Editora Equador, in co-publication with AVXLab, has just released O Cinema e seus outros, edited by Lucas Bambozzi and Demétrio Portugal.
The book brings together texts by researchers, artists and intellectuals, as the editors themselves are—indeed, leading figures in critical thinking about audiovisual media.
One of the book’s chief merits is to offer a more contemporary view of a world that does not conform to the industrial standards of cinema and television. One of its most interesting aspects, which I would like to highlight, is its discussion of the impact of networks on contemporary visual culture.
Images on networks
Contemporary visual culture is inseparable from image production on networks. Never have so many photographs been taken as in our time. It is estimated that every two minutes more images are produced than all the photographs taken over the past 150 years. This is a relatively modest estimate, considering that there are one billion camera-equipped devices (among five billion active mobile phones), each capturing around three photos a day, or one thousand a year.
The significance of this phenomenon does not lie in its quantitative power, but in the cultural—and therefore qualitative—transformations it points toward. The popularization of cameras corresponds to an unmistakable multiplication of subjects who begin to frame and be framed on screens. What is at stake is an unprecedented process of image appropriation by new social groups.
This spectrum is ambivalent, however, because the new visual culture oscillates between opportunities to democratize access to audiovisual media, new aesthetic regimes, overexposure, surveillance and tracking. These are precisely the ambivalences I discuss in the chapter I wrote for this book, which is now available and has already become essential reading for anyone who, like me, believes that understanding our time depends on learning to listen to images.
- editors: Lucas Bambozzi and Demétrio Portugal
- co-authors: Andrés Denegri, Christine Mello, Claudio Bueno, Edu Zal, Fernando Velázquez, Gabriel Menotti, Giselle Beiguelman, Henrique Roscoe, Leticia Ramos, Lucia Koch, Mario Ramiro, Mirella Brandi, Patricia Moran Fernandes, Raimo Benedetti, Roberta Carvalho, Roberto Moreira S. Cruz, Rodrigo Gontijo, Tanya Toft Ag
- contributors: Mirella Brandi x Muepetmo, Carolina Caffé, Augusto Mojica Salvador Santos, Don Salvatore, Tatiane Gonzalez, Caio Fazolin, Didiana Prata, Fábio Malini, Fernanda Pessoa, Javier Cruz, Ihon Yadoya, Julia Alves Rodrigues, Heloisa Oliveira, Renata Brabo, Rayane Vasconcelos, among others
- publisher: Equador
- editorial coordination: Gabriela Longman
- graphic design: Laura Daviña
- printer: Ipsis Gráfica e Editora
- production: AVXLab, Spcine, São Paulo Municipal Department of Culture
Buy the book here
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7 FM).
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