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The Book

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.

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