Para-images: Cultural ideas and technical apparatuses beyond the pictorial surfaces

Contemplating the ever-complex relationship between images and reality, the thesis proposes a new approach to understanding images in contemporary visual culture: para-images. The thesis employs Vilém Flusser’s notion of counter vision to examine cultural ideas and technical apparatuses operating beyond the pictorial surfaces of seven images of water splashes. In the process, the thesis identifies agential realism and twenty-first-century media as two useful frameworks in formulating the triangular relationship among humans, images and the world. Attempting to answer the question ‘What is left of an image if the pictorial surface is scratched away?’, the thesis uncovers the often neglected ideological and technical infrastructures that make images possible in the first place. Situating images and machines at the same level of humans as entities with their own agencies, the image theory this thesis establishes concerns the entanglement of humans, machines, apparatuses, images and the world. In short, an image is the world, the world is an image.