Week Five

I finally finished the book. It took a turn for the strange on chapter seven... Instead of talking about imagescapes, Burnett went off on a tangent and did several chapters on humans and technology and where it will all potentially go in the future. There wasn't anything particularly insightful in those chapters, nothing that I hadn't been exposed to in my own study of human/machine interaction (and a fair bit of science fiction), and plenty that I very much disagreed with. But more on that later.

So how do images think? Well it seems to be a matter of perspective according to Burnett. Not just the artist's perspective, but your own. What makes the image able to think (if such a statement can be made) is the internal process of what Burnett calls "visualization." Basically, seeing an image starts up this whole process in one's brain of taking the image and applying personal experience, knowledge, and expertise to it to create a whole new environ for the image to live. It's a process that is instant, yet languorous, contained, yet limitless, and is constantly being broken down and reassembled in the mind. In this way, meaning is created and interpreted differently by everyone. Especially now, when we are just saturated with images, we've become exceptionally adept at building and maintaining these visualizations in the media landscape. They meld into the bigger, global (meaning mind-wide, not the actual world) visualization that makes up in essence how we see the world.

So I guess, it's not so much how the images themselves think, it's really how we think the image thinks (whoa).

To put it more succinctly, and in a really really nerdy way, here is the cute bald kid from The Matrix:

Consider the spoon to be an image (of a spoon?). Really, there is no spoon, just your perception of a spoon. To make an image more or less significant, one must change their perception of it, to visualize it in Burnett's sense of the word. This is how images think.

Burnett had some interesting things to say about image cognition and interpretation, but he lost me when he began saying we can only consider "cyberspace" as it relates to pop culture and video games. I have to give him some leeway however, the book was published in 2005, we've come a long way since then, especially with peer networks and open source technology.

Now begins phase two, the preparatory stage! I'll be researching and building infrastructure to the future web goodness in this phase (to be completed in three weeks). There will probably be more blog posts so I can think out loud and experiment a bit. Stay tuned!

Speaking of images, here is a cute puppy! Visualize that!