week 3

Image, there must have been a moment of truth--In the reading of this week,

Ulmer talks about the concept of electracy “image” with the discussion of

Roland Barthes’s definition of “photography image” (p 43). According to

Barthes, “image” in photography is “ a new dimension of signification”

that “characterized as a meaning that is ‘obtuse’, a ‘third meaning’,

neither literal nor figurative…(p 44) ” Barthes emphasizes the word

“Punctum”, something “stings or pricks one emotionally (p 44), ” and

something with opposite meaning to the literal meaning of “existence ”.

Images are neither “reality” nor “virtually”, but something that exist

between the two and can be hardly verified the truth them describe.

However, images are the emotional expression of the truth, as what

Ulmer discusses with the citation of Kant and Heidegger, they record

a “state of mind (p58)” , and “ In electracy, a state of mind is as

writable as the object of thought. To find the wide image we must

learn how to write and reason with our state of mind…(p59)”.

This reminds me of certain feeling I had when appreciating some

pictures: the visibility is gradually turning into transience. In

other words, the pictures in my eyes are not in correspondence

with the real objects anymore, but some virtual images that

duplicate the mind of myself. The current fast developing electronic

technology always make us hardly focus on one image, and the

outcome is that we are struggling among millions of images

produced by graphic designers while trying to find out the reality

or the truth in our own state of mind. Most of the time, we lose

the original intent to explore what the designers try to express

but subconsciously seek what ourselves want to see. So can you

say this is a state of reality or virtuality? Just like the film

“Matrix” try to express, the obscure boundary between virtuality

and reality, and self can freely wander between the two.