Visualising the invisible :articulating the inherent features of the digital image

Contemporary digital imaging practice has largely adopted the visual characteristics of its closest mediatic relative, the analogue photograph, In this regard, new media theorist Lev Manovich observes that "Computer software does not produce such images by default. The paradox of digital visual culture is that although all imaging is becoming computer-based, the dominance of photographic and cinematic imagery is becoming even stronger. But rather than being a direct, "natural" result of photo and film technology, these images are constructed on computers" (Manovich 2001: 179), Manovich articulates the disjuncture between the technical processes involved in the digital image creation process and the visual characteristics of the final digital image with its replication of the visual qualities of the analogue photograph.This research addresses this notion further by exploring the following. What are the defining technical features of these computer-based imaging processes? Could these technical features be used as a basis in developing an alternative aesthetic for the digital image? Why is there a reticence to visually acknowledge these technical features in contemporary digital imaging practice? Are there historic mediated precedents where the inherent technical features of the medium are visually acknowledged in the production of imagery? If these defining technical features of the digital imaging process were visually acknowledged in this image creation process, what would be the outcome?The studio practice component of the research served as a foundation for the author's artistic and aesthetic development where the intent was to investigate and highlight four technical qualities of the digital image identified through the case studies of three digital artists, and other secondary sources, These technical qualities include: the composite RGB colour system of the digital image as it appears on screen; the pixellated microstructure of the digital image; the luminosity of the digital image as it appears on a computer monitor, and the underlying numeric and (ASCII based) alphanumeric codes of the image file which enables that most defining feature of the image file, that of programmability, Based on research in the visualization of these numeric and alphanumeric codes, digital images of bacteria produced through the use of the scanning electron microscope, were chosen as image content for an experimental body of work to draw the conceptual link between these numeric and alphanumeric codes of the image file and the coded genetic sequence of an individual bacterial entity