The Image as System
An image is no longer certain. It has ceased to function as index, evidence, or representation in any stable sense. Increasingly, images are generated not for human comprehension, but for machine processing—composed through models, optimised for circulation, and rendered for systems that sort, predict, and extract. They move through pipelines and platforms, accumulating legibility without necessarily producing meaning. They are not read—they are routed. And they are evaluated not by what they show, but by what they allow: what they let pass, what they keep in motion, what they smooth over. To ask what an image is today is to ask how it behaves—how it circulates, performs, and operates across technical infrastructures and within affective economies. If images once claimed to reflect the world, today they compose it. They orchestrate attention, administer emotion, and encode permissions. They choreograph not only what is seen, but what is possible to feel, to say, to become. They do not represent power— they perform it. The image is now a system: dynamic, composite, and procedural. It calibrates perception to match the needs of platforms, classifiers, and metrics. And in doing so, it no longer mediates—it governs...Read the full article in the printed issue. Get OVER Journal 4
