Critical Paper Response

This writing cover three stages of human civilization, which are linear images, technical image and post industrialization (digital world).

When it comes to linear image age, there are several interpretation impressed me the most:
1. Images are significant surfaces.
2. The meaning of the image as it is disclosed by scanning, then, is the synthesis of two intentions: the one manifest in the image itself, the other in the observer.
3. Images offer room for interpretation.
4. Images have magical meaning
5.Images are meditations between man and world.

At this stage image is abstract and linear.

Then it is Technical Image Age. This is when camera and photography come into being. Texts kill imagination, while image provides inspiration. Images became a powerful tool and started to appear in newspaper and media. 

1. Techni-cal images, for their part, are third-degree abstractions; they are abstracted from texts, which in turn are abstracted from images which were themselves abstracted from the concrete world.
2. The function of technical images is to emancipate their receivers from the need to think conceptually, by substituting an imagination of the second degree for conceptualization. 
3. Technical images were meant, first, to re-introduce images into daily life; second, to render hermetic texts imaginable; and third, to render visible the subliminal magic inherent in cheap texts.
4. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, man was surrounded by tools; after the Industrial Revolution, it-was the machine that was surrounded by men.

Camera as an apparatus is programmed. photographic camera illustrates this robotization of work, as well as the liberation of man for playing. The camera is an intelligent tool because it automatically produces pictures. 

Every program functions for the sake of a higher meta-program, and the programmers of a particular, program are functionnaires of that meta-program.

Last stage is the post industrial ages, the digital world where we are now. We easily observe the characteristic of all post-industrial society: it is not he who owns the hard objects, but he who controls the software, who in the end holds the value.

Power has shifted from the owners of the objects to the programmers and operators.


There is no doubt that technology advancement provides us convenience in creating new forms of art and pictures. Personally, I am not a big fan of abstract or purely composed photos, like making photo-shopped pictures without even touch the camera. To me, it loses its core value and spirit.  

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