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1. THE TRANSITORY FRAME
17 degrees South, 149 degrees West. He had been told that this was the location of Paradise: a wonderful idea, although he did not quite believe it.
The voyager, Joseph Banks, discovers these coordinates to be the location of the island we now call Tahiti. This exploration is not solely an articulation of Western society's supremacy over 'inferior' cultures, but is also a manifestation of the human predisposition to be at odds with the state of things. We intrinsically want to exist elsewhere, to subsist in a utopic environment in which our desires become discernible. Humans' "striving for happiness is to be recognized as a natural fact requiring no justification," writes Max Horkheimer.✎ We search for what we cannot have, and what we have is no longer adequate. The user surfs online in anticipation of some revelation; she refreshes her email, in hopes of notification within her inbox. The user subsequently refreshes, again attempting to discern a change. Yet, there is no bolded text, no highlighted phrase, and no red bubble in her hindsight. She then stares at her desktop, passing the time. A few more minutes go by until the user acknowledges her physicality, until she perceives the space surrounding the computer screen and readjusts her fixation to the corporeal environment.
Contemporary digital interfaces are designed to instigate a sense of familiarity amongst the unfamiliar. While fixated on the computer monitor, the flat LCD backlit screen transpires as a window into another space. The contrast between the screen's luminosity and the materiality of the hardware allows for transcendence into the virtual space to fruitfully emerge. However, the user is grounded by the familiarity of the objects within this virtual space; she assimilates through images and icons that denote her everyday corporeal experiences. Desktop folders disperse amongst columns and rows, embodying humans' indexical tendencies, drop shadows recede behind the files, giving them dimension, and application icons emphasize various formal traits associated with specific physical objects, such as the Safari browser's blue compass. These images, objects, and icons facilitate the user in creating a sense of depth within the desktop, making sense of this space rather than denoting it as void.
However, the scale of the monitor causes the viewer to realize her own physicality, turning this virtual window into a flat material once again. The screen now exists as an apparatus, an object of functionality rather than a space for contemplation. This back-and-forth relationship between the screen's depth and flatness, its illusory software and its material hardware, has a prominent correlation to Western painting's tradition of pictorial illusionism, "in which a screen functions as a window into a virtual space, something for the viewer to look into but not act upon."✎ The screen does not encompass the entire space surrounding the viewer, but the viewer is nonetheless engrossed by this window due to the framing of the screen, the scale of the imagery in relation to the viewer's body, and various formal and conceptual qualities embedded within the imagery. The viewer descends into another space, while standing on firm ground. According to Derrida, the frame "breaks down and dislocates even as it cooperates in the production of the product, overflows it and is deduc(t)ed from it. It never let's itself be simply exposed," but rather coexists with the screen, acting as a mediator between the image and the surrounding physical environment.✎
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The computer screen is simultaneously flat, three-dimensional, static, dynamic, and operational. Perhaps the operational, the real-time, is what distinguishes this screen from any other. Rather than solely acting as a window for viewing, the screen becomes a window for potential, a space for input and output.
But what exactly is created in this operational screen? What is outputted through this space? Through the computer interface, images may be produced, images that have no referent to corporeality. Due to the uncanny hyperrealism of these images, the viewer is immersed into the virtual space, neglecting the flatness of the screen. Everything renders with sterile uniformity, remaining intimate with the design firm as an aesthetic access point. The modern notion of progress, the corridor to Utopia, thrives in the viewer's level of descent into the CG space. Yet, we must posit boundaries for how to approach this spiraling image.
Utopia… is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world (except in the direction of dystopia and catastrophe).✎
Applying the Utopia operation to the CG image, the user's limitations arise in her spatial continuity; she may not be able to literally step into the rendered image, but she nevertheless recognizes and speaks of it as its own spatial entity. If digital images can be transmitted with congruent speed, then "the concepts of near and far, horizon, distance, and space itself no longer have any meaning...," and as a consequence, geometric perception is lost and "the earth becomes our prison."✎ The new CG image discussed subsequently attempts to disrupt this imprisonment through the image's affect, its simultaneous accessibility and distance (see Figure 2). Digitally manipulated CGI are here considered to be dystopic and catastrophic, and without which the user cannot postulate a future renewal of progress. It is through flattening these hyperrealistic simulations that the image instigates a sense of placelessness, a sense of being "neither far nor near."
2. THE DIGITAL ORIGINAL
Before further considering potentialities for the image's post-observation affect, the image's origination needs explication. The mode of production is intrinsic to the expansive concept of the individual work, but is never overarching.
Art-historical-craftsmanship-hierarchies deem reproducibility antithetical to authenticity. Manual reproduction implicates forgery, and the original avoids devaluation. The meticulous efforts of counterfeit painting create a surplus of artworks, yet do not truncate the original's collectability. However, in his canonical essay "The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin denounces the original's preservation in light of technological reproduction. Benjamin's logic consists of two endorsing scenarios: photographic reproduction's amplification of previously imperceptible data, and the ability to re-contextualize the copy in situations foreign to the original.✎ The latter is problematic within digital production, for the copy operation is misallocated. Reproductions of CGI are not copies of original pixels, but rather are re-executions of generative source code. Rather than use the term 'copy' to refer to this re-execution, we hereby refer to the newborn images as counterparts, as this series of seemingly identical images are in fact all originals!
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We here enter the conversation of simulacrum: that which "bears only an external and deceptive resemblance to a putative model."✎ The rendered image is now inner-dynamic, its counterparts infinitely generative. Similarly, not only do twin image files proliferate independently, they remain legitimate simulacra even when manipulated by interfacial tools. One of the most primitive of such tools is Light Pen; invented in 1949, it is considered to be a precursor to the contemporary computer mouse.✎ The Light Pen is an input device in the form of a light-sensitive wand that is used in conjunction with a computer monitor; it allows the user to draw on the screen in a similar manner to a ballpoint pen on paper, allowing for fine control over the graphical user interface (GUI). Most importantly, the Pen's original implementation changes computer screen's utilization from an information display to a junction for inputting and outputting.
Consider painting in Adobe® Photoshop® with an optical computer mouse. In order to once again advocate for computer graphics' authenticity, we must make distinctions between internal tools and external tools in relation to the screen and implemented software. In preparation to paint, Adobe provides the user with two primary tool presets:
 'Brush Tool' and  'Pencil Tool.' The utensils share the same array of brush shapes and sizes, the only difference being the Brush Tool's 'Flow' attribute, which is the rate at which color is applied to the cursor's position on the canvas at a given point in time. Regardless of flow preference, the user's hand grasps the mouse and performs a frenetic display of communication with the GUI. Simultaneously, the cursor jumps around the canvas with similar gesticulation as the mouse, somehow culminating in an abstract expressionistic squiggle (see Figure 3). Note that the optical mouse detects two-dimensional motion relative to a supporting surface that is typically parallel to the floor, such as a desktop or tabletop. But what, if anything, is simulated – the act of painting, or the paint itself?
The cursor's pathway appears identical to that of the mouse, before realizing its containment within a gridded plane that exists perpendicularly to the surface being tracked. Mouse-to-cursor synchrony is thus slightly abstracted. However, the user's body in relation to the screen plane and mouse plane typically positions itself obtusely so that both planes flatten via perspective. The mapped mouse-cursor dynamics deconstruct spatial distance, allowing for the user to examine her once-perceived gestural synchrony with cursor. "The simulacrum affirms its own difference," says Brian Massumi, "It is not an implosion, but a differentiation; it is an index not of absolute proximity, but of galactic distances."✎ Through simulated synchrony, difference and distance protrude. The screen-based brush and the user's hand realize their schism, their spatial distress. Yet the user holds onto as many threads of engagement as she can; she knows that somehow her hand's artifact is present within the digital paint. The hand's simultaneous removal creates a sense of awe; as Benjamin suggests, "We define the aura of [natural objects] as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be."✎
The Macintosh has served as a carrior object for the (postmodern) idea that search for depth and mechanism is futile, that it is more realistic to explore the world of shifting surfaces than to embark on a search for origins and structure.
-Sherry Turkle
3. FILTERED DISTANCE
Adobe advertises its filters as tools "to clean up or retouch [one's] photos, apply special art effects that give [one's] image the appearance of a sketch or impressionistic painting, or create unique transformations using distortion and lighting effects."✎ This statement audaciously proposes that 'anyone can do it,' anyone can create an impressionist painting with ease, and that anyone can become an artist. To a certain degree, this statement is accurate in regards to technique. In Adobe Photoshop, the mouse acts as an extension of the hand, utilizing various tools within the program's menu. While the level of skill required to use Photoshop is typically overlooked, the Filter Gallery is an exception to the majority of the application, in that the user is required to do very little in order to make the impressionist painting. The initial image willingly accepts these alterations, as it is the nature of the computer-generated image to be subject to algorithmic manipulations. The computer-generated image differentiates itself from the analogue image, existing in binary code, existing in an immaterial dataset that longs to become material. Similarly, the user longs to make these immaterial digital images physically, to feel the contours and textures of the image itself. Through the use of various filters from the Filter Gallery, the image feels slightly more 'real' again, slightly more three-dimensional, as contours form over the image, mimicking realistic lighting and shading. In this sense, the Filter Gallery acts as a provisional solution to this attempt to exist with the computer-generated image physically as the user does virtually.
But what is this aura of which Benjamin speaks – when do we feel it, why must we feel it, how was it lost? The image in discussion is still a digital original, an image born in binaries; yet, it exists as an amalgamation of dimensionality, instigating a sense of placelessness. The user desires to penetrate the image, to touch its glossy objects, and yet is confronted by the flatness of the frontal filter (see Figures 7 + 8). "Although the thing should be easily within our grasp, the entire universe has somehow been adjusted to produce, again and again, an unfathomable contingency blocking it."✎ This notion of wanting to go where one cannot, of attempting to subsist in an idealistic or utopic realm, is intrinsic to human nature. The image needs to navigate and amalgamate multiple dimensions, in order to exist in a degree of inaccessibility. If we fully penetrate the image, if we subsist within utopic binaries, then there is nothing left to live for, nowhere else to go. The image must obstruct our human desires in order for there to be something worth attaining, someplace worth going.
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