Ambient Images
Seán Cubitt, Celia Lury, Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis, Daniel Stephen Vaughan Palmer, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Emilie K. Sunde
Abstract
The digitization of the image has intensified the transformation of the relationship between humans and images. The proliferation of tools for the production of images and acceleration in their distribution has meant that a blas attitude toward visual saturation, already prominent in the 20th century, has become more widespread. Writing in 1927, Siegfried Kracauer presciently spoke of a "blizzard of photographs." 1 In the first decades of the 21st century this grew into an environmental flood and the multiple streams along which people circulated images, challenged many of the traditional assumptions about the status and function of the image. Then came the pandemic. Suddenly, the relationship between the personal image and the public image was reconfigured. People hung out on platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok with increased intensity and hunger. The platforms for virtual communication absorbed and at times aimed to compensate for the loss of events, meetings, face-toface encounters and relationships. Confinement to the domestic sphere produced ever more mundane practices of co-present intimacy across platforms. For instance, while cross-generational practices of food photo sharing have long been a significant genre, photographs of home baking became an Instagram clich, with "sourdough" becoming Google's top food-related search phrase in 2020. 2 The zoom boom soon became a new malaise-zoom fatigue.