Could Deep Fakes Uncover the Deeper Truth of an Ontology of the Networked Images?

Abstract

CAN ONE RESPOND TO A QUESTIONNAIRE WITH QUESTIONS? In the questionnaire he sent us for a special issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Jacob Lund asks: “To which extent do the advent of operative images and machine vision and the increasing number of images that become networked change the ontology of the image?” If we agree with the statement that we can no longer “think of images as relatively individualized or delimited phenomena,” but that, increasingly, “images seem to gain meaning and significance through their relationships with other images, and from being networked,” what philosophical, political and aesthetic consequences should we draw from this (new?) state of affair? While genuinely attempting to address such issues, I will rather do so by formulating further questions than by bringing assertive answers.