Can an image show anything else today?

Visual media are an intrinsic part of the development of human communication yet it seems that the images are damaging rather than empowering social communication. With the development of digital media, the creation of images became part of everyday life for the majority of world population. Millions of images that are being created day after day are almost entirely subordinated to the traditional codes of figuration and narrativization. The negative features of visual communication that in the past century have been analyzed by the critiques of the society of the spectacle and the simulacra of the simulation are being preserved. This brings back once again the importance of the work of pioneers in digital art. They were using computer mostly to explore new potentials of the medium of the image, and were developing visual language beyond realistic imitation and linear narration.

The initial question of our symposium is as follows: Are visual media necessarily the tools for the imitation of the outside world and for linear narration of the stories that promote dominant ideologies, the tools of hegemony? Or, on the contrary, can the experience of the pioneers of digital art encourage the creation of images and the development of visual languages as, with the words of Ed Zajec, "new means for imagining the world", but also for imagining a new world