For a Postmedial Image: The Challenge of Enunciation for the Digital Practices of the Contemporary Image

This paper aims to propose some suggestions on what role semiotic analysis of the visual can take in the postmediality environment. Taking a case study from the field of scientific research on biodiversity, that is, the INaturalist platform, what we wish to highlight is how, with the development of digital technologies and the proliferation of new practices of use related to visuality, the landscape of media has changed to such an extent that the need to revise certain semiotic categories developed from the principle of textual closure has become evident. Algorithms, datasets and computer vision technologies include images within complex and heterogeneous configurations in the realm of enunciation, which call for different planes of immanence beyond textuality that become particularly clear from the perspective of a material turn. Considered within the materiality of its substrate, a text becomes an object, and as an object it is included in a network of possible practices of use: scientific research represents in this sense a very accurate context for observing how digital visual texts, even in their apparent immateriality, display the process through which we do things with images.