Any unique image that you desire probably already exists on the internet or in some database... the problem today is no longer how to create the right image, but how to find an already existing one.
Lev ManovichThe digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.
Lev Manovich... the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.
Lev ManovichIt has become a clichรฉ to announce that 'we live in a remix culture'... What was referred to in post-modern times as quoting, appropriation, and pastiche no longer needs any special name. Now this is simlpy the basic logic of cultural production.
Lev Manovich... what is faked [by the computerization of image-making], of course, is not reality, but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. In other words, what computer graphics have (almost) achieved is not realism, but rather only photorealism - the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image.
Lev Manovich