REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

Representation; is a key idea in traditional media studies where it points to the role of ideology, belief, and selective perception in the act of communicating ideas about and experiences of the ‘real’ world (in photography, television, film and cinema, advertisements etc.). It also draws our attention to the role of language, and in the realm of visual representation, the signs and codes that we necessarily employ in making images. In using the concept ‘representation’ we stress the way that the words or visual signs we use (the signifying processes) necessarily mediate or change the objects in the world that we communicate about.

In its strongest form people go so far as to argue that the world only has meaning for us because of the concepts that we employ to make it meaningful. Changes in ways of visually representing the world, and the relationship of the resulting images to historically changing ‘ways of seeing’ are also central to the study of visual culture. Images both lead us to ‘see’ the world in certain ways and are themselves shaped by our ideas and a culture’s priorities and interests. The technologies available to a culture also play a role in these processes.

Further, the nature of an image or a visual representation can be said to constitute a viewer or spectator, largely by the way they give us a position and an identity from which to view the world (although, of course, we may reject the identities that a particular kind of image encourages us to adopt). In these and other ways, ‘representation’ has long been a very important concept in the study of art and media.

People identified three broad ways in which simulation is used in the analysis of new media. In the version which we call ‘Postmodernist’ people noted that many commentators on contemporary cultural change tend to agree that during the last decades of the twentieth century there has been a shift, in visual culture, from ’representation’ to ‘simulation’. Given the centrality, that we just noted, of the concept of ‘representation’ in the study of art and media this should be a change of some moment. Yet, surprisingly, there is simultaneously ‘no agreement that simulation does in fact differ from representation or imitation’. By narrowing our definition of simulation, particularly by using the meaning it has in the study of computer simulations and computer games studies, some clarity was introduced into this otherwise confusing situation. In the study of computer simulations, a simulation is taken to be a ‘modelling of a dynamic system’. This model is a structured environment, a universe with its own rules and properties with which the user or player interacts.

It is not confined to imitating existing worlds or processes, although it may also do that in part. Here then, we have a kind of simulation (temporal, algorithmic, not necessarily mimetic, and interactive) that is clearly different from any visual representation that we can think of. However, outside of these important cases, the distinction between simulation and representation remains unclear. Once we return to the kinds of virtuality and simulation that digital and networked image technologies produce, to the wider changes in visual culture which our ‘postmodern’ theorists celebrate or regret, confusion again reigns. If we think about our wider ‘digital’ visual culture the distinctions between representation and simulation that make sense in the study of computer games do not really hold for the following reasons:
Not only simulations are real We saw above that it is important to see that simulations are not adequately thought of as ‘illusions’ both because they have their own reality (as hardware, as machines) and because they may model real processes. But while images that ‘represent’ in a traditional sense may not offer us an interactive engagement with virtual worlds in this way, they too are real things. They are also artefacts and are composed of material stuff (just as the things they represent usually are) – paint (coloured mud), ink (ground up shells), silver salts (mined) and spread on celluloid strips in factories, electro-magnetic particles, electronic pulses in hardwired circuits etc.

However ‘realistically’ such images may represent or depict things they also have their own physical reality. In this sense, while it may be very important to insist on the materiality of simulations this is not an adequate basis to distinguish them from representations. We cannot simply say that a simulation is the product of a simulating machine while a representation is only a mental process or the product of ideas. It simply is not true. Both involve work on materials and utilise tools and technologies, and both are artefacts.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686