Periphery Vision: Data as image

In this paper, I begin by suggesting digital photographic images should be considered as being neither a purely visual experience nor a purely perceptual one. Instead, I argue these may be somewhat limiting terms which confine our engagement with images to traditional linguistic interpretations. At a time when digital images are more amenable and liable to forms of recombination, fragmentation and to being encountered through associations and connections, semiotic approaches to signification may no longer be the most appropriate tools for describing and explaining images. In “Reading the Figural” (2001), D.N. Rodowick suggests a linguistic reading of images is both interrupted and disrupted by the different spatiotemporal organisation of contemporary forms of representation. His account of the figural is an attempt to reconcile image and text as being discursive in a non-linear, nonuniform and discontinuous sense. In this sense the figural is not a combination of image and text, it is an interstitial space located between them both that conforms to the properties of each but can be reduced to neither one nor the other.