Today I am giving my lecture at Talent Campus Buenos Aires. I will discuss the status of the contemporary image, conceived and appropriated by and within networks.
I believe an entirely different paradigm of consumption and production is taking shape through online images, showing that images have ceased to be frameable planes and have become the most important apparatuses of our time. It would be no exaggeration to say that mobile phones today are a kind of third eye in the palm of our hands, cannibalizing the subject’s right of access to projection on the screen and subverting not only ways of making (framing, editing, adding sound), but also ways of seeing.
I open with Pacific (2009), by Marcelo Pedroso, and move on from there.
https://youtu.be/GksfELuFa6g
Abstract
It has become commonplace to say we live in a world of images. There is nothing new in that. The subject has been repeatedly discussed and celebrated since the 1960s. But the situation we face today is unprecedented, and so is its scale. When we measure what happens on social networks, the numbers can convince even the most skeptical and technophobic analysts.
In one month, YouTube receives more videos than the three main US television networks produced in 60 years. And that is just one of many astonishing figures. Poured onto the internet in gazillions of bytes per second, twenty-first-century images also become spaces of sociability through which other aesthetic regimes, different from those of film and art schools, flow and assert themselves, especially on YouTube, breaking canons of class, gender, and market.
Never have so many images circulated, and never have images been so decisive in the way we conduct our everyday lives. Their digital, networked status drives and participates in profound transformations in the narratives and aesthetics of time-based arts.
Another paradigm
An entirely different paradigm of consumption and production is taking shape through online images, showing that images have ceased to be frameable planes and have become the most important apparatuses of our time.
Audiovisual production today transcends the traditional notions of images that once allowed us to perceive clear boundaries between photography, video, and cinema. Video editing programs let us produce stills, while we create animations in photo editing programs. But that is only a small part of it. What matters is that we produce different kinds of images using the same equipment, and this applies not only to the amateur scene, propelled by mobile phones and small multifunction cameras. The same is happening at the professional level.
These transformations in the size and profile of cameras matter because the changes are not merely technical. They affect the entire image production chain, significantly increasing our ability to capture images. It would be no exaggeration to say that the miniaturization of cameras has brought us face to face with the emergence of a third eye in the palm of our hands.
Tactile images
More than that, images become tactile, responsive to our gestures, temperature, and presence, and participate in a new lineage of design. Wiis, iPads, Xboxes, and a whole range of new screens are almost self-explanatory examples of this lineage. Everything suggests we are entering an age of devices for mass synesthetic exercises, in which things seem designed to explore combinations of senses, such as sight and touch, and to turn the images around us, once mere clickable surfaces, into interfaces we relate to and within which we also come to exist, in increasingly interconnected and mediated situations.
This process entails an unprecedented change in the history of technical images: the revolution beyond the screen has already begun. It is made through new projection devices, cameras, and new spaces and resources for experience. It cannibalizes the subject’s right of access to projection on the screen, subverting not only ways of making (framing, editing, adding sound), but also ways of seeing.
I close with Vc Não Está Aqui (You Are Not Here, 2012), by Giselle Beiguelman and Fernando Velázquez
https://vimeo.com/48451986