Colourful, vibrant images glide across my computer screen, one display superseding the next. I navigate through the various windows open on my desktop – click from programme to programme, from app to app, from site to site, from hyperlink to hyperlink. As I do this, ever new windows and tabs pop open and I try to close them, in as much as I still have any sort of overview of these animated displays; displays that more and more lead their own singular life, slip away or withdraw from my control, or better still, themselves exert control over me.

My fingers click, tip, swipe and scroll mechanically – and with every movement and motion performed by my fingers on the touchpad, I unconsciously or consciously become consumer and simultaneous producer of contents. I produce, consume – consume, produce.

Displays and images everywhere.

Everyone and everything is displayed in images, functioning nowadays only according to a logic of image – an entire, all-encompassing technologized spectacle. The image space has become the everyday space of action of “the digitization of our existence.” [i] Inside and outside, private and public, dissolve or rather merge into oneness. Low resolution “poor images”, that is viral images as defined by the German film maker, artist and writer Hito Steyerl, fill and dominate our virtual everyday. Characteristic for those “poor images” is their low resolution, their high compression, as well as the fact that they are poor in content, both in terms of colour and image. To be precise, these are the images which have become the symptomatic product of our very real, all penetrating visual culture today. Those “poor images” together with our performatively–lively handling of them, are in some ways the mirror image of an “affective condition of the crowd” [ii] because, as Steyerl continues, they provide an insight into our collective neuroses, our paranoia and anxieties. In the destabilising of life forms in Postfordism as described by Paolo Virno, the Italian philosopher of the recent Post-Operaist movement, “poor images” sooner or later get all of us. I produce them and let them circulate, visual ideas become viral.[iii] As if lifted out of time, and time itself being suspended, these animated circulations function in their very own particular time or even non-time.

My gaze drifts across the computer-display. I leisurely click my way through various windows and tabs, navigate through the displays – whereby it is more those displays guiding and leading me. In the age of digital technologies, social media and ever renewed YouTube, meme and internet-aesthetics, I produce illusions of an image without depth and images of an illusion, illusions that themselves have nothing but an image as origin. Fundamentally, I set out not from a reality that is to be represented but rather I mimic prefabricated images. In this sense, there is no ‘original’ to which I refer. The differentiation between reality and representation is no longer possible – not for me nor for others. In its place substitute what the French media theoretician and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in a postmodern society governed by visual mass media, named, in 1981,  “hyperreality” – whereby it is no longer a question of imitation, but rather the substitution of reality by signs. No longer do we experience this by means of traditional mass media, but rather we perform ourselves from within our current prosumer-behaviour – as Networked Displays. 

What role does art play in a present in which the production, circulation and not least the consumption of an apparently infinite flood of images dominate – images that are not solely acting as “discreet objects” but instead are travelling through global networks and as such participate equally in socio-political debates and processes of economic value creation.[iv] We live as medial networked individuals in a post-digital image logic, or more precisely, we deal with a new image-logic of networked displays, a logic that manifests as an aesthetic and relational dispositif. The new status of mass circulation and of the transformability of images  – that is, their potential to be simultaneously present everywhere, available for processing and contextualising – engenders a new value for and through the images – a certain “force of image.”[v] This force of images is confined not only to the digital, but rather recursively impinges on the analogue, which in turn influences post-digital visual life.

What does it mean to think, see, and feel – hence to live – through the post-digital?

Just as I stroll through display-situations in art spaces, too, I navigate through networked displays on my computer.

Display is defined here as an artistic mode of presentation, one in which what is shown makes an appearance in the form of presenting; and whereby the display’s aesthetic function itself is simultaneously exhibited. Such an artistic form of presenting generates a transparently two-fold display-situation: exhibited is both, whatever the display presents as well as the form and mode in which whatever is presented (that is, the display’s effects) is exhibited. In this way a (social) situation, exceeding a purely artistic context, can be constructed.

In a post-digital relational image-logic of networked displays, which includes imagining the very presence of the digital even beyond digital media,[vi] there is a recognition of the tendency towards interlinking the three dimensions of production, circulation, and consumption of images more and more closely; sometimes they cannot even be separated at all anymore. With and in the various apps of social media, everywhere and at any time I am able to produce, see, manipulate, aestheticize, appropriate, frame, evaluate, comment upon, multiply and tag images. Those digital, image-based and not exclusively art-specific platforms for pictorial presentation perform as networked displays, and they position themselves – in a recursive movement – against analogue space: I conceive these networked displays as a dynamically animated format of presentation, for actively co-steering the circulative force of the image; although it is in the end only myself who is animated and steered by networked displays. According to the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, a definite pressure of synchronisation occurs within the existing capitalistic mentality – corresponding to “modes of life and thought”.[vii] I, or more precisely what I assume to be my self, will be/ is animated.

It may be the case that the specificity of this new logic of the image can be outlined in relation to another art historical and techno-political transformation.

Insofar as the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin declares that exhibition value replaces cult value, given the emergence of photography and film in the age of technological reproducibility, the following can be observed for the artwork in today’s digital age: exhibition value has become the definitive value of art. To put it more sharply, we can almost speak of a new cult value of images, a fetish of exhibition value, in which the artwork is instrumentalised as speculative art-commodity-value – cult here obviously not in the sense of a divine presence in icons, rather as quasi-ritualistic manual and manipulative interweaving  of production, circulation and consumption of art via networked displays. Networked displays represent infrastructure for the circulation of image value or exhibition value. They make possible a circulation value – the actual surplus value of the image in a networked display.

Marie-France Rafael

[i] Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media”, Artforum, Vol. 51, No. 2 (September 2012): 434–41, here 434.

[ii] See Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image”. e-flux journal #10 (November 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/#:~:text=In%20Defense%20of%20the%20Poor%20Image,is%20bad%2C%20its%20resolution%20substandard.&text=The%20poor%20image%20tends%20towards,idea%20in%20its%20very%20becoming, (last accessed 15 August 2020).

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] David Joselit, After Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 93–4; see also Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image”, 2009.

[v] See David Joselit, After Art, p. 16 and p. 53.

[vi] See Felix Stalder, Kultur der Digitalität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2016), p. 20.

[vii] See Bernard Stiegler, “Dans la vacance, on cherche à retrouver la consistence dans son existence”, Philosophie magazine (20.09.2012), https://www.philomag.com/les-idees/bernard-stiegler-dans-la-vacance-on-cherche-a-retrouver-la-consistance-dans-son-existence (last accessed 17 August 2021). For the English translation see Sam Kinsley, “Bernard Stiegler on holidays and the need to ‘deprogram’”, http://www.samkinsley.com/2014/07/28/translation-bernard-stiegler-on-holidays-and-the-need-to-deprogram/ (last accessed 17 August 2021).

Marie-France Rafael works at the Department of Fine Arts at the ZHdK as a Tenure Track Professor and is a researcher in the theoretical field of contemporary art. Her research focuses on the history of exhibiting as well as the artistic strategies of presenting art as a means of reflection and communication that aesthetically negotiates everyday culture, politics, and economics in a particular way.  

Among other projects, she curated the exhibition “Imaginary Displays” (2018) at BNKR in Munich and was part of the curatorial team for the Video Art at Midnight Festival (2018). 

Her publications include the monograph Reisen ins Imaginativ. Artistic Displays and Situations (Cologne: Walther König, 2017). Other publications include Ari Benjamin Meyers. Music on Display (Cologne: Walther König, 2016) and Pierre Huyghe. On Site (Cologne: Walther König, 2013).