Vincent Thornhill

Prizes: Keep an Eye Grant Nominee, Gijs Bakker Award Nominee

Department: Information Design
Website: vincentwork.com

THE HD SELF

As our production and consumption of images increases, encouraged by the formats and systems of the digital image, the visual becomes more than just representation. Image use begins to form both a visual and philosophical paradigm with the potential to liberate us from the restrictions of a singular sense of identity.


The current production and consumption of images has the potential to liberate us from the restrictions of a singular sense of identity. In this research and design project I investigate the digital image in relation to self-image. When much of today’s image circulation derives from a human desire for recognition — hardwired by our needs as social animals — an understanding of the reality of images becomes urgent. The re-examination of the broader sense of ‘image’, in conjunction with tracing the rise and enactment of images, attempts to dissolve the limiting and deterministic distinction between the real, and image representation.

The orientational paradigm of the digital image disrupts the linear perspective we use to structure our experiences. Where this ‘one point perspective’ can be seen as a limiting subject–object relationship, the digital image breaks apart this dichotomy, using multiplicity — the pixel, the camera, the screen — to illuminate our plurality. In doing so, the digital image can show us the reality of our image, simultaneously more defined and more distorted than we were able to perceive.¬¬