Alex Linfield

My research and artistic practice often looks to language in order to reveal our relationship to media and images. To me language is not only a material to create work out of, it is also a resource which provides etymological sources to digital media’s source code. Just as Heidegger utilized etymology to understand that technology holds its roots in technique, I tap into language to decode our digital images made of language itself.

The digital image is an impression completely made of language (code) and its visual form is perhaps only a skeuomorph adopted from previous modes of photography. If the digital image is a mimicry of photography’s forms of depiction then we require new modes of visually understanding it. Hence the source of source code may be the language we understood media through previously. After all, as Derrida believes, there are no outside texts.