Learning to look beyond the frame: reflections on the changing meaning of images in the age of digital media practices

Changing the way in which we produce, store and share images, new technologies have modified our ways of relating to and addressing the visual field. The importance of these changes resides not so much in the increased speed and size of production and distribution of images around the world, but rather on the practices that are emerging in parallel to this. Alongside with the spread of new technologies, the last decades have witnessed the growth of new image-making practices that are more attentive to context, social relations and materiality, and hence to the world surrounding the frame. The present paper aims to explore this topic by addressing two separate fields of contemporary image-making practices. It will first address the world of interactive (or multi-linear) documentaries and discuss the capacity of this new filmic genre to push viewers, against conventional stereotypes, away from the screens and into the material and social contingencies of everyday life. The second example, instead, will offer reflections on digital images’ growing embeddedness in spatial networks and relations. Because of their ever-increasing entanglements with geolocative media, images today contain new (invisible) layers of information which are interesting not only from an epistemological and ontological point of view, but also from a methodological one. Overall this article constitutes an invitation to further integrate, in our understanding of images today, the field of visual culture with that of digital culture.