What is an Image (AR)

The question, ‘what is an image?’ is like the dilemma, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Someone like the artist, Julian Lethbridge, says, “an image could be anything.” Others, like my friend Nisa, who is a filmmaker, says, “an image is an idea.” Having thought about this question for almost 2 months, I would say that an image is a kind of process consisting of several elements. Starting with the complexity of an abstract thought, i.e. the ‘idea,’ to the final end product, which is the materialization of that idea into a kind visual form. We arrive at this visual end result through a series of processes vis-à-vis words.

In trying to define an image, however, language falls short due to the limitation of language, which is a kind of contradiction. Since most of the time an image is formulated via the articulation of an abstract thought, the expression of that thought, no matter how complicated it may be, is a syntactical process. Nonetheless, there will always be a disconnection between word and image. This dichotomy is manifested because we do not have the brain capacity to fully describe the visual landscape coexisting within an image. Words could only carry you so far until vision has to take over in order to extend the visual experience of what the eyes are seeing without a complete explanation.

Further, there is a hierarchy in the brain. We are highly visual creatures, therefore we tend to pay much more attention to vision rather than to voices or hearing; we give much more weight to vision than to anything else. Since we depend on vision to get around in the world, an image is what we decide; whatever the brain pays more attention to and processes. In that sense, attention and perception are married through a kind of hierarchical process, which determines what an image is. While I agree to a certain extent with Lethbridge’s and Nisa’s answer, I would argue that whether anything can be thought of as an image, which starts as an idea, is something that derives from a kind of process.

Thus, one can say that an image is the representation of an idea, reconstituted through a process, which is composed of several coexisting elements in a mode of expression and manifested or produced through different systems of production.