Under the gaze of Ulysses –

Species, words and other landscapes

a TRAVEL NOTEBOOK by Manuel Valente Alves

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Digital grid

“The synthetic image is free of the limitations of both human and camera vision. It can have unlimited resolution and an unlimited level of detail. It is free of the depth-of-the-field effect, this inevitable conequence of the lens, so everything is in focus. It is also free of grain – the layer of noise created by film stock and by human perception. Its colors are more saturated, and its sharp lines follow the economy of geometry. From the point of view of human vision, it is hyperreal. And yet, it is completely realistic. The synthetic image is the result of a different, more perfect than human, vision.
Whose vision is it? It is the vision of a computer, a cyborg, an automatic missile. It is a realistic representation of human vision in the future when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed of noise. It is the vision of a digital grid. Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality.” –– Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2001)

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