Seeing things : image and affect

In the age of digital media how might we speak about images of torture, and how might we might think about regarding the pain of others, to cite the title of Susan Sontag’s book? Through reference to a short six-minute film on torture, A Silence Full of Things by Chilean film-maker Alejandra Canales (resident in Australia), and the Abu Ghraib photographs, this essay addresses the coextensive function of imaging and viewing, and the need to rethink the relationship between media and the human body especially in relation to the concept of virtuality. It works with the thesis that we don’t see the world in the image, but that the image sees the world in us—in other words, images are not solely the visible features of objects that fall before our eyes, but are inflections of the outside world incorporated and transformed by the body of the viewing subject. To see, in this sense, involves an act of composition, a process of corporeal imagination, that complicates the idea that we merely subtract information from the outside world. I propose thinking with the image in its correlation with the body, its specificity and its capacity for community through the production of virtual experience. I argue for the thesis that virtual experience is a capacity of the human body rather than a trait of media (although they act to extend this capacity), and that image making like all genres of communication is a practice in virtual community