Seeing Things: Image and Affect

Abstract

In the age of digital media how might we speak about images of torture, and how might we regard the pain of others?  Using the examples of a short film by Alejandra Canales which recounts the experience of torture, and the Abu Ghraib photographs, this article seeks to repose the question of the function of the image and its relationship to epistemology. How do we know what we see? And how might we rethink the orthodox function of the image in the age of digital technology? In attempting to answer these questions, I argue that the production of virtual experience is a capacity of the human body, and that image making, like all genres of communication, is a practice in virtual community.