Visual Culture 3.0
One of the distinctive features of studies on visual culture is that it takes into account all those elements that contribute to the material configuration of an image: an embodied image whose presence in a specific cultural context is determined by material, technical and spatial factors that cannot be ignored. This line of research addresses the study of the relationship between images, carrier media and the body in the contemporary scenario of social networks and what we call visual culture 3.0. These new carrier media, their technical qualities and their mass diffusion pose a real theoretical and methodological challenge to begin to understand the modes of production of meaning and the relationships established between subjects and the field of visuality both contemporary and in past times
Like all pictures, digital images are also precarious images, whose existence is threatened by various forms of deterioration. What distinguishes studies on visual culture is the attention paid to the diversity and historicity of the different media and the way in which each media, with its particularities, has important repercussions on the production, circulation and reception of images within a specific cultural context. Within the field of Visual Culture studies, the question of media is addressed in historically and culturally situated terms, considering media as part of these technical-material conditions that contribute to determining the ways in which an image circulates, changes, is transformed and is observed within a given cultural context (Pinotti and Somaini, 2016). With the arrival of the Internet, digital channels allow for a global and viral diffusion of images, which constitute what has been defined as the “global flow of visual culture” (Sturken and Cartwright, 2009). A digital milieu through which images circulate rapidly, manifesting themselves on screens of all dimensions, developing as intrinsically “shared” (partagées) images (Gunthert, 2015) although always linked to some form of materiality
The image in contemporary visual culture poses profound theoretical challenges that imply a careful review of concepts such as medium and apparatus, but also that of device. For example, the history and contemporary transformations of the screen, which constitute the field of study of the so-called screen studies, have been approached from multiple perspectives that point to the recent widespread use of touch screens. Francesco Casetti alludes to the way in which in the contemporary media panorama screens have essentially become a point of articulation, of transit and of momentary visualization of images that circulate continuously in social space. The screen has become an apparatus with various functions that must be thought of through new concepts. In turn, when speaking of supports and screens, it is necessary to take into account the transformations that the passage from analog to digital implies.
The nature of the medium determines the ways in which an image can be produced, reproduced, visualized, manipulated, archived, transmitted and shared, as well as its duration and ability to persist over time. Images in visual culture 3.0 respond to the conditioning of new devices of the gaze, devices that have established themselves as optical-spatial articulations, but also epistemic, political and ideological, capable of assuming a specific conception of vision and of the subject's position in relation to the world
