DISTRIBUTED IMAGERY: IMAGINATIVE PRACTICES OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2020-1-31-46
Main theme of the article are the types of imagery becoming increasingly characteristic of contemporary culture. The core feature of these types is their being distributed across time and space, their ability to accompany us virtually everywhere, without being tied to any organizational form. Distributed imagery opposes “traditional”, non-distributed images “representing” some identifiable subject-matter. One of the essential traits of non-distributed imagery is its normative claim addressing not only the ways of its interpretation but also bodily practices of the perceiving subject, relevant for experiencing images of this kind. In contrast to the inherent oppressiveness of non-distributed image connected to a perceptual regime characteristic of it, the distributed imagery draws not on reduction and control of body of the perceiving subject but – on the contrary – on intensifying (and in this sense, on emancipating) its bodily emotional self-presence. From a diachronic point of view, the relationship between distributed and non-distributed imageries is mediated by quite a complicated socio-historical and material-technological dynamic of the developed and late modernity. Reconstruction of this dynamic enables us to identify the genetic interrelation (continuity) between non-distributed and distributed imagery. From a synchronic point of view, distributed and non-distributed imagery forms generate incompatible experience types with mutually exclusive structural characteristics and social-political implications (discontinuity).
Keywords: distributed / non-distributed imagery, political implications of perceptual experience, culturalization of matter, image theory, visual culture.
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Issue: 1, 2020
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 31 — 46
Downloads: 888