Infravisuality
invisuality - there is in as negation and in as preposition indicating "inside" - this creates the tension required for the neologism to sustain inquiry. However, I would claim that it tends to distract from the very object it purports to study: it hinges on the idea of invisible images, and problematizes the image as something that can exist beyond vision. Certainly, while broader understandings of the word image exist - i would claim that invisuality leads too easily to an unimportant interrogation: are invisual images images at all? This is in fact irrelevant, but is an intellectual pitfall that is laid, proably fortuitously, by a term that so ambiguously surrounds image culture. In place of visuality, we should talk of opticality. In place of "in" for "inside" or "inverse", we should say "infra" for "under": infravisuality, or infraopticality. I will also go on a coining frenzy, suggesting "anopticality".
We talk about invisible image technologies: Lidar, heat sensing, infrared and ultraviolet sensing, depth mapping, potentially also latent (statistical) imaging.
A term is being used to describe
Plan:
I. Lit review forinvisual
II. Limitations and shortfalls of the term
a. tension of "in" as both "inside" and "inverted" is counterproductive - the paradoxical nature of the term creates ambiguity which is fertile ground for academic speculation but renders the neologism inoperative as a heuristic
b. tends to lead to debates around what is an image, what is an invisual image and so on, which are irrelevant - imageness (the character of being an image) is not a useful heuristic either, thoughimageability (the ease with which a concept can become an image) is, in a different context
III. Suggestion of infravisual, elucidation of the advantages
a. avoids the debate "is it an image", how can it be an image if it cannot be seen etc, which I consider:
- to have essentially been solved by philosophy of perception - an image is such as it is perceived by an embodied sensory apparatus
- to be irrelevant to the discussion of invisible image technologies
b. suggests layering, scaffolding, a support structure of the image - the link to infrastructure helps build a mental model of invisible image technologies as a stack of layers that could underlie an image or not (that is to say the image is always latent in this model)
c. brings the discourse to a more easily grasped position (almost physically so) in relation to:
- the difference and relationship between vision and visuality
- the subterannean, very obviously hidden nature of the actual subject (which is image technology beyond the visible)