Audiovisual production is transcending the borders between photography, video and cinema

Legenda: In Empathetic Heartbeat (2011), by Hideyuki Ando, Masahiko Sato and Junji Watanabe, participants use headphones and stethoscopes to watch the movie. They can hear the sound of their own heart and the volume changes according to the situation in the movie.

Never have so many images been placed into circulation, and never have images been so decisive in the process of our daily life. Due to its digital and networking nature the image is spawning thoroughgoing transformations in the narratives and aesthetics of time-based arts. When they go onto the Internet, the images of the 21st century also become spaces of sociability, where new aesthetic regimes other than those of the schools of cinema and the arts hold sway, especially on YouTube, breaking the canons of class, genre and market.

An entirely new paradigm of consumption and production is arising, evidencing that images have ceased to be framable planes to become the most important devices in contemporaneity. Audiovisual production currently transcends the traditional notions of image that once allowed us to clearly perceive the borders between photography, video and cinema.

Not only do video-editing programs allow us to produce stills, as we can make animations in photo- editing programs. But even more importantly, we can use the same devices to produce various types of images – and here we are not talking only about the amateur scene, catapulted by cell phones and small multifunctional cameras. The same situation also holds at the professional level, for instance, with the release of the Canon 5D Mark II, which took place simultaneously with the final episode of the sixth season of Fox network’s House television series, entirely recorded with this equipment.

These transformations in terms of the cameras size and profile of the cameras are important because they are not only technical changes. They affect the entire image-production chain, significantly increasing our capacity of capturing images. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the cameras miniaturization has given rise to the emergence of a third eye in the palm of our hand, which has irreversibly “cyborgized” us.

Moreover, new approaches in design have made the images tactile and able to react to our gestures, temperature and presence. Wiis, Ipads, Xboxs and an entire range of new screens are self-explicative examples of this novel line of products. Everything indicates that we are entering the era of devices that furnish exercises in synesthesia for the masses – a new age when things are made to explore a combination of senses, such as vision and touch, converting the images around us (previously only clickable) into interfaces with which we relate and within which we can also exist, in increasingly interconnected and mediated situations. This process entails an unprecedented change in the history of technical images: the beyond-the-screen revolution of the post-tube era has already begun.

* Originally published in the print edition seLecT LOOP.