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Footnote

Moving an to virtual images, Burnett posits the existence of "microcultures": places where people take control of the means of creation and production in order to makes sense of their social and cultural experiences. Driven by the need for community, such microcultures generate specific images as part of a cultural movement (Burnett in fact argues that microcultures make it possible for a "small cinema of twenty-five seats to become part of a cultural movement" [p. 63]), where the process of visualization-which involves an awareness of the historical moment - is central to the info-world and imagescapes presented. The computer becomms an archive, a history. The challenge is not only of preserving information, but also of extracting information. Visualization increasingly involves this process of picking a "vantage point" in order to selectively assimilate the information. In virtual reality systems, and in the digital age in general, the distance between what is being pictured and what is experienced is overcome. Images used to be treated as opaque or transparent films among experience, perception, and thought. But, now, images are taken to another level, where the viewer is immersed in the image-experience. Burnett argues-though this is hardly a fresh insight-that "interactivity is only possible when images are the raw material used by participants to change if not transform the purpose of their viewing experience" (p. 90). He suggests that a work of art, "does not start its life as an image ... it gains the status of image when it is placed into a context of viewing and visualization" (p. 90). With simulations and cyberspace the viewing experience has been changed utterly. Burnett defines simulation as "mapping different realities into images that have an environmental, cultural, and social form" (p. 95). However, the emphasis in Burnett is significant-he suggests that interactivity is not achieved through effects, but as a result of experiences attached to stories. Narrative is not merely the effect of technology-it is as much about awareness as it is about Fantasy. Heightened awareness, which is popular culture's aim at all times, and now available through head-mounted displays (HMD), also involves human emotions and the subtleties of human intuition.
Burnett's work is a useful basic primer an the new media. One of the chief attractions here is his clear language, devoid of the jargon of either computer sciences or advanced critical theory. This makes How Images Think an accessible introduction to digital cultures. Burnett explores the impact of the new technologies an not just image-making but an image-effects, and the ways in which images constitute our ecologies of identity, communication, and subject-hood. While some of the sections seem a little too basic (especially where he speaks about the ways in which we constitute an object as an object of art, see above), especially in the wake of reception theory, it still remains a starting point for those interested in cultural studies of the new media. The Gase Burnett makes out for the transformation of the ways in which we look at images has been strengthened by his attention to the history of this transformation-from photography through television and cinema and now to immersive virtual reality systems. Joseph Koemer (2004) has pointed out that the iconoclasm of early modern Europe actually demonstrates how idolatory was integral to the image-breakers' core belief. As Koerner puts it, "images never go away ... they persist and function by being perpetually destroyed" (p. 12). Burnett, likewise, argues that images in new media are reformed to suit new contexts of meaning-production-even when they appear to be destroyed. Images are recast, and the degree of their realism (or fantasy) heightened or diminished-but they do not "go away." Images do think, but-if I can parse Burnett's entire work-they think with, through, and in human intelligence, emotions, and intuitions. Images are uncanny-they are both us and not-us, ours and not-ours. There is, surprisingly, one factual error. Burnett claims that Myron Kreuger pioneered the term "virtual reality." To the best of my knowledge, it was Jaron Lanier who did so (see Featherstone & Burrows, 1998 [1995], p. 5)."