Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie develop the notion of the common image--a multisensory perception and common ethics that transcend species-bound ways of living. Highlighting the notion of the common as opposed to the immune, the authors ultimately advocate otherness as a common ground for a larger than human communism.
With today s digital technology, the image is no longer a stable representation of the world, but a programmable view of a database that is updated in real time. It no longer functions as a political and iconic representation, but plays a vital role in synchronic data-to-data relationships. It is not only part of a program, but it contains its own operating code: the image is a program in itself. "Softimage" aims to account for that new reality, taking readers on a journey that gradually undoes our unthinking reliance on the apparent solidity of the photographic image and building in its place an original and timely theorization of the digital image in all its complexity, one that promises to spark debate within the evolving fields of image studies and software studies."