What is the relationship between digital media and the material world, and how might our use of the former change our understanding of and place within the latter? A central concern of digital media theory from the late- 1990s onwards, the ethical aspects of this technological and (potentially) ontological change in relation to film is summed up by Markos Hadjioannou in From Light to Byte: Towards an Ethics of Digital Cinema (2012). As he describes, analogue cinema's indexicality ‘enables a realization on the part of the spectator of her or his existential position within the world and so qualifies an ethical implication in the image as the potential for responding to, and acting in, the world’ (2012: 177). Digital media, by contrast, offer not indexical trace but interactive, present-tense simulation, and so, for Hadjioannou, ‘cannot conjure up an image of the world as an existential guarantee’ (2012: 177). While assertions around the radical differences between analogue and digital capture have been challenged (see, for instance, Cubitt 2011), it is certainly the case that digital images and the networks that produce them offer a new kind of visual modality. In a digital age, vision becomes a method of filtering, rather than encountering, and the image becomes interactive and navigable (Manovich 2001; Verhoeff 2012). Images are no longer only observed, they are swiped, clicked, tagged, filtered, and shared. If they provide evidentiary proof, it is less as an authentication of a past moment than a trace of a flexible present, a conditional marker of temporary conditions.

All of this alters our ethical relationship to images. The new digital visuality is not principally voyeuristic or scopophilic but rather cartographic, defined by an informatic mode of automated recording and registering that seeks legibility and apparent usefulness. This is not to say that this is entirely novel: the digital's ‘cartographic gaze’ of remote presence certainly inherits impulses to catalogue and quantify familiar from colonial visual modalities – image-making and image-circulation remain methods for distant control and ideological persuasion (Specht and Feigenbaum 2019). Through interactive digital images, the perception of the user is extended beyond their temporalspatial confines. This is achieved through the digital generation of an algorithmic world, one which is less concerned with aesthetic appreciation than it is with bodily immersion and virtual presence.