Networked image

CSNI understands that the “networked image” is at the centre of a new global mode of reproduction and representation in which the visual image is paramount. We realise that what constitutes an image has been radically transformed, and with it the theories that allow us to study it. Although we have to date largely followed a historicity based on the photograph, we recognise the anachronism, and the need for an enlarged scope that can account for the image as a dynamic, distributed and computational object that unsettles received notions of space-time — no longer limited to traditional representation (what media artist and theorist Harun Farocki has called “operative image”), and no longer necessarily visual at all. In using the term “networked image” — preferring it to operative image (or even post-photography) — we aim to emphasise the network as a descriptor of dynamic social relations as much as technological infrastructure.** Moreover our aim is to broaden the discussion of the networked image as a relational assemblage to address planetary scale computation, the politics of infrastructure, and wider ecologies that would include non-human entities and environmental concerns.** - Centre for the Study of the Networked Image.