the number-image

Gabriele Buzzi

In this work we want to propose some suggestions about the changes occurred in the relationship between image and reality with the advent and the spreading of digital technologies. So we shall sketch two different schemes: one for analogical image and one for digital image. Then we shall be able to understand some important differences between them. Finally we will observe that the ontological statute of analogical and digital image is also reflected on our modality of interaction with them.     

Firstly, analyzing Deleuze and his work about cinematographic image, we can try to define a first theoretical model of the relationship between analogical image and reality. Our proposal reminds the Deleuze’s one, despite some differences: it’s peculiarity is to be found in the separation of the ratio between image and reality in two distinct logical moments (even though in ordinary life they are always coexistent).
In the first one, analogical image splits, reproduces and modulates reality. In the second one , analogical image subsumes reality in a semiotic system: it reorganizes the material produced in the first moment through the enunciative strategies of the different languages that use image like signification system (ie.: photography, television, cinema).
This “double articulation” functions like a (Derrida’s) difference, even, in the mechanical sense of the term, like a differential: we are able to think for every kind of image (from documentary to video clip) different dosages of this two image’s components: from a maximum of indexical integrity associated with a minimum of rhetoric, to a mirror situation, through a large number of different shades.
Such double-level model allows to look at an old problem in a new way: why images can, at the same time, lie and tell the truth, inform and deceive us.

The concept of modulation reminds directly of Deleuze (the cinema books, but also the book about the great English painter Francis Bacon) and of musical theory, also. Through a synthesizer we can modulate a sound, vary its wavelength, its frequency, and its intensity. In our text, the term is used in a (nearly)metaphorical way: analogical image modulates reality, reproduces it in a strictly analogical mode, following every  little or insignificant variation. According to Deleuze, in that context of study, image is precisely the variation of the mould, the non-stop reproduction of the object and the object’s movement’s.

Car la modulation est l’opération du Réel, en tant qu’elle constitue et ne cesse de reconstituer l’identité de l’image e de l’objet.
(Deleuze, 1985 : 42)

We should add to this first sketch some important notes. Even following Deleuze and underling the ontological continuity of image and reality (level of modulation), we must consider the “natural” phenomenology of image that always appears framed into a screen, showing perceptual characteristics strongly different from reality.
We must also specify the importance, in fictional contexts, of the moment known in film studies as profilmic. Profilmic simply represents the fact that realty has been staged ad hoc in front of the camera objective. This is a further complication for the science of image: the truth of what is seen on a screen is shifted from the domain of the image to the domain of reality: reality is indeed artificially reconstructed just to be shot.
We are more doubtful than Deleuze even in regard to the possibility of extending modulation to subject inner world and to subject memory. Especially after second world war, cinema knew a great introspective season where cinematographic narration became deeply subjective, but, notably in that kind of cinema, the “profilmic issue” become bigger and modulation intensity grew thinner.

Concluding, we propose the following scheme of the relationship between image and reality for a basic level of analogical image: 

	Reality (Deleuze’s plane of immanence)
	Image (screen)
	Image as language domain (for example, Metz’s cinematographic syntagm)

If we want to adapt the scheme to fiction images  we have to consider profilmic and write a new scheme in this way:

	(Real)
	“PROFILMIC” (staged reality)
	Image
	Linguistic dimension of images

When we think at analogical modulation process, we have to consider it like the moment of reproduction of reality that, in the images, becomes:

une masse plastique, une matière a-signifiante et a-syntaxique, un matière non linguistiquement formée, bien qu’elle ne soit pas amorphe et soit formée sémiotiquement, esthétiquement, pragmatiquement. (…) C’est ne pas un énonciation, ce ne sont pas des énoncés. C’est un énonçable. (Deleuze, 1985 : 44)

But we can not forget the second part of the Deleuze’s lessons about images:

Nous voulons dire que, lorsque le langage s’empare de cette matière (et il le fait nécessairement), alors elle donne lieu è des énoncés qui viennent dominer ou même remplacer le images e le signes, et qui renvoient pour compte à des traits pertinents de la langue, syntagmes e paradigmes, tout différents de ceux d’où on était parti.    
(Deleuze, 1985 : 44)

Now we will try to update what we have said about analogical image to the new context of digital image, the new media image.
In this regard, digital image’s progressive detachment from the dimension of indexicality of analogical technologies has to be underlined. Digital image, also called number-image, is often created only with the aid of information technologies, instead of reproducing something already existent. So, with the number-image, we can leave out from our theory the level of modulation.
It is also crucial to consider that digital image usually is proposed to the audience hiding in a (false) reproduction of the world, whereas number-image often pretends to represent the world, while it is (more or less approximately) only simulating it. In this way, the theme of relationship between digital image and reality becomes highly stimulating: more ambiguous and elusive than the one inferable from the statute of the analogical image.
There is a classic theoretical referent of this transformation: the post-modern thought. Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio or Guy Debord dwelt for a long time on the primacy – typical of our time – of simulation and representation, compared with reality and effective existence.  
Therefore, there is some affinity between the digital image as it is configured and the (apocalyptical) social set as represented by the post-modern thought. This affinity can be read through the theme that Jean Baudrillard proposed in his book The symbolic exchange and the death (1976): the end, in a post or late modern context, of language’s denotative function, its use value, and its replacement with the logic of meanings’ exchange and interchangeability: the logic of simulation. Such radical theory – criticized by Habermas, for example – seems to predict, on an abstract level, what is really happening with digital image: the end of referential function and the explosion of compatibility, the exchange value of signification.
Our idea regarding that theory is to accept only some Baudrillard’s suggestions and try to historicize them. So we agree with Baudrillard’s reflections about sign, given that “sign” is a digital image, but we accepted only some of his considerations on analogical image and tout court linguistic denotation. Finally, we like to think that, in our times, all the different signification modality are coexistent and they overlap more than undermine each others.
At this level of theoretic analysis, we can summarize the relationship between digital image and reality through a new scheme:

	Real (end of image referential dimension)
	Image: simulacrum
	Linguistic dimension of images (compatibility)

Another way to make, in a semiological way, concrete this reflection is to think digital image as an image without ground.
We can make it in two different ways. First, thinking ground in a philosophical and aesthetic sense, like Martin Heidegger, and considering it as the essential link of matter between work of art and world.
Digital image, turning reality into a numeral and algorithmic sequence, dissolves this link like snow under hot sun. For this philosophical suggestion, we can follow Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s book, Beauty and contemporary sublime (1999).
To explain the digital “treason” of ground, Gilbert-Rolfe makes a further observation. In his opinion, the definitive leave of digital image from reality completes the journey western art began a long time ago, taking off from representation every link with the object represented. From impressionist painting introducing synthetic and artificial colours, to photography and video, that introduced a further level of separation from immediateness and automaticity of imagine production. No more effort, no more labour to extract the art work from the materiality and concreteness of the world: according to Gilbert-Rolfe, digital image is the definitive landing place of this iter, the automatic and disembodied image par excellence.

The precession is from a grounded sign, a sign concerned to recall its origins and to signify through that recollection, to a sign grounded in its own ungroundedness. From Heidegger’s work of art, through impressionism, and thence to a video color.
(Gilbert-Rolf, 1999: 32)

We can consider other (semiotic) aspects of  the issue with Umberto Eco and Charles Peirce, Ron Burnett and Oliver Grau.
According to Eco and Peirce, in fact, ground is the iconic direct and analogical likeness (based by a kind of contact impression) that representation and perception itself have with reality. For the above mentioned reason – the numerical digitalization of reality – the same  idea of ground disappears together with the number image.
Finally, following Grau and Burnett we can think about ground of image in a more metaphorical way, as the link, the evidence or the memory of a past already gone.

Dynamic image worlds will possess an as yet unimaginable potential of suggestion; images, out of control and apparently recreating themselves, ever changing, containing information that will outstrip the resolution capacity of the human eye. The threshold on which we stand, to open, interactive, evolutionary image spaces, heralds not only a “culture of the moment”, but also the loss of the image’s historical status as “witness”. The mnemonic function of an immutable and fixed work capitulates to arbitrary manipulation of the image where recapitulation is impossible and will ultimately fall victim to system frameworks that last for perhaps only few years. The image is in danger of becoming a transitory phenomenon.
(Grau, 2003: 253)

In this regard, digital image is, once again, an unreliable witness of its time:  not only it can be manipulated ad infinitum without any evident sign of alteration and without creating substantial differences between the original and its copies, but, above all, because digital image is completely re ex nihilo by computer (even automatically, thanks to new technologies):

I have discussed the transformative impact of the move from the analogue to digital in such detail because, for the most part, there is a tendency to assume that images remain constant. In other words, the move from the analogue to the digital doesn’t change the basic fundamentals of communication using images. However, in the analogue world images are not information in the sense that they have become bits and pixels in the digital world. In fact, some serious question need to be asked about the role of aesthetics and design as the distinction between the images and information blurs into pixels, lines, and rates of compression.
(Burnett, 2004: 47)

For these reasons, some authors like Lev Manovich suggest to think digital image as a pictorial image: they both have complete freedom of invention and abstraction from reality:

In retrospect, we can see that twentieth-century’s regime of visual realism,  the result of automatically recording visual reality, was only an exception, an isolated accident in the history of visual representation, which has always involved, and now again involves, the manual construction of images. Cinema becomes a particular branch of painting – painting in time. No longer a kyno-eye, but a kino-brush.
(Manovich, 2002)

If it is true, it is also true that, as we already said, digital image, unlike painting, often searches for a level of realism comparable to analogical photographic image. For this reason, Lev Manovich suggestion to consider cinema, digital and painting as a single momentum in history of representation seems to us a little forced and this re-unification seems to us qualified only in peculiar situations as cartoon cinema and video art with its own installations but not for every kind of image.

Even from a technical point of view digital image places itself at a distance from analogical image in the way it reproduces reality. Following Laura Marks’ Touch: sensuous theory and multisensory media, we can observe that analogical reproduction of the world keeps a strong indexical nuance through the wavelength of the electrons producing image.  Through the light coughed, for example,  by the lens of any analogical camera (and through wavelength of light that changes in correlation with the object that it reflects) reality’s wavelength are captured by images:

Say we have a camera, any camera. The light that reflects off an object and is focused on the camera lens is composed by waves. Say it’s light reflected form a purple flower, embodying is color in the wavelength defining purple. “Purple” photons, photons with wavelength purple, will converge on the lens, producing an image that is the analog of the purple flower. Inside the vidicon tube of an analog video camera, the image is focused not on a lens but on a photoconducting layer. Incident light excites electrons in the photoconductor, dislodging photons at wavelengths that continue to correspond to the color of the object being recorded. Then the photon bean from the vidicon’s cathode scans the phosphor-coated surface of the photoconductor, stimulating the phosphor to release photons, which are what we see. (…) All this mean that it is individual electrons that travels all the way from the cathode to the screen, when they crash and die a brilliant death in the release of thousands photons, forming the light patterns on the phosphor-coated surface of a video monitor (...). 
(Marks, 2002: 169-170)

Wavelengths that are “broken” in the real digitalization process of digital technologies: 

 What happens when an image is digitalized? Say we have a still, color image. A program   divides the image surface into small areas (also called pixels) and calculates for each a set of numerical values. These correspond to the intensity, or number of photons per second, for the frequencies of red, green, and blue. The resulting values are translated in a string of 0s and 1s. (…) Light waves, whose frequency and intensity physically represent the color brightness of the object, are translated into symbols when the image is encoded in strings of numbers.
(Marks, 2002: 170-171)

Technical data are meaningful because allow us to understand that reality is always produced by digitalization, even when it seems that it is just re-produced. Digitalization, in fact, is mainly a construction process of image, where electrons’ wavelength, that in the analogical image remains constant from object to image, are broken and converted in binary impulses (act that sometimes is the cause of malfunction of our pc!).
We can now write the number-image definitive scheme:

	Real (historical event)
	MODULATION
	Image as simulacrum. Artificiality of materials, immediacy of production.
	Linguistic dimension of images General commutation, combinatory and simulation (compatibility)

We can continue shifting our attention to the other characteristics of digital image that, in some ways, balance and compensate (or may be stimulate) its non-indexical vocation.
First, following again Gilbert-Rolfe, we can affirm that number-image basically is a plastic image. There are some  sort of elective affinities – probably produced by their natural tendency to “dematerialization” or transfiguration of the real – between digital image and plastic, the substance – at the same time ordinary and magic – that, according to Roland Barthes in his Mythologies (1957), was progressively replacing reality and that it is presently become the surface and the screen of the digital revolution.  

The surfaces and colors to which video appeals, and the material in which it lives, are plastic.
(Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999: 27)  

The second characteristic of digital image – gained from becoming detached reality – is to be an image that allows an high degree of immersion.
About this, we can refer to Oliver Grau Digital art. From illusion to immersion (2003): through an accurate sampling of examples taken form western art tradition (from Pompei’s frescoes to contemporary movie theatres), the author suggests that image has a strong and natural vocation to illusion, to creation of a virtual worldthat surrounds and wraps users totally. Vocation that, in Grau’s thought, continues today with virtual reality devices. Instruments like CAVE (Artificial Virtual Environment) or l’HMD (Head Mounted Display) that adds to that western tradition – probably for the first time – the chance of a true and not metaphorical immersion and interaction with the images. Illusion becomes real, throwing us in a present where image worlds are not virtual but autonomous and self-sufficient substitutes of our world:

ingress into virtual image spaces of the computer, which is now possible, is not the revolutionary innovation its protagonists are fond of interpreting it to be. The idea of virtual reality only appears to be without a history; in fact, it rests firmly on historical art tradition, which belongs to a discontinuous movement of seeking illusionary image spaces. Although these were constrained by the specific media of the period and used to convey highly desperate content, the idea stretches back at least as far as classical antiquity and is alive again today in the immersive visualization strategies of virtual reality art.
(Grau, 2003: 339)

Clearly, the possibility of immersion into the image implies a series of new ethical problems: for example it decreases the user’s possibility distance itself from images and to maintain a critical consciousness in regard to what he/she  is experiencing.        
There are other digital image’s characteristics that we have to recall. The compression of data that compose it and that allows image to be moved and sent very fast. The compatibility of data that gives sense to that movement: digital images, compatible with every standards, flow and shift without encountering barriers historically encountered by analogical media images.   
These last two facets define a situation that some new media theorist call digital convergence,  or even post-medium era. The era in which traditional media lost their specificities and their differences and become surpassed by a single flux of compressed, compatible, and convergent information inflected in all the electronic devices (from personal computer to washing machine).
That idea opens a chance for some interesting reflections. According to media theorists like Friedrich Kittler – with a little radicalization of technological determinism and Shannon and Weaver’s information theory – we can read actual situation as the beginning of the era of digital flux, entirely autonomous form active man’s intervention.
From that situation it would result a phase of true obsolescence of the image and therefore of its own users! Obviously, such an idea has met a lot of opponents: we can mention here Katerhine Hayles, who wrote a book on this topic, ironically titled How we became posthuman (1999).
We are left with the urgency to understand that there are two parallel tendencies (theoretical and practical), very active in new media current configuration. On the one hand there is the tendency to stress new media autonomy from (social) body, and to consider digital as the realization of cybernetic founder aspirations, as the possibility of entering a world of pure information without substance and without bodies.
On the other hand there is the tendency that insists on information embodiment or framing, on the problems of interface between digital image and user. Interface that – if we think to the strong degree of interactivity that characterizes digital images and that has allowed their fast and capillary diffusion – has seemed to be impossible to eliminate until now.
In conclusion,  we can affirm how a possible synthesis of both tendencies resulted in the theory of digital image that, avoiding the post-human drifts, thinks to digital image as  the basic plug of interaction environments inclined to “make world”. Or, using deluzian terms, to create “perfect” and autonomous digital planes of immanence that users enjoy through a complete, interactive and personalized experience. Autonomy underlined also by the tendency of many virtual environments to twist and distort space and his geometric and Cartesian orientation.

Finally, we can propose a new scheme for the Deleuze’s “classical” images and for the number-image:

As shown in the scheme, we propose the idea that the new dimension of  image implies a sort of digital return to movement-image peculiarity. Referring to action movies and video games that use digital technologies to create every sort of special effects number-image is a image devoted again to action more then introspection. As Manovich says it is a spatial image more than a temporal image both for linearity of his narration and for simultaneous and topographic way in which it realizes his editing effects (typical of operating system as Window or software as Internet Explore).
But it is also a new type of action and a new type of space: not the analogical space of modulation, but the space of digital possibilities, where immersion and distance, information and bodies coexist in new peculiar ways.

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