“Art for Machines” presented by Stig

When celluloid was replaced by sensors twenty years ago, the photographic image became bilingual. The digital im-age, now being shot, shown, stored and shared by one device, lives up to (and beyond) expectations of analogue mnemonic technologies. Satisfying the human urge for visual traces, the easy-to-use digital apparatus tempt us to produce photographic images. Yet the current ubiquity of images demonstrates not only our ‘analogue’ needs to archive and share memories, it also points towards a ‘digi-tal’ hunger for data. The photographic image, both data and imagery, speaks to different audiences. The human audi-ence, with its growing need for visual updates of other peoples’ lives and the non-human audience, gathering data to index, recognise and categorise patterns in order to pre-dict future developments. Pointing towards past and future at the same time, in between ‘narrative-based stories’ and ‘data-based story-telling’ the data-image serves both needs. We, seduced by the digital device, feed the data-hungry and the image-needy more and more. And now “Life is experi-enced as increasingly documentable, and perhaps, also experienced in the service of its documentation, always with the newly accessible audience in mind,” a seemingly irrelevant transition changed the human role in image pro-duction forever.