THE END OF THE DIGITAL

摘要

In 1992 Peter Eisenman published two now-famous articles announcing the coming of a new age of electronics in design. The technical logic of electronics, he argued, is symbolized by the telefax, the old age of mechanical technologies by the photograph. William Mitchell had just written a seminal book explaining that digital photography (then still in its infancy) may look like traditional photography, but it is technically and ontologically quite unlike it. Traditional photographs are indexical traces of the originals they represent; digital photographs are sequences of numbers that can be edited (or recalculated) anytime.