S.H.A.M.E. - Week 2 / Image

In our second group discussion, we first talked about the concept of the mental image since we thought it was a bit confusing how Mitchell approached it in the text. It lead us to discuss imagination and how not everybody is necessarily capable of imagining a concept or an idea in a visual matter. It made us question ourselves about our senses, how we depend so much on our sight to navigate through the world. How about blind people? Not the ones who lose sight during a certain event in their life, but people that are born that way. Can they have mental images? And if so, are they even close to reality since they don’t have any visual representation of it? How does this come into play when interacting with media images?

We also discuss biases; how people rely on their biases to create their own physical (i.e.: photography and film) and mental images and how, in creating images, even AI learning machines are biased by their creator’s biases. Is it even possible to make sense of the world / be self-aware / conscious (for a machine or a human) without being biased? If a computer knows all possible information about a color, what digital value it is, all the shades it can have, etc., does the information and the knowledge translate into a true experience of it?