Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The paper presented here for consideration under the title Unclear and Indistinct situates itself critically within a saying of philosopher, René Descartes: “Whatever I have a clear and distinct idea of is capable of existing just as I understand it, at least in principle.” I argue that today’s dominant design sensibility is not only dutifully directed by the values put into relief in this saying, those of clarity and distinctiveness, but that, in so being directed, it precludes others that would be directed otherwise. The paper redresses this foreclosure. It does so at the limit of one of today’s most topical implements of design: image-editing software. Image-editing software serve to enhance and make more refined the material countenance of what is produced by other means. The paper argues that it may be redirected away from their accepted and intended use of enhancing and making more refined and recognizable to distorting and making fuzzy and unrecognizable the objects at their source. Erasing not imperfections of the source object for the sake of clarity and distinctiveness, but the source object itself, yields not, by being more clear and distinct, a determinative object, but a radically indeterminate one inviting interpretation. Indeterminate and illegible, the image casts the viewer into a dense material aura in which he or she becomes caught in new perceptual possibilities and unforeseen practical realities.