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Digital Visions
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The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project

Image Trace comments on how the image as a visual experience shifts through digital transference. This concept is bounded, to a degree, by what Smith sees as "related to the whole of the digitalization of our sense of space and spatial relations, whether it be vector graphics, x, y, z coordinates on a web page, or GPS locations." With the advent of computer technology, society has "defaulted to seeing all relations, spatial as well as other forms, as mathematical and numerical." Thus, in Image Trace, visuals are stripped down to their essential structure, or code, which computers read in order to project an image onto the screen.

The most important aspect behind Image Trace is how it attempts to make "viewers" consider how they interact with computers. Users who didn't bother to read "more on [the] project" encounter blank looking screens when prompted to "feel images." In anticipation of what they are supposed to be "seeing," users scroll and click on empty pages, only to find that nothing changes on the screen except for the numbers coordinates (x, y values). Eventually users realise that these numbers indicate where the cursor is located on the screen. Smith says that he "intended to focus the "viewer's" experience on the mouse as an extension of the hand, as if the viewer is tracing the image with the finger as a direct contact based experience of the image."

Spectators who engage with the piece's text expect to see nothing. These users know that by moving the cursor across the image space, they are an extension of the mouse and are supposed to feel the image being traced across the screen. In attempting to "touch" the image by scrolling over the black space, users navigate through the space by looking at the constantly changing x/y variables for any differences in how it "looks" or "feels." This is similar to how one would approach one of Rauschenberg's White Paintings - looking for imperceptible differences in how the light affects the surface of the canvas, thereby making each encounter with the painting different as it is viewed in different lights - or in Smith's case, scrolling over the image choosing various paths in an attempt to see or feel these differences. On a side note, it's interesting how programmers have tried to evoke the conceptual sensation of touch through the mouse by creating cursor icons for the computer that resemble mini hands. "Viewers" use their mouse/hands to guess at what the image is by "feeling" their way across the space looking for an outline - using the coordinates to see if a sense of depth or height can be interpreted from the dissipated image, like a computerized Braille - only to realize that this option is not possible. Depth is denoted in vector graphics by a z coordinate and these images do not offer the option of seeing a third point. Regardless, in an attempt to understand what is being seen or rather, not seen, users change their approach to how they experience the images both sensually and intellectually.

In keeping with the playful aesthetics of Fluxus and Conceptual artworks, Image Trace subtly points out the nature and limitations of our experience with digital art. Ironically, the very same conversion that was used to "heighten" our sense of tactility in the digital realm, results only in the "collapse of a whole range of complex sensations, most particularly the image itself, into a flat designation," which we as users are inevitably unable to touch. The perception of Image Trace as a "successful" net art piece depends on whether the viewer is able to detect and appreciate the irony of the work. Thus, to some, Image Trace may be confounding; to others it is brilliant and goes beyond the possibility of what a webpage can offer.

 

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Site: www.altarts.org/tracker/index.html