Sophia Chefalo’s (SMACT ’26) and Vinzenz Aubry’s (SMACT ’25) latest essay “The Non-deterministic Apparatus: From Index to Icon” traces the current trajectory of todays image culture towards post-light imaging and its impact on our relationship to the world.
The photographs we create have been undergoing a quiet yet radical transformation in their relation to the world. Digital cameras, particularly smartphone cameras, which we take as our guiding example for this essay, reveal how far indexicality is being displaced. With a recent Samsung Galaxy smartphone, one can no longer photograph the real moon. Instead, when trying to do so, the result contains details that were never optically present. An artificial moon synthesized from a training dataset of previous moons is unknowingly superimposed onto the final image. These moons no longer point to a singular time and place in the physical world—they appear real through photographic visual language, invoking “photographicness,” yet function through probabilistic generation.
What happens when the photographic image becomes statistical rather than indexical? Photography has long operated through what Roland Barthes called ‘that-has-been’ (ça-a-été) the trace of a specific moment fixed from time. Computational and AI imaging transform this relationship from ‘that-has-been’ to ‘this-could-be’: from singular trace to probabilistic synthesis. The gesture of single-bodied image-making, which once produced the photographic trace, is evermore superseded by processes that require no bodily mediation, removing the individual’s need to search, decide, or even press a shutter.
This essay traces the exponential erasure of the gesture of photography, the embodied human-apparatus relation on which Vilém Flusser grounded his theory of Technical Images. We follow this transformation through computational supplementation, the replacement of the shutter via text prompts, and machine learning models that average singular traces into statistical multitudes. This ontological shift introduces self-referential, post-corporeal, post-light icons that only intensify the question of how to read images.
