AI 이미지 시대 사진 경험의 기호학적 재독해 - 해석적 지표성(Interpretive Indexicality)

초록

The emergence of AI-generated imagery has disrupted the social consensus that had implicitly accepted photographs as physical traces of reality. With this disruption, the elision of the Interpretant in 1970s–80s theories of photographic indexicality has also become newly visible. Departing from this point, the study restores Peirce's triadic structure and the distinction between Dynamic and Immediate Objects, proposing Interpretive Indexicality: the thesis that photographic indexicality is not an intrinsic property of the image but a retroactive sign-process in which the viewer's Interpretant constructs the image as a trace of the real. The history of the photographic medium traverses three eras—analog, digital, and AI-generative— each renewing the viewer's perception and the operation of the Interpretant. Tracing this temporal transition through three cases (Walker Evans, Andreas Gursky, Boris Eldagsen), the study shows that indexical conviction shifts from a naturally operating background, through fissure, to structural absence. A brief auxiliary discussion of the Balenciaga Pope incident further indicates that the AI stage itself bifurcates into the artist-disclosure mode and the social-verification mode. Photographic indexicality, on this account, is a semiotic event constructed retroactively by the Interpretant, and the conditions of its possibility shift with the changing media environment.

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