The materiality of image and the notion of “presence games”
What is an image? One way to answer this question may be, following Lambert Wiesing, to conceptually divide its whole in three parts: das Bildobjekt – der Bildträger – das Bildsujet (Artifizielle Präsenz, 2005). But what is the relation between the “image-object”, i.e. the image we see, and its medium, e.g. the canvas of a painting?
A phenomenological approach to answering this question has historically been to assume that the relation between these two entities emerges as a conflict between the materiality of the world we normally perceive, and the immateriality of the world we imagine in a picture (see: Hippolyte Taine, “Die Bilder”, in : Der Verstand, 1870; Edmund Husserl, Husserliana XXIII, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, 1898-1925; Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imaginaire, 1940; Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects, 1980). My concern with this “conflict theory of images” is, however, that it is based on what seems to appear as an unfunded or unclear metaphysical claim about the nature of the immaterial. This way of considering the image-object as in a conflict opposing it with the “real world” supposes a fundamental ontological binarity that my analyses are trying to query. Is light, by which we see, in fact material itself? What does calling it material or immaterial entail? What about color? And what could possibly be the “pure form” of an image, once radically isolated from its materiality?
These questions become even more complex in film studies as we consider the growing digitization of images, which occupies a central role in a great part of contemporary literature (see: Dan Streible, “Moving Image History and the F-Word; or, “Digital Film” Is an Oxymoron”, 2013; John Belton, “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution”, 2002; Giovanna Fossatti, From Grain to Pixel, 2009). What is the materiality of an image on the internet?
My hypothesis is that if we aim to further develop the phenomenological approach to images in general, a certain pragmatism, of sorts, may be preferable. Instead of considering pure contents of consciousness or our general capacity to imagine, greater attention needs to be paid to the context in which a specific subjectivity – which is part of a certain collectivity – watches an image. This increased focus may help to address the way in which spectators don’t binarily separate form and matter but elaborate multiplicities (Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 1976) when they see an image.
These irreducible and complex objects are built upon different scales and degrees of presence (and here I refer again to the notion of Präsenz by Lambert Wiesing), which enable the viewer to engage in a playful way with images. Through images, spectators may be conceived as players who enter in what, inspired by crossing the references of the phenomenology of Lambert Wiesing, the psychanalytical approach of Donald Winnicott (see: Playing and reality, 1971) and the second philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, we may call presence games.
