From the “Camera Obscura” to the Computer, or How Does the Image Become an Apparent Indexical Sign

The triumph of the image in contemporary culture is as obvious as the triumph of the body within the Western civilization. However, what has been less noticed is that it is also as partial and specific. As it is not the body in its metaphysical certainty that had triumphed, but only the body as a register of meanings (only the body as language), what triumphs in this civilization is also only a certain type of image. This is because when we, the Westerners, refer to the image, we inevitably think of the tridimensional space of the Euclidean projection, originating in the Renaissance paintings and backed up afterwards by the photography of the late 19th century, by cinematography and by today s omnipresent television. This is the type of image that has triumphed and that takes under its caring wing everything that resembles it within the visual culture. Consequently, we speak with too much ease about the image and we call almost everything “image” as long as it vaguely belongs to visibility, or even to resemblance in a very general sense, even though we conceive it according to the tridimensional image from the Euclidean projection.