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From Softimage to Postimage
- Leonardo
- The MIT Press
- Volume 50, Number 1, 2017
- pp. 72-73
- Article
- Additional Information
With the digital revolution, the photographic paradigm of the image has become supplemented with an algorithmic paradigm. The result is a new kind of image capable to gather, compute, merge and display heterogeneous data in real time; no longer a solid representation of a solid world but a softimage—a program-mable database view. In today’s neurosciences and machine vision, the very concept of “image” as a stable visual entity becomes questionable. As a result, the authors propose that the need exists to radically expand the definition of image and abandon its humanist and subjective frame: The posthuman image—which the authors propose to call the postimage—is a collaborative image created through the process of distributed vision involving humans, animals and machines.