Digital images are an integral part of all media, including television, film, photography, animation, video games, data visualization, and the Internet. In the digital world, spectators become navigators wending their way through a variety of interactive experiences, and images become spaces of visualization with more and more intelligence programmed into the very fabric of communication processes. In How Images Think, Ron Burnett explores this new ecology, which has transformed the relationships humans have with the image-based technologies they have created. So much intelligence has been programmed into these image-dependent technologies that it often seems as if images are "thinking"; ascribing thought to machines redefines our relationship with them and enlarges our ideas about body and mind. Burnett argues that the development of this new, closely interdependent relationship marks a turning point in our understanding of the connections between humans and machines. Table of Contents List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments x Introduction xiv 1 Vantage Point and Image-Worlds 1 2 Imagescapes, Mind and Body 39 3 Foundations of Virtual Images 57 4 Imagescapes as Ecology 71 5 Simulation/Viewing/Immersion 93 6 Humans-----------Machines 117 7 Peer-to-Peer Communications/Visualizing Community 143 8 Computer Games and the Aesthetics of Human and Nonhuman Interaction 167 9 Reanimating the World: Waves of Interaction 199 References 222 Index 241