From spectatorship to interaction: Toward a phenomenology of digital image as a work of participatory art

Fortunes of the western civilization have always, to a large extent, rested on the visual. The unyielding domination of seeing, as it's been passionately argued by McLuhan and Ong among others, suppresses rest of the human sensorium, resulting in an almost hegemonic ocularcentrism. Accordingly, discourses of visual culture, since the dawn of modernity, presuppose a disembodied sense of sight, promoting a pretense that images of things are perceived solely in the mind. Yet, the process of digitization, redefining the essence of the image, has kindled a potentially much more significant change, which, in fact, challenges this established discourse: images are now ceasing to be the objects of an exclusive visuality, that is, they are quitting to be the things that are out there just for being looked at. In this research, we show that images are fast transforming instead into dynamically interactive entities, which are intelligently responsive to various somatic acts of their audience, such as touch, head and eye movements, gestures, and other postures of the body. We argue that in order to understand the nature of our future relationship with "intelligent" images, we should be prepared to re-think the sense of seeing in a holistic and embodied context, and address a number of questions that are inherently technological from a philosophical point of view. Building our research within the theoretical framework that we construct on concepts we barrow from McLuhan and three founding fathers of phenomenology, namely Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, we look at examples from art, and in particular, participatory art to investigate the sensual perception of digital images.