Every image exists in relation to others: images that precede it, images it answers to, images it contradicts or erases. Every image looks back. In the age of predictive and speculative media, images not only represent the future, they actively participate in producing it.
Renderings of cities, territories, and infrastructures, for example, are used to guide political, economic, and even genocidal decisions -often by actors distant from the places depicted- reshaping social, environmental, and cultural realities before they even exist. Yet images circulate faster than our capacity to look at them, let alone understand them.
We scroll past them in isolation, encountering them as fragments within personal feeds. But the effects they produce are collective: they reshape how we imagine life, politics, territory, conflict, and social relations.
The School of the Image proposes to slow down the act of seeing.
Rather than treating images as objects to consume or verify, the project invites participants to read, dissect, and reconstruct images collectively.
In the School of the Image we seek to unpack the relations between images, tracing the ethical, political, economic, and emotional circuits that connect one image to another.
We call this the backdrop of images: the set of invisible layers that every image compresses into a single visible surface. Images are treated as the result of an extrusion process: what we see is only the visible output of multiple underlying strata: technical, institutional, geopolitical, social, historical, economic, and platform-driven layers, such as virality, hype, attention economies.
Rather than asking whether an image is true or false, we ask: Where does it come from, what infrastructures produced it? What relations does it activate? What does it do in the world? What does it demand from us?
The School of the Image is a space for collective image literacy, where seeing becomes a shared socio-political practice.