Julian makes a good point, which seems sometimes to be forgotten,
that digital images (and not just images of course) always have
some physical realization. This is usually on some kind of electronic
storage medium (CD, magnetic disc, etc) but could in principle
just as well be printed or even written by hand on paper in some
agreed coding such as a sequence of numerals zero and one. Equally
we could realize the information in knotted string or modified
genetic material.

These physical realizations don't actually seem to be what we
think of as the digital data itself, which is something more
abstract than any physical realization. I think there is an
analogy with numbers and other abstract things. We talk about
"the number ten" or the idea of "a square" without having
to mean any ten things or any particular square.

Is the digital image something as distinct from any physical
realization, just like writing the word "square" is distinct
from the idea of a square?

The difference between digital images and printmaking or the non-digital
photographic image is that the digital is an abstract entity which can
be denoted by many physical realizations all of which carry exactly
the same information. [I mean the physical realization of the
data itself, not a printout of the image.] With a photographic negative,
the original has status not just because of its cultural significance,
but because it cannot be copied perfectly. Similarly a printmaking
plate cannot be copied perfectly, and printing from it always
entails some physical damage to the plate which cannot be
be restored to something that would be agreed to be the same plate
as the original.

I'm not sure what Julian means by 'mystification' and would
interested to hear any clarification of this, but it seems to
me that there is something fundamentally different about digital
information.

John Stell

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Julian Howell wrote:

> I have a resistance to a mystification of digital drawing that seems to arise from comparisons with
> 'traditional' drawing. I prefer to think of digital image-making as more akin to photographic or
> printmaking processes than to directly marking surfaces.
>
> Digital artwork does have a physical state - an arrangment of electrons on a silicon chip - and
> although we cannot see this directly, we are used to this virtuality, from photography. We take a
> picture on film and we can't see it until we do something to it to make it visible. What I think of as
> the 'grain' of digital images (the pixel resolution) is usually very crude compared to drawing
> directly on a surface. Vector images don't have the same grain as bitmap images, but both are still
> dependent on output devices (printer, screen, plotter etc), which are still very crude compared to
> marks on a surface.
>
> It is possible to alter digital images extensively, but it is also possible to process film, printing
> plates or drawings extensively or to translate them to the stimulation of other senses.
>
> Some of the wonder of digitalisation is the speed with which changes and translations can be
> made. And this is enabled partly because digital images contain information which (at present) is
> vastly simplified compared to what our senses are used to dealing with.
>
> Julian Howell
> (Kingston University MA drawing as Process student)
>

-- 
Dr John G. Stell              room:   E.C.Stoner 9.15
School of Computing           phone:  +44 113 34 31076
University of Leeds           fax:    +44 113 34 35468
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