The impurity of images: aesthetic interstices between analog and digital photography

Abstract

A critical analysis is made of the digital image, given the incompleteness of the process of assimilation of analog photography by numerical technologies. Vilém Flusser’s philosophical apparatus and Foucault’s concept of emulation are employed here to interpretthe digitization that occurred in the 1990s as an industrial project that was aimed primarily at the emulation of analog technologies by digital ones. After this historical moment of technological transformations, a detached analysis allows one to hypothesize that the digital photographic image begins to assume an interstitial position between indexical fulguration and computational algorithms. This perspective allows for a better understanding of image production in art, which does not entirely deny the indexicality of photography, but also refuses to ignore other possible contemporaneous modes of existence of the image.