Simon Zara : The Latent Image : Mutation, Potentiality, Viscosity

Among the literature dealing with the circulation of images, the endless flow of pictures seems to be a recurring metaphor. This alarmist and iconophobic discourse is illustrated and sometimes even reinforced by certain contemporary artworks. In order to consider this hybrid and elusive object of study, would it not be necessary to build a made-to-measure methodology? Taking as a starting point the art project No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2002) initiated by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe the two artists buy a character from a Japanese character design company before distributing it among a group of artists, allowing each one to produce artworks with the fictional character I propose using the concept of “latent image”, a term borrowed from analogue photography, in order to imagine an investigation method specific to the transmedia mutations of images. Through their circulation, these images change status, properties, substances and may overflow our need to circumscribe them as completed and stabilized forms. Rather than establishing yet another typology of images, I will propose to study these visual entities within their mode of existence: an indeterminate state, in which all the potentialities are still open, existing simultaneously. This concept urges us to reconfigure our understanding of the image and to apprehend it as a viscous object, contaminating and contaminated by our subjectivity. Any mission of ontological distancing would risk reproducing theoretical blind spots and inhibit any questioning of capitalism logic since 19th century, which operates a systematic circulation, transforming any unique object into an object of exchange. At stake throughout this lecture will be the understanding of how this state of uncertainty may constitute yet another territory to colonize, to quantify, to regulate and to commodify.

Simon Zara is an artist-researcher, PhD candidate at Lille University and Visual Arts teacher at Strasbourg University. He defines his approach as practice based critical and scientific research on/with pictures. Through works of détournement, mashup, culture hacking, dialectical editing, visual survey and situated interview he questions vision, visuality and the visual regimes in which we navigate daily. He lives and works between Lille and Strasbourg.