How Images Think

Digital images are an integral part of all media, including television, film, photography, animation, video games, data visualization, and the Internet. In the digital world, spectators become navigators wending their way through a variety of interactive experiences, and images become spaces of visualization with more and more intelligence programmed into the very fabric of communication processes. In How Images Think Ron Burnett explores this new ecology, which has transformed the relationships humans have with the image-based technologies they have created. Burnett argues that the development of this new, closely interdependent relationship marks a turning point in our understanding of the connections between humans and machines. He argues that virtual images occupy a "middle space," combining the virtual and the real into an environment of visualization that blurs the distinctions between subject and object - part of a continuum of experiences generated by creative choices by viewers, the results of which cannot be attributed either to images or to participants.