In The Electric Image, Chris Kitze explored the transformation and globalization of culture by digital technology. Investigating urban centers where store windows and monumental advertising images are a worldwide phenomenon and a part of modern mythology, Kitze reveals how the numerical representation of imagery makes it possible for everything and anyone to be everywhere.

Although Kitze is fascinated by digital forms, he does not apply the technology to his work. Instead, he allows these objects to reflect and collide with one another, creating an improvisational mise-en-scène replete with unintended meaning and full of ambivalence. Questioning the new realism of digital media and its manipulation of desire and fear through the use of familiar icons and archetypes, The Electric Image exposes how easily one can appropriate, manipulate, and distribute the digital image, challenging photography’s traditions of originality and authority. What emerges is a new visual mythology not unlike software, which is malleable in the hands of a user and transformative of cultures.

Chris Kitze is a fine art photographer based in Northern California. Trained in commercial design studios and photographic labs, he did advertising, technical, and product photography before founding several digital publishing companies, including Creative Multimedia, Point Communications, and Xoom.com. This cross-pollination of art, commerce, and technology led to his exploration of the emerging possibilities in software and digital media.

Martin Lister is a professor at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where his teaching and research interests are in visual culture, photography, media history, new media studies, and the role of technology in culture. He is editor of the journal Photographies, to be launched by Routledge in 2008, and coauthor of New Media: A Critical Introduction, a comprehensive and rigorous introduction to the culture, history, technologies, and theories of new media.