ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the first light-space-time structures and how they manifest in the earliest images. Virilio claims that through photographic images, particularly those that aim to transcribe the world, we have lost touch with the real. Baudrillard's understanding of the void through the absent connection between the sign contained within the photomedia image and the thing it represents is analyzed, as is Virilio's theory of speed and transition to the void through photomedia and its fast transmission. The chapter illustrates that in the digital era light-space-time developed with increasing vigor as image-spaces gained convincing and malleable pictorial compositions and highly compelling constructs via computer technology. As the technological drive for faster ways to take and present the image evolved, a new light-time experience emerged: slowness because of speed. Artists engaged with this paradoxical slowness, such as Wearing who responded with Snapshot (2005) which explores the stillness of the photograph through moving video.
