Ambient Images

We are living, in short, through the mass adoption of computer vision in our lives. In terms of everyday photography, for instance, the human eye and machinic processes are fused together not only in the taking and editing of photographs (using the camera phone’s facial recognition and filters, and so on), but also at their multiple points of reception. This applies even and especially to our own collections of images that are not necessarily shared and would once have been kept in albums or shoeboxes. Image oversaturation, the interweaving of commercial and emotional currents, images for and by machines, algorithmic curation, the networked ‘trace’ image --these are all factors serving to underscore the complexities of living in an age of ambient images. Taken together, they indicate a need for a renewed exploration of how we learn to read the image, and for whom (or what) images are legible.