For an autonomous existence of images: an archaeological perspective

Abstract

Monitoring and interpreting an increasing number of images has become part of people’s daily lives. These images trigger a complex process of relations that can result in direct human or non-human actions over people, over services or over the very space. As part of a broader and widespread mediascape, the repertoire of images, its organization and connection to multiple devices and huge databases, make interpretation processes much more complex and beyond our reach. When arranged in a network, technical devices do not need to follow a logic narrative of facts. Paradoxically, they contribute to the construction of all possible narratives. This work proposes, from an archaeological perspective, that the intentionality of images, especially those that are produced and circulate in digital environment, is the symptom of a contemporary episteme that delegates to objects not just a functional autonomy, but also one of existence and of description of the world. The multiplicity of digital images makes of them Beings that exist beyond the human and that constitute a kind of continuous phenomenological machinic process, an awareness of the self and of the other.