The author proposes, in the six essays of this her brand-new book, a reflection on the status of image in the contemporary world. Since the emergence of photography, and after cinema, the universe of technical images did not know a process of transformation as radical as that of our time. Images have become the main interfaces of daily mediation, occupying communication, affective relationships, infrastructure, surveillance aesthetics and body scan systems in the city.Speaking of image policiesʺ, she argues that images are, in addition to the transmission of ideas and languages, the very field of political tensions and disputes of today. Beiguelman associates the invention and massive distribution of smartphones with a new surveillance regime, no longer instituted by the state, but the result of the systematic capture of personal data, deliberately offered by users to social media platforms the datasphere. The countless production of images in the feeds and stories of social networks, surveillance cameras and official records configure, according to her, a new aesthetic of surveillance. Digital image, selfies, memes, image aging apps, Waze and Google Maps, deep fakes videos, body scanning, the internet of things, facial recognition machines, artificial intelligence, gable protest projections in cities, digital censorship, all these novelties from the contemporary world are analyzed by Giselle Beiguelman to describe (and even guide the reader to recognize in the world around him/her) the role of the image in social relations today.

The author proposes, in the six essays of this her brand-new book, a reflection on the status of image in the contemporary world. Since the emergence of photography, and after cinema, the universe of technical images did not know a process of transformation as radical as that of our time. Images have become the main interfaces of daily mediation, occupying communication, affective relationships, infrastructure, surveillance aesthetics and body scan systems in the city.Speaking of image policiesʺ, she argues that images are, in addition to the transmission of ideas and languages, the very field of political tensions and disputes of today. Beiguelman associates the invention and massive distribution of smartphones with a new surveillance regime, no longer instituted by the state, but the result of the systematic capture of personal data, deliberately offered by users to social media platforms the datasphere. The countless production of images in the feeds and stories of social networks, surveillance cameras and official records configure, according to her, a new aesthetic of surveillance. Digital image, selfies, memes, image aging apps, Waze and Google Maps, deep fakes videos, body scanning, the internet of things, facial recognition machines, artificial intelligence, gable protest projections in cities, digital censorship, all these novelties from the contemporary world are analyzed by Giselle Beiguelman to describe (and even guide the reader to recognize in the world around him/her) the role of the image in social relations today.