Distribution of Images
For Benedict Anderson, national "imagined communities" emerge from productions of mass media. The printing press, for example, distributes images of, say, England nationalism on a mass scale, filling the English landscape with images that individual and collective actors interact with and maneuver through. The spatial language is appropriate to thinking about images if we are to consider images as more than Platonic abstractions. Images occupy space, a type of topological space, perhaps, not conceptualized metrically but as a network. A space beyond our local, common-sense experience of a given place. Imagined communities are image communities that take humanity into previously uncharted territory, producing cohesive collectivities out of spatially and even temporally distant actors.
In a word, images are distributed, "divided and shared among agents and structures in the environment" (Syverson 7). Really, images extend our sense and concept of the environment outwards. En"viron," a closed circuit, becomes ever larger as images introduce new encounters that extend the real and imagined boundaries of our world. It works at all scales too. Electron microscopes reveal cellular topographies, while the Hubble Space Telescope relays pictures of interstellar gas birthing new stars. We maintain social lives over rivers of information flow, a Facebook page connecting Texas to Thailand.
Images of Distribution
An image, as in a webpage, offers an image of distribution: those networks of friends that make up a given "community." Facebook remains constrained, however, by its templates, centralized by a company, centered around a spectator (me). An image of distribution would display Facebook under new light, a highlight of its material distribution among electrical circuits, laptops, houses, living rooms--simultaneously a socio-economic distribution among middle-classes and its deviations.
Food, a highly condensed social fact, as Arjun Appadurai says, and a material necessity, offers a potentially densely-connected, widely-dispersed image of distribution. Within complex systems of food are lines of flight connecting multiple scales and varying actors, material and social, organic and inorganic. In a nuclear age, to echo Timothy Morton, food is a plutonium hyperobject with a rate of decay beyond any individual human time scale. (Even generations may not live to tell the tale of plutonium decay, 24,100 years). The now famous commodity biographies on cod, spice, bananas, coffee offer a snapshot of this radioactive decay, but not the whole story. Not the endless flares of distribution perpetually heating up and burning out. But capturing the entire distributed quality of a commodity is impossible, a perpetual fractal machine dynamic to the core.
An image of distribution may be enough to spark a new fire trail, a fire walk in the David Lynch sense.
Enough of a cult following has sprung up around Lynch's early-90s drama, Twin Peaks, to demonstrate the power of a new path, a new line of flight out of rote TV dramas. Down the rabbit hole we go with images of distribution.
