On November 20, Am Johal and I held a book launching conversation for The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds. The event took place at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre in downtown Vancouver. A podcast from the event is being prepared for Below the Radar: A Knowledge Democracy Podcast.
Director until recently of Simon Fraser University’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Am Johal is also an author, whose books include Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (2015) and the co-authored Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (2018) and O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology (2024). He is currently Chair of the Vancouver International Film Festival, Vice Chair of Greenpeace Canada, and a board member with the BC Alliance for Arts and Culture.
In preparation for the public conversation, which veered off in many directions (with a lot of questions and comments from audience members), Am sent me some questions ahead, to which I’ve written out responses. I’m sharing those here, as I think they’re helpful in elucidating both what’s in the book and a few things that go beyond it.
Here, then, is our full “print conversation” (really, a Q & A). The actual public conversation that took place at Harbour Centre, with a lot of audience participation, will feature in the podcast, which should come out in February at Below the Radar.
Images and imagination as world-making
Am Johal: You suggest that imagination is a medium through which we and others live. Could you begin by expanding on how images — and the ways we understand and interact with them — relate to imagination as a world-making force?
Adrian Ivakhiv: My argument is that imagination is a word for the world of images, and that images are a way that the world is constituted — they are relational events that create meaning through likeness or resemblance. They aren’t the only type of meaning-making events; we also make meaning through symbol systems like language; and we make meaning through inference from causal-indexical relations (we see smoke and understand “fire”). In the study of semiotics, these are the three basic kinds of signs, or meaning-making events. But images, or what C. S. Peirce, the founder of semiotics, called iconic signs, are more primary because they engage our direct perception together with that part of our cognitive-affective “hardware” that deals in memories, which makes them more direct than language. Words may include images, so that’s a bit misleading; and indexes, to use Peirce’s language, are more accurate or reliable than icons, but it takes a lot more work to parse out the indexicality of the world, whereas the world’s iconicity — its “imageability” — is immediate. We evolved to “read the signs of the world” quickly, and images are our main way of doing it.
AJ: This brings us to the book’s larger reframing of what an image is. You describe images as dynamic, living participants in our social and ecological worlds. What do you think is the biggest misconception we still hold about what images actually do today?
AI: The biggest misconception is the same misconception we have about reality: that it consists of objects in the vast container of space, and that we humans are privileged to be able to act upon some of those objects, with the objects themselves having little meaning except what we make of them. Images, in that sense, are just another kind of object that we can manipulate and make use of. From a process-semiotic perspective, images aren’t objects that are just there before us. They’re events involving the recognition of objects (which can always be misrecognition) — objects that can be visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and so on. If images aren’t the objects but the events in which an object comes to stand for something else (from somewhere else or sometime else) to someone or something — it brings something absent to presence because of what it looks like, sounds like, smells like, tastes like, or feels like — then we can see how an image builds a world by connecting past experiences to things in the present, and producing meaning through those connections. Images are world-making connectors, world-weavers.
Then the important question becomes how to relate to an image. We humans have developed various ways of relating to images, some of which have become particularly prominent — I call them “image regimes.” And we have some fundamental disagreements about where the power lies in our relationship with images, and what the relationship between those images are and the reality they may point to. For instance, for some of us, certain images are powerful or even holy, not to be tampered with (I call those “ideal-images”), but for others no images are holy; holiness doesn’t even exist (the ideal-image regime makes no sense). That’s one of the most acute kinds of problems we run into, but not the only one. Unless we understand how these different kinds of image-relations are even possible — they’re part of the fabric of the image-mediated world — we get into conflicts that we aren’t in a position to untangle because we don’t understand what they’re rooted in.
Ecological thinking and the “post-truth condition”
AJ: How does ecological thinking help us see images differently from more traditional approaches in art history or media studies?
AI: First I need to clarify that the way I use the term “ecological” is not just ecological in the scientific sense. It is that — i.e., materially sensed, perceivable and measurable, ecology as the study of objectively measurable relations between things (ecology #1) — but it’s also social (ecology #2), which is the ecology of our social and ethical relations with each other, our intersubjective relations, and it’s perceptual (ecology #3), which means it’s mediated by our sensory entanglements which include those things we call our senses, but also those extensions of our senses that we call “media.”
This tri-ecological way of understanding images helps us because it allows us to see them in their interactive, relational webs, which are always material, social, and medial-perceptual. It’s that third dimension — that in-between place of sensorially mediated, embodied interactions — which is where it all happens, where the negotiation takes place between “what will bear signs and what will not” (to quote Bruno Latour), what will be an agent, to be respected as such, and what will just be an object, a resource, a piece of the background. And that’s why I put a lot of my focus on that medial-perceptual dimension. Those ecological webs are made up of entanglements of objects, behaviors and practices, and relationships within which we get immersed and “enchanted.” The most powerful images are the ones that enchant us to such a degree that they possess us; they act through us. We become their medium.
AJ: Of course, we’re also living in a rapidly shifting media environment. With deepfakes, AI-generated imagery, and algorithmic distribution, how do you see the agency of images changing? Are images becoming more autonomous, or simply more entangled in human and technological networks?
AI: Images are becoming more autonomous in the sense that their relationships with each other are becoming thicker and more complicated — as Trevor Paglen has put it, the “overwhelming majority of images” today are made “by machines for other machines.” And it’s becoming more and more difficult for us to understand where they begin and end: who creates them, with what goal, who they belong to, what they mean, etc.
Where the scientific model of working with images — which I call the “regime of the world-picture,” the image as a copy of reality that’s constituted by causal-indexical relationships — required an awareness of the source of each part of the indexical network — with the digital image-world, that indexicality gets washed out and almost entirely lost to us. With generative AI especially, the image is no longer sourced from any indexical event: it can be created from a prompt with a high degree of randomness, of mystery really, in the sense that I can ask Gemini or Midjourney to create a certain image, and with the same prompt it will generate one image one day and a different one the next day, and there’s no way to tell why the two are different. The indexical relationships behind AI are so complicated no human brain could possibly grasp them.
So it’s not just entanglement that is increasing, but also the loss of a traceable and verifiable connection to an originary reality. We experience that as a loss of faith, a kind of cognitive loss in our perception of the “reality” basis of images — this is the so-called “post-truth” condition — even as the images themselves become more powerful in our experience, as a kind of affective gain in their emotional volume.
The practice and responsibility of artists
AJ: Your ecological framework has practical implications as well. You describe images as part of wider energetic and material flows. How might this reshape how artists, designers, or media makers think about their own work and responsibilities?
AI: Artists have always been the key shapers of the images that make up our worlds. I say that even though the notion of the artist, and the regime of the “art object” — which I call the “expression-image” — is relatively new in its widespread dissemination across a whole range of activities we call art (the art world of galleries, art schools, biennales, and so on). But the images that have shaped societies have always been somewhat constrained by their ability to travel and extend themselves spatially. Proselytizing religions, like the Christianity of colonial Spain, France, and England, had to be spread by ships, priests, and physical warfare. At the height of the world-picture regime, images spread by printing press (which was controlled by elites); and at the height of the moving-image regime, by celluloid, radio, television, electronic cables and radio transmitters and receivers (also still broadcast out from centers of power). But with the digital image-world, they come to spread not only at the speed of light, but with the multiplicational and recombinatorial frenzy that digital media makes possible.
Image-making has become both thoroughly democratized — anyone can do it — and thoroughly reshaped by the algorithmic channeling of various structuring forces, including what’s been called “surveillance capitalism” (the capitalization of online behavioral data), cultural-political information warfare, celebrity-focused spectacle, memetic propagation, and so on. Credentials are no longer important in these domains; what’s important is the ability to dominate the attention economy. The key movers now aren’t artists, politicians, or movie stars but “influencers.” Trump is an influencer extraordinaire. Musk is an influencer who happens to have the power to shape the algorithms for a lot of other people. Wealth and influence go hand in hand, as they always have, but now that relationship is turbocharged by the infrastructure of digital media, the platform economy, and increasingly by artificial intelligence.
Maybe the first responsibility of artists, within this new world, is to recognize that the art you make is not something for yourself (which is trivial), but is something that can contribute to building memetic, narrative, and imagistic alliances within a world that’s being contested by rival imaginaries, with their visions of what’s possible and what isn’t. Some of them build on fear and offer the promise of a return to the “ideal-images” of imagined pasts — “make America great again” (white, Christian, etc.), “make Russia great again,” “make India Hindu again,” and so on. Others do the hard work of envisioning habitable relations encompassing a much broader constituency of humans and nonhumans living together in multispecies ecologies that are materially sustainable, socially just, and perceptually enlivening. If you’re not part of working toward that kind of broader vision, if your art is just about yourself, then it can sink with the trivialities of the art world…
Afterlives (and futurities) of images
AJ: One of the memorable ideas in the book is that images have “trajectories” and “afterlives.” Could you share an example of an image whose afterlife surprised you, or one that illustrates the kind of transformations you find most meaningful?
AI: One of the artists I write most about is Hilma af Klint, the early twentieth century abstractionist whose work was completely unknown practically until this century. The reasons for her rediscovery — or really just discovery, and when it was shown at the Guggenheim in 2018, it broke all records — is not just because she was a woman abstractionist doing all the things that the famous men did — Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, František Kupka, and others — at least the artistic things, not so much playing the networks of the art world as they did. So feminism could pick up on her today. But it’s also because she was doing them not for “art” but for what we today call “spirituality.” She was responding to “commissions” given to her from the “higher worlds.” It turns out that so were they, too — to one degree or another, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, and the majority of the leading artists of the early twentieth century were either Theosophists or Anthroposophists or dabbled in Spiritualism or something of the sort. They were reading, and in some cases (like Kandinsky) writing about how color — or sound, in the case of musicians (like Scriabin or Holst) — had real power. They believed in it, a bit like the early Soviet constructionist artists believed they could make a new world through art.
Both Kandinsky and af Klint believed they could change the world through images that corresponded to cosmic truths that represented the harmonies of color and nature, truths about evolution (physical and spiritual), in Klint’s case about gender complementarity, and so on. All of that got whitewashed by art historians like Clement Greenberg and the hegemony of MOMA and the post-war “art world” that saw it all as quasi-religious, maybe even proto-Nazi superstition that didn’t warrant anyone’s attention. In the end, af Klint thought the world wasn’t ready yet for her paintings, so she asked that they be kept secret for at least twenty years after her death.
I connect her work to some of the futurisms of recent decades — Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, and others — all of which I see as moving well beyond the notion of art as individual expression toward something that is both expressive and ideal, a combination of the expression-image of individual creativity and the ideal-image, which is the religious, holy image, but in these cases an ideal-image that comes not from the past but from the future, something that’s never existed before because we’re still making our way toward it. Actually, it comes from a sense of long-range, multi-generational movement between the ancestral and the futural, between ancestralities (which are multiple) and futurities (which can also be multiple). I call it the “creative-image,” and my book ends with an exploration of some variations of it, including in music and in poetry (especially the poetry of Alexis Pauline Gumbs).
So af Klint’s work was a surprise to me, but also a surprise to everyone who saw it at the Guggenheim, or the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2013, or the Tate Modern a couple of years ago, where I first saw it. And it’s a genuine “afterlife.”
Navigating the image-world: “adequate images” and accountable infrastructures
AJ: Many people feel overwhelmed by the volume of images that surround us. Does your framework offer ways for individuals or communities to navigate this image-saturated world more consciously or ethically?
AI: My hope is that we can better navigate the image-saturated world by having a better understanding of what images can and can’t do. So I point toward art that can move us, cognitively and affectively, toward a better world. But I also point to some limitations of the art that doesn’t quite get us there, or that gets lost along the way. For instance, while I love what Ed Burtynsky and his collaborators are trying to do in their Anthropocene Project — and I agree with them that if you just aren’t aware of the scale of the human transformation of the Earth, you need to see those images — I also think they run up against limitations because they’re working with older principles of environmental communication via the scientific world-picture and the expressive sublime, and those kinds of pictures get a little washed out in the digital image-world where we’ve seen them all before in movies, sci-fi flicks, apocalyptic films and the like.
I compare their work with John Akomfrah’s beautiful multi-screen video works Purple and Vertigo Sea, which work with a much more nuanced understanding of what the Anthropocene is — with its thorough entanglement with the last five hundred years of colonialism, slavery, resource extraction, but also travel, tourism, homelessness, romantic nature spectacle, the hopes and dreams and illusions of modernity and all of the rest. There’s a quality of feeling that Akomfrah gets at that is more mixed, more ambivalent, and more probing than Burtynsky’s extractionist sublime. But its limitation is that Akomfrah works in the art world — in galleries and museums — and we really need to get those kinds of rich imagistic flows from our interaction with images in digital worlds (which I think is possible).
AJ: If images are actors rather than objects, that raises ethical questions. What responsibilities do we have toward the images we create, circulate, or interact with? I want to reference a quote you use from Werner Herzog. He says that a civilization without “adequate images” is doomed. How does this idea connect to your project, and what might it mean for cultivating more adequate images for our time?
AI: Herzog has a way with words (as we see in that quote), and of course a way with images: he’s given us some memorable images “for our time” (I wrote about a few of these in Ecologies of the Moving Image). I agree with him that we need more adequate images, which are always also adequate narratives — storylines lodged within images that embody an understanding of where we’re coming from and where we’re heading — our histories and ancestralities, the trajectories that we’re on, but also the openings they might offer for deviating from their logical, inertial end-points and toward other possibilities. Envisioning alternative futurities is perhaps the most important project for art today, and it requires images that can motivate us to act against the predominant tendencies of the art world, the political world, the algorithms of digital media, etc. A lot of artists recognize that, and it’s heartening to see the ways in which environmental and climate justice issues have been taken up, not just through the tired old white-environmentalist lenses, but through decolonial lenses, by artists in recent years. But we need a lot more than that.
And one of the key leverage points is the establishment of much better regulations for digital media, for social media, and for artificial intelligence. It seems very difficult today to be talking about reining in the media industries, at a time when politics is so discouraging, so polarized, and the world ruled by neo-imperialist alliances of right-wing populists and tech overlords. But there’s actually a lot of common ground to be found across the political spectrum once you start talking about the risks to humanity from the new digital tools of the tech titans — AI, the addictive and attention-eroding qualities of social media, the vast profits being made and huge bets being placed on our futures, and so on.
So yes, we need more adequate images for our time, but we also need to understand how the environment in which all of our images move and function is being reshaped in ways that aren’t publicly accountable or even understandable, that are geared toward mega-profits and new imperialisms, and how this — like every wave of extractionist expansion in history — has to be reined in very quickly.
In that sense, The New Lives of Images is both a call for new kinds of images and a call for understanding and managing the infrastructures within which images take on these very strange and different lives, lives that change us in the process.
