A NEW FRONTIER FOR VISUAL CULTURE: THOUGHTS ON THE PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF DIGITAL DEEP-SEA IMAGERY The following discussion is a response to the proliferation of digital deep-sea imagery that has been emerging since the mid-1990s. Here, digital imagery is understood in William J. Mitchell's (1994, 7) postmodern social and cultural terms as "a medium that privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and that emphasizes process or performance", and an "opportunity to expose the aporias of photography's construction of the visual world". A stock of visual documentation (still and moving images) is growing each day - widely available on the internet, in books (both for adults and for children), and in movie theatres internationally. IntroductionMindful of this new entertaining and educational material, it strikes me as problematic that there is a paucity of critical inquiry into the curatorial and signifying practices associated with its dissemination, certainly in terms of...
