Totalitarianism of the Image in the Age of Post-media
Since the first obvious indications of the inception of the times of the “end of representation” – as Deleuze pointed out half a century ago – we have had to deal with a widespread awareness about the persevering change of art and of the reflections about art in the social framework of institutional and technological contexts. The analysis of interactions, starting with the invention of film/cinema, artistic practice and theory, including aesthetics, highlights the importance of the notions, categories and agencies of movement. The emergence of the so-called post-media epoch signals a new decisive change following the one that was revealed as an overwhelming onset of mass culture and the one that has been characterised as the event (Badiou) of the 1960s revolution. As the theoretical indecision about the features of an on-going new change still seems to be dominant, the art practice of any conceivable variety basically reflects the same indecision. The fact that “film” is still the notion that by and large means moving images even though digitalization has made the material (celluloid) film obsolete is an elementary metaphor for the process of the vanishing of signifiers related to the notion of art. However, in a more complex sense, the questions about the correlation between form and content are re-emerging in novel configurations, also in relation to the epistemological and ontological problems of aesthetics concerning the designations of the objects of analysis.
The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!