SIMAGE PROJECT

With found contributions by dozens of voices in philosophy, economics, politics, popular culture, art, and design, Simage Project attempts to trace the evolution of “image” from its first known expressions 50,000 years ago to the present through visual and written essays. The project gathers thousands of personal and public domain images to explore how the evolution of representation contributes to the formation of contemporary cultural contexts.

Through its artificiality, imagery is putatively curated to reveal and establish reality. Since its appearance image has called for more images and pictorial accumulations but when big data and social media optimization combine to drive pictorial accumulations and targeted disseminations, “image” then sublimates the idea of representation and becomes its own form of growing reality where images can multiply and mutate seemingly at will. 

As such, SIMAGE has a double meaning:
1. As accumulation of similarities, it is the plural of “image”, when grouped by formal or semantic systems of likeness.  “Simages” then stands for several image groups that can be thought of as hyperobjects or conceptual images in their own right. From tree, portrait or house, they may become forest, crowd or city. From Antiquity to now, this phenomenon continues to produce expressions in a tradition that we could label “simagism.”

2. As pictorial synthesis, it is a mix of related images combined into the singular representation of a subject or typology.

»SIMAGE PROJECT /.»Framing By Image PDF