Communication Models, Aesthetics and Ontology of the Computational Age Revealed

In this chapter I look at the postdigital in relation to the way in which it manifests a real-time phenomenon that affects many fields of contemporary business, social and cultural activity. Technological advancements still to some extent based on Moore’s law are resulting in an exponential increase of the computational capacity of electronic devices. Thanks to powerful processing units and creative software, we can create visual hybrids and perform any kind of media editing and transformation. Visual media became programmable pieces of data which are often perceived as high-definition still images, computer-generated imagery (CGI) or movies. They are displayed on ultra-high-definition retina displays and can be accessed and edited thanks to intuitive user interfaces. However, the very computational materiality of today’s visual media is hidden beneath layers of user-friendly software, hardware, networks, cloud-based processing and storage services.