside world incorporated and transformed by the body of the viewing subject
Summary
‘[S]eeing things’—a phrase that hovers disturbingly between two senses. It indicates on the one hand that the reality of things is comprehended above all by the eye, by an act of visual perception.
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