Beyond Representation? The Database-driven Image and the Non-human Spectator

The discursive shift from photographs to content is indicative of the way in which the paradigm of information positions images within an alternative semantic framework. Metadata and pattern recognition algorithms have therefore become important methods through which meaning can be extracted from visual information. For the database-driven web, the analysis of metadata remains a key method through which selections of images are evaluated and gathered on-screen into meaningful visual assemblages. On social media platforms, a kind of metadata is generated through tagging, image rating, commenting, and other digital gestures collected as a byproduct of user interaction. Facial recognition algorithms ("built-in smile detection") are now a marketable feature of cameras, and scientists in the field of "computational photography" are focused on the deployment of new algorithms inside the camera itself, heralding a future in which "software is the next optics".