Boundary Images

For modern visual analysis, images are no longer pure images, they have become agents. Their actions and mechanisms no longer represent something, as traditionally studied in the field of semiotics, history, or art history, but actually do something: they produce various types of relationships and thus meanings in and outside the merely visual space. More concretely, they morph into “boundary images,” a concept that pays tribute to the work on WJT Mitchell and his interest in what pictures “want.” The boundary image can also refer to the broader definition of Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, for whom it is “an entity that links networks, elastic enough to be adapted to a new context and robust enough to keep its main characteristics” (p. 2). Boundary images are a subcategory of such boundary objects and are themselves capable of accepting new subcategories like “ontological boundary images,” which transgress the usual...