Marxist Aesthetics
In digital image-making each picture is as much a manifestation for the senses as a set of texts or tags that describe it and put it in relation to other pictures. Digital images are not only representations or copies of objects, but expressions of relations between pieces of information. Differing from perspective and more closely resembling cinema, the final form of the digital image is not an individuated object, but the unfolding of techno-social relations; that acoustic landscape colloquially known as the scroll. A digital image is not a single picture, but a techno-social scroll that, through the anthropometric figures of meta-data, retroactively grants sense and value to the overproduction of digital pictures. Meta-data can be therefore read as a curiously Marxist addition to aesthetics. However, these numerically encoded relations are not used to reframe our individuated perception, instead, they parasite on physical movements of social beings to recreate an apparent scrolling causality.