My Paper Proposal for S.A.S. 2009, Savannah, Georgia

High Definition Images, Moderate Scholarly Definitions and Low Level Analysis

David Surman

It makes sense that, in the wake of high definition content production and delivery, we would be sensitised to the affordances of lesser definitions. The contemporary question of definition is less contingent on an exploration of the dialectic between digital and analogue image cultures. Instead it presumes a post-digital analogue; analogue textuality performed and curatorially conditioned by a ubiquitous digital infrastructure.

The pixel doesn’t hold the immediacy of signifying digital visual culture that it once did since, come what may, historical iterations of pixellated imagery sit in an everyday context of conversely analogue forms -- cathode ray tubes, Polaroid film, CMYK magazine print. The previously potent pixel is now concomitant with the anticipation of the digital rather than its arrival. Its intervention is softened and naturalised by the reception and positioning of its encompassing image and sound production modes.

From the false monad of the pixel, we now zoom out to the polygon as candidate for stable signifier of digital processes. The polygon, the basic component of the constructed static meshes used to create computer generated imagery. The pixel is subsumed within the polygon, and ceases to signify other than in moments of shearing and microanalysis. Discernable pixels seek only to evoke the trajectory and contour of line, deferring to their cognition as polygons.

Wherein lies the significance of the polygon, when naturally the endeavour of producing higher image definition seeks to erase the trace of the component from the sensate surface of the screen? In the post-polygon digital image, tropes of the analogue are retrieved, in the form of perceptual cues and intellectual caveats. Lens flare, shaking camera, focal depth defer to the authority of the cinematic analogue, but highlight the intellectually and creatively precarious nature of the digital image which, like the roman mosaic, cannibalises the material terms of its own image to remain contemporaneous with its referent culture.