Metadata

Startingpoint for the Image Map research is the Add note feature of photo-sharing application Flickr and image recognition software. The remarkable transformation going on here is the introduction of the image metadata as a visual layer on top of the original digital image, a painting in this case. The image with notes turns into a kind of map, a diagrammatic collection of notes linked to the image; an abstract image. A map of comments but at the same time a map of relations between people, images and camera’s. They map out the network of this particular image, they are organograms, visualizing the organization of the internal image architecture of data as well as social relations of Flickr users through images which the image as data repository is collecting. Both the original data + metadata are in fact in one interface: the image itself.
This introduces an interesting transformation of the relation between figure and medium. The figure interfaces the transformation of image body when content is added to it with the Add note feature. Figure and medium are not in an antagonistic relation, they become one. The image or photograph is not about its figurative representation, it is a representation of the image body and the way it is being produced. Visually, figure and medium merge and transform into an abstract image; the diagrammatic collection of notes linked to the image, an Image map.

What happens when reality becomes digital for the first time?

The passage from the virtual through the possible to the real is the fundamental act of creation ... Ontology is not an abstract science ... Now the new virtualities, the naked life of the present, have the capacity to take control of the processes of machinic metamorphosis. (Hardt & Negri, 2000).

When Reality and Virtual encountered, a new form of commodity was born. Whereas consumption becomes immaterial, the object is Imaginary.

And if property was out of date? Another inversion is possible.