CONSUMPTION OF TECHNICAL IMAGES AND REGIMES OF VISUALITY: idolatry and iconoclasm in mediatic cultures

Abstract

The project argues that the consumption of technical images appears, in the mediatic cultures, as a central sphere of the long and disturbed relationship between men and images. Consumption, here, means signification, ressignification and recycling - the myriad of uses we give to images; or, as Rocha (2007b) proposes, the uses we give to the uses images give to us. The research we propose will study the topology of the mentioned sphere. Will relate the current relief of your surface to the specificities of the scopic regimes that emerge in our era of "biocybernetics reproducibility" (MITCHELL, 2006), media-cities, virtual avatars, digital TV, internet shopping. It will carefully avoid both iconoclasm and idolatry, questioning both the naïve occularcentrism of the common sense and the theories that hide, beneath the layers of erudition, a deep fear of images. Bibliographic and iconographic researches will be used. Through their articulation, we will also propose methodological operators to a visual analisys more focused on the dynamics of image consumption.