Post-iconia. On the contemporary visual regime
“Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign [...]. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality.”
— Paul Valéry1
On April 2nd, while we were remembering our veterans and fallen soldiers from the Malvinas war, an AI-generated image went viral.
It showed a Sun of May whose face was clearly off.
Yet at first glance, it was convincing. Even aesthetically pleasing.
Just as Mark Fisher uses the concept of post-lexia to describe the inability to attentively read a text,2 I believe there's also an inability to attentively see an image. Post-iconia, perhaps?
Images today are no longer looked at — they’re swiped. They’re part of a dizzying stream consumed almost automatically. The contemporary visual regime privileges the trivial and the viral. That’s why so many images circulate without critical filters, and obvious mistakes go unnoticed.
If everything is surface and spectacle, the gaze loses analytical depth. AI generates convincing images, but not necessarily coherent ones. And our eyes, trained by endless scrolling, demand impact over consistency.
I see it as a colonization of vision by the logic of capital: what matters is not whether an image makes sense, but whether it works, whether it gets likes, whether it’s shared.
In the face of this landscape: cognitive sovereignty.3 Reclaiming the autonomy of our attention.
— E.