The Energy-Image

Towards a Revised Conception of the Image

Abstract

The properties of the image in contemporary communication circuits are increasingly linked to a very specific material context, from the fossil fuels on which it depends, the fibreoptic cables and data centres through which it travels, to the devices that produce and reproduce it. Through the term “energy-image”, I appeal to the finiteness of that which, despite being intangible, has a very precise environmental impact, in order to critically understand the complexities that surround the visual today. This image is increasingly accelerated, and it has broken with the linearity of its production to be recombined again and again into electricity, heat, light - but never detached from its ideological, colonial and capitalist heritage.