The Digital Networked Image and its Modes of Existence as a Technical and Political object.

Imaginary Property incites to reconsider the condition of the digital networked image within the current aesthetic culture. What kind of digital images are being produced today? What are their production mechanisms? What do current images represent, not just in the sense of their meaning, but in the sense of the politics of its design?

I will be researching Imaginary Property as the condition of the production and circulation of the digital networked image. Digital images are made of code and represent information, they are data objects. Photographs that are shared through web platforms become repositories of metadata such as date, time and keywords. At the same time they function as identifiers of (property) relations within networks, both between people and files. Do these transformations imply that the representation of the image is of minor importance compared to its program, its function as a node in the network, aggregating various network relations?
Thousands of images are created everyday to capture different accounts of reality. The image is constantly being copied and manipulated. As a designer I’m interested in the repetition, circulation and accumulation of the image as mechanisms for design. Can patterns or rhythms be recognized within the ‘lives’ of images in networks? Is there a structural overlap between for example, surveillance data and google street map imagery? Do these images share certain characteristics?
Have mechanisms of image production taken over the visual in the sense that they represent reality instead of images? And what would that imply?

For Imaginary Property I will collect digital images, analyze their modes of existence and design with their potentials. The Video Image for its potential of recreating reality through time and movement. The Mirroring Image as a conceptual and visual series on non-representational images. Google maps as the Indexing image.
The analysis and deconstruction of existing image production mechanisms will allow for the design of an alternative model of production that would interrupt existing mechanisms. This alternative model could range from the creation of certain images that instigate alternative modes of circulation as a kind of network event to the repurposing of existing image collections.