an image of a cat

I am looking at a cat in a room. 

I wonder if the cat could be a cat without there being an image of the cat as well. I think the image of the cat cannot be what you see in the moment of seeing the physical cat. The physical cat, there in the room, is the cat itself. In this spirit, let's assume that what I see when I see the cat is the cat as a physical clump composed of its essence. If we were to cut through its body and its cross section was uniform—in the moment of our perception of this cat, this cat is not an image. I was inspired by Matt Keegan's idea that if you were to cut through Anne Truitt's totems, the color would continue throughout the whole section.

The most obvious definition of an image of the cat is something that signifies or refers to the cat. A drawing, or a photograph, of the cat is an image of the cat; it is not the cat itself in that specific moment in time. This notion of "image" involves the physical creation of the image by hand, which may lead to the idea that an image is something created with the purpose of having an appearance that refers to something specific. It appears.

While seeing is clearly a fundamental characteristic of an image, in that it activates it, a drawing also inherently carries another sense: the quality of tactility. The drawing is a physical and tangible object. 

However, the image should be independent from tactility. Consider memory: remembrance can only exist after the moment. One's imagination may be triggered by perception, but it is fundamentally an internal experience projected onto the screens within one's mind. As such, when I imagine an image, even if I picture spatial depth, the "image" is a ultimately two dimensional surface, just as a photograph flatly conveys depth.

While an image is not necessarily two dimensional, perhaps we have been trained to perceive of appearances in this manner.