pyramids, for example, were moved closer together by means of Scitex rendering for the February 1982 cover of ‹National Geographic,› who plays an exemplary role in the debate over digitalization. The introduction of the personal computer and the opening of the Internet, however, also shaped the participatory and (inter)active potential of the configuration of photography, the video, and computer processing: Multi-media ‹desktop publishing› is now no longer only available to the mass media, but also political groups, citizens' groups, artists—i.e. anyone who has anything to communicate. It is in this spirit that in the exhibition catalogue «Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory, New Montage,» Jim Pomeroy takes up a slogan of the leftwing media avant-garde of the 1930s: Every receiver can become a transmitter. [43] The exhibition, which in 1988 was presumably the first to take up the subject of ‹digital photography› within the context of art, also makes reference to the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s in another respect. The image/text works by the artists, which were presented primarily in the simple form of computer printouts, are compared in their method with the

montage concepts of Dadaism, Surrealism and Constructivism: [44] In the same way the ‹analog› collages consist of fragmentary photos and texts of different origins, the computer works also disclose their construction principles—the contrastive superimposition of heterogeneous material. In doing so, the low-tech optics of coarse, mosaic-like pixel resolution, visible video lines, of saw-tooth distortions and transmission errors (cf. e.g. «The Noise Factor» (1988) by George Legrady) are set against the ‹smooth,› high-tech image manipulation by the large photo agencies. The ‹noise› of the data not only prevents illusionistic effects—it shows, so to speak, the medium ‹computer› at work.

With the introduction of the image processing software ‹Photoshop,› a further form of digital montage appeared. Like the large magazines, artists can now process photographs without their intervention being directly visible in the result. Works such as «Faces #1–12» (1998) by Vibeke Tandberg, «Affaires infinies» by Bettina Hoffmann (1997), or «Le jeu de la règle» (1992ff.) by Alain Fleischer are based on the—still assumed—reception of photographic images as