My starting hypothesis in the theory of pictorial appearing is that Gottfried Boehm’s notion of iconic difference can serve as a sufficiently comprehensive concept for differentiating between image and non-image in all visual artefacts that have been created during the several millennia of visual representation. This era started with the first paleolithic drawings and includes the entire visual production from the period “before art”, as well as all those visual representations that emerged in the early modern period beyond the needs of religious worship, only to be substituted through the technosphere. However, since the technosphere is characterized by increasingly evolved systems of visual immersion, from the all-accessible OLED screen and IMAX cinema theatres to Oculus Rift glasses and further to the experience of total immersion, which recreates synesthetic visual-haptic impressions, ontological differentiation between the visual surface as such and the extra-iconic reality can no longer be established with the idea of difference alone. Namely, the notion of difference can serve as a qualifier for defining the relationship between the separate categories in an object – in our case, the pictorial and non-pictorial ones – only insofar as the reality in which they are situated is identical or equivalent. Thus, nobody questions the clear ontological separation between the two-dimensional represented reality such as established in cinematic fiction and the non-represented, that is actual reality existing outside of that fiction. Many films and artworks count on that implied separation and can therefore afford to question the borderline between the two, primarily within a strictly artistic discourse. Boehm’s theory of iconic difference and Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of the cut have helped establish the semiotic-phenomenological criteria for a theoretical differentiation between various experiences that are innate to man’s picture of the world. In other words, the difference or ontological cut between image and non-image can exist only because even a modestly capable individual can empirically grasp these two categories. However, my hypothesis is that iconic difference reveals itself as an inadequate concept for that ontological cut, not only because the status and the possibilities of human experience are radically altered in the time and space of the technosphere, but also because this new type of experience has not yet been “normalized” within the process that Flint Schier has termed “natural generativity”. The space and time of the technosphere require that one should no longer approach the image merely as the ancient Greek eikon, i.e. mirroring or representation, but rather as an experience, event, and a specific type of phenomenon. The modalities of pictorial appearing in the technosphere can be recognized as symptoms of the most recent visual turn, in any case the first in the 21st century, which no longer occurs in an encounter between image and language, as lucidly described by Mitchell and Boehm, but in an encounter between analogue and digital images, between representation and post-representation, reality and virtuality, semiotics and phenomenology. In order to understand this epochally new reality, one can use concepts such as Bolter’s and Grusin’s remediation, or Žarko Paić’s idea of the technosphere, as well as some other approaches, such as Paul Crowther’s categorization of “transhistorical images” or the phenomenologically based interpretation of art and images that Martin Seel has termed “the aesthetics of appearing”.
“Stars” from the Tube
