Vision has always been unreliable. Whether true or false, could a photograph or a painting ever show us more than the outward appearance of things?

But today visual form seems particularly vexed. Under the aegis of digitization, we are bombarded with images, and yet so much of labor, leisure and communication happens invisibly, across fiber optic channels, server farms, and encrypted Wi-Fi signals, unseen except for some complex computer algorithm silently collecting data, and then whatever glowing array might appear within the confines of a rectangular screen. And any distance between visual art and the various myths of our time that it might represent is so uncertain: does art “reflect on” the current ideology of information and dematerialization, or is it an instrument of this ideology itself, furnishing images for a new order of things?