Thinking by Inference

To varying degrees, images have always been integral parts of human efforts to construct livable environments. They have always helped shape and form the spaces we inhabit whether they took the form of drawings, markings or pictures in caves or defined the architecture of churches and museums.

Today, as images and screens have become more and more prevalent, they have begun to redefine human action and human subjectivity in even more sophisticated ways than in the past. The extension of image use into digital technologies has further heightened not only their importance but their role as mediators of human experiences in general.

Interestingly, digital technologies rely on inferential thinking. They do not so much make the real come to life as they create an awareness of the many different planes on which our perceptions of the real depend. One of the best examples of this is a CD player and the CD’s themselves. One may infer that a particular CD will play a certain sound and that inference will have a great deal to do with the experience. The properties of the CD that generate the inferential process are not physically apparent either on the CD or even when the CD disappears into a player. In other words, we begin the act of listening within a virtual space of expectation devoid of sensory stimulation yet flush with internal dialogues and feelings and expectations. The laser that helps to generate the sound is invisible. The electric current that energizes the music, gives it a shape and broadcasts it to us is also invisible. Yet, the expectations remain constant. Inferential thinking is at the heart of digital technologies and I will be exploring this mode of thought in greater detail over the coming months. 

Music Videos

To grasp with the ear and the eye is an embodied act. The activity of listening to music or watching a music video goes far beyond "presentation" and into something far more complex that connects our bodies to the screens we watch. 

Music videos combine the many different elements of sound and picture into images. The videos represent the music and they picture bodies that dance — they display not only the physicality of musical creation, but also the potential of audience performance. Music videos, especially the good ones by groups like R.E.M. bring music into the foreground, neither a prop for sight, nor just an aural experience.

They create a space for the performance of meaning, which exceeds and often undermines the mediating layers of image projection. It is the dancing body which music videos call out to, that body which twists and turns, sweats and laughs. It is the body on a vast dance floor that from a distance appears to be one of many, just a cog in a machine, the stuttered movements of Janet and Michael Jackson. But, taken down to the individual, to the release of energy, the release of the body from its everyday constraints, there is suddenly an explosion of sexuality.

This is the haunting look of rock star after rock star straight into the camera, into the living room, beckoning, almost begging for the bodies who watch to join the scene, the stage, the studio. Join us as we dance! The ritualization is so intense that the television screen cannot contain what it shows. Out of this explosion comes the energy of Lolapalooza and the community of Deadheads and the swaying seemingly uniform rhythms of thousands of audiences the world over. Embodied and empowered because of images and sounds.

Images

Images are the “face” of technology at work. Images are evidence of our needs, and windows into our history. They are the tools that we use to explore the world around us. From the start, the power of the television image has been dependent upon our need to explore its surface, not only at the level of form and content, but through touch and smell and sound. We do this by stretching images into our daily lives and thereby giving images volume and form. Screens are only a small part of the ecology that defines imageworlds.