Hyperimage: Photography Beyond the Human Scale
Hyperimage refers to a myriad of emerging imaging practices, such as remote sensing and computer vision, where large-scale computation valorises the massification of photography to automate image-making and interpretation. These practices comprise an assemblage of computational infrastructure,cultural techniques, visual media, human operators, and machine agents spanning the globe across time and space on a much larger scale than conventional photography. Applying scale theory to the contemporary photography discourses, this doctoral thesis addresses how their vastness impacts visual culture. I argue that the large expansion of statistical scale not only leads to a quantitative expansion of operational capacity but also entails a qualitative change in how images mediate reality. While offering new visibilities previously impossible to photography, these practices also produce misinterpretations, hallucinations, and apophenia. Through interviews and field visits with remote sensing scientists, image studies, cognitive mapping, and video essays, my artistic research unveils the invisual scalar operations behind the visual image and untangles the complex network of relations at play in computational image making. Hyperimage signifies a shift towards a post-representational ‘truth-to-scale’ realism where large-scale supersedes human experience as the basis of mediation, casting an ever-present shadow of epistemological uncertainty over every image.
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