Endless everyday images: links and excesses in digital image

THESIS AND DISSERTATIONS

Endless everyday images: links and excesses in digital image

Ana Cláudia do Amaral Leão

Doctoral Thesis. Post-Graduate Program in Communication and Semiotics, Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo - São Paulo (São Paulo) – Brazil 2012. [e-mail]

The research analyzed the relationships and communication links between overproduced images on digital media and their carriers. I start from the hypothesis that the way we look, record, save and access images have been deeply modified with the advent of digital cameras and 'phone cameras' – encouraging an addictive behavior for pictures. The method was based on interviews with ten informers – the images' carriers, who let us conclude that we are overproducing pictures as information. In this context arise the producers of endless everyday pictures, here named 'photomaniacs', who give birth two kinds of images: the circulatory infoimages and the everyday infoimages. Overproduced digital images transform devices in our magnifiers of memory and oblivion, undoing the way we compile, save or file – and operating in cumulative, disordered, small and private stock of images. Thus, we try to saturate our most superficial memory, that generates schizophrenic pictures when operates on excess. However, even if the way is only technological, we must remember that the body is the living organism suitable to pictures, the place where we hold deep bonding relations. Over this body surface, images survive impregnated of meanings, links, belonging and healing. The research was based on the theories of communication links of Boris Cyrulnik, Jose Ângelo Gaiarsa and Ashley Montagu, besides the works on images and schizophrenia of Nise da Silveira and Leo Navratil. The research also activated the central European stream of Cultural Semiotics, specially the theories of images proposed by Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Dietmar Kamper, Norval Baitello Junior, Hans Belting and Vilém Flusser.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 Sept 2013
• Date of issue
  Aug 2013