Harry Sanderson reflects on the economy of networked image commodities and the chains of labour which underpin their appearance There is a relation, largely avoided and unexplored, between the ubiquity of digital commodities, and the capacity of these devices to reproduce and maintain a necessary insouciance towards the exploitation and violence required for their continued production.
(CGI) images cease to reflect the external world and get enclosed within the organism’s internal milieu, folding perception back into the subject’s endogenous apparitions instead of extending perception outside itself. […] The technology’s efficacy is [..] articulated in terms of how the patient becomes affectively ‘immersed’ in or ‘synchronized’ with the virtual environment.(Pasi Väliaho)
This analysis can be extended to the cognitive affects of CGI and interfacial modes of experience that digital commodities effect in civilian society, and their role in ‘modulating […] affective life’ in the creation of a de-politicised subject. The user internalises a distance from corporeal reality as they are progressively enveloped by a field of potential interactions and relationships."