02/17 // EIKON #97 is out now!

"The possibility of converting all media into digital data has consequences that today are still almost impossible to assess. What is certain is that with the rise of the computer as the universal medium our awareness of media differences gets lost along with the unique experiences that individual media are able to communicate. As far as the photochemical media of photography and film are concerned, they, suddenly reduced to data packages, suffer the loss not only of their material and haptic qualities but also of their intelligibility. To grasp processes of becoming-image is incomparably easier in media that transcribe instead of transcode than in electronic or digital media. Though photography and film are based on a complex interplay of optics and chemistry, their mechanisms seem to be a great deal more coherent and comprehensible than those of the new technologies. Does the reduction to a single meta-medium, the computer, not boil down to an impoverishment? This seems to be one possibility that artists and even some representatives of popular culture are unwilling to accept."

Read more in the new EIKON #97, International Magazine for Photography and Media Art, pp. 45-56.