IMAGE FLOW

Abstract

This essay is about the phenomenon of mass, mobile photographic images in a digital, networked context. In response to recent writings that challenge the relevance of the close reading of singular images, it proposes rethinking the opposition between singular images and images en masse through philosophical ideas of multiplicity and, in particular, via the concept of image flow. It examines four connected contexts in which concepts of flow have been used: in discourses surrounding the internet and digital media, where it is used to naturalise these media; in psychology, where ideas of flow underpin descriptions of consciousness and human/animal perception; in robotics and artificial intelligence, where ideas of flow from psychology joined with a move away from dependence on representation to facilitate increasingly autonomous mobile machines; and finally in studies of television, where the on-tap transmission of images has been understood in terms of a flow that articulates or choreographs bodies and attention, connecting the rhythms and temporality of private and public space, cities and suburbs. This model of flow, in particular, allows for analysis that operates across different scales, and undoes oppositions of scale and surface/depth that pervade recent photography theory.