indexing & monitoring image

One of my conclusions is that images are no longer created to represent a reality but to manage it. The image existence as data, being described by metadata, makes it readable and therefore manageable by the network. The visual and infrastructural meet on the meta(data) level of files and applications. Within this meta(data) context the image’ utilities and profits are measured and further developed; how useful is it? The image as facilitating entity is being developed by the network consisting of humans and even more of machines.
People have become aware of the image as a tool, of its multiple uses and benefits such as indexing, besides its singular aesthetic richness. Google maps is one example of the indexing image. It illustrates the madness of imaging every bit of reality while finding the opportunity to reconfigure certain political and cultural concepts under the header of the semi-neutral concept of the map. The imaging of land by satellite corporations and Google eventually delivers them a valuable image. An image that contains powerful information on the basis of which Google updates its software: preferences. While digitizing land new borders arise; borders between images.
Is Google Earth a map or is it a political act of imaging land to own its image?

Is this a map, or is it a kind of cultural satisfaction of ‘being there’, inscribing ones presence into land? What you see here or actually not see anymore is a map of iceland covered with images of iceland.

This is a google street-view performance in Pittsburgh. Inhabitants of Pittsburgh proposed to integrate streettheatre into google streetview. One could say, the fake or some kind of unreal situation is introduced into the reality of the map, the streetview images.

More examples of StreetView acts: at Googleplex

monitoring
Digital image devices, such as camera phones and digital camera’s, with a connection to various networks and being an ever present eye on the world, instigate a performative role of the image; monitoring. The eye of the interconnected camera does not just capture, it observes, evaluates and sometimes predicts. The resulting imagery is inextricably connected to its productive technology, many times performing preprogrammed network protocols. A camera phone image of her dog’s poop in the metro configures the future of a Korean girl at the moment the image is being recorded and instantly uploaded to the web. Networked images allow for the management of power relations inscribed to it by software. This ‘image utilitarianism’ is a result of the social productivity stimulated by web-applications as well as by the easy access to recording devices. The combination of these tools makes imagination applicable, directly linked to implementation.