Sara Benaglia, Mauro Zanchi, Le insidie delle immagini, 2022

Which traps do images bring with them and what side effects do they bring into circulation? How has the language of photography opened up to an interaction with complex systems that have revolutionized the medium itself? Current metaphotography has had photography as its incipit, but then it has become a critique of the present future, written through an analysis of vision, also having in mind issues inherent in metalanguage, metamedium, metamodeling and metaverse. Artificial intelligence is involved in breaking through the hitherto known concept of vision and has been integrated into devices used on a global scale, influencing the collective imagination. Information accumulated in Data Centers and the Cloud is branching further within a transformation of the human being, with planetary political impact. Algorithms, Image Datasets, neural networks, algocracy, surveillance devices and technological redlining are the essential keywords for understanding this change, which is first and foremost an economic process. The “intelligent technology that sees,” the computational eye composed of countless eyes, has a field of vision whose limits may be the boundaries of our world. How does metaphotography inform or inspire our perception and understanding of spacetime? Images look and feel us, from the devices that make them visible and usable for our use and consumption. We are now turned toward a new status of the image, whose fruition is no longer only human.