Читать книгу Homo Cypiens - Herlander Elias - Страница 24

In our time, everything consists of image, whether text, object, service, product, figure; everything around us becomes something imaginary because it can be photographed, reedited, etc. There is a certain grammar at the image level, as the images have codes, visual elements, links and are part of a matrix. One thing always connects to another. It is surprising to see how we try to understand the fascination that the images exert in us humans, but the truth is that we ourselves cannot live without images. Images are forms of communication since prehistoric times. Images are something mental, first of all, but they also were useful for propagandistic and warlike objectives in the twentieth century. As for the twenty-first century, our problem is different. We are overwhelmed by images. There have never been so many images available, circulating on the Net. This is a regime of images that are in close relationship and that make the bridge to the social networks. Images no longer need cameras or video. The smartphones we own are images machines. Social networks like Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram, without forgetting YouTube, have increased the perimeter of the problem. More images machines lead to the production of images on a mechanic scale.

We should also mention a small detail. Images, whether electronic or not, have their own grammar. That is to say that it is possible to communicate only by means of images, since they have codes and these codes connect themselves with images; linked images are the matrices, and the matrices are the last, the final image. The grammar of the image is related to its structure of meaning. When we see an advertising or promotional image, what does it mean? What codes do you see? What do you want to communicate? Will it stand out from the rest? This is where the problem lies — originality — since everything is image-bearing, our problem is that all images become equivalent to each other. In this way, we do not have images, but rather "the image". There is a macro-image that represents everything and means everything, a kind of image-archetype. The grammar of such an image is either reductive or simply ambitious, but the grammar of the most varied images is exponential and trully interconnecting.

Each image carries with it the germ of its referential universe; the image reports what it is, what it represents, and its portfolio of associations. In other words, the same is to say that an image is a set of links, meaning that in order to understand the grammar of an image we must first understand its connections. The image, then, is what you can connect to. A weak image has only one referent in reality or in the conceptual plane, but a strong image has a greater symbolic power because it is more connective to other dimensions. Images can be divided as follows: connection images, disconnect images and isolated images. The first images are designed to be connected. For example a transmedia film has a narrative that expands in a videogame, or a film can be based on a Shakespeare’s work. The second images are images designed to be turned off. As an example, a photographic image belonging to a particular cultural and / or social elite can only be seen in an exhibition, in a certain group of days and at a certain time. If the temporal frame of a certain image is not transposed, it is inaccessible to us. The third type of images are the isolated images, which in practice are images that will never connect to anything, because they are designed to enter neither the mass media nor digital media. They are almost solipsistic images because they only exist in our head, like our dreams. An example of this kind of images is conceptual design projects before moving from vision to reality. They are images with a "beyond" potential, but they are only a "goal" unless something allows them to materialize. Yet, it does not mean that they materialize, that they translate into something concrete, they only have the potential to isolate or stop isolating, passing from isolated to off-mode or from isolated to connection of images.

What we ascertain is that even the most stealth marketing campaign for a brand of product or service can be recorded and found in the media. The great difficulty of our time is that images are out of control, and for this reason it is difficult to understand their grammar, being simpler to understand the associations between each other or between image and real, and image and dream. Understanding the grammar of the images implies that we know how to deal with their scale, their level of interconnection and also their level of visibility, because eventually even the most hidden image can be transferred to the media. This means that there is a certain difficulty in escaping from the reach of the media. The interconnecting images of our time are connection-images, which validates our position as decoders (or encoders) of the connectors-images grammar.

The greater the cultural background of an individual, the greater his ability to deal successfully with connecting images. The big question is that we need to understand the isolated images on a first level, and then the images already connected, on a second level. Meanwhile, the images do not wait for the ideal frame of time to be perceptible to us. Images flow and their grammar is mutant. We need a homo cypiens, someone from the digital age to understand them.