SCHOOL OF THE IMAGE

MANIFESTO

We live inside an unprecedented flood of images: generative visuals, synthetic faces, 3D renderings, video leaks, livestreams, surveillance footage, memes.
Images circulate faster than our capacity to look at them, let alone understand them.

At the same time, we are exposed daily to images of extreme violence, domination, and power, consumed individually yet experienced collectively.

Every image exists in relation to others: images that precede it, images it answers to, images it contradicts or erases.
Every image looks back.

In the age of predictive and speculative media, images not only represent the future, they actively participate in producing it.

Renderings of cities, territories, and infrastructures, for example, are used to guide genocidal, political and economic decisions, often by actors distant from the places depicted, reshaping social, environmental, and cultural realities before they even exist.

We seek to unpack these relations together, tracing the ethical, political, economic and emotional circuits that connect one image to another, and collectively producing meaning rather than receiving it passively.

Rather than asking whether an image is true or false, we ask:
What does it do? What does it connect to? What does it demand from us?

The School of the Image is a transmedia project that proposes to slow down the act of seeing, restoring time, attention to our relationship with images through a series of lecture-performances, workshops and  conferences.

Rather than treating images as objects to be consumed or verified, the project invites participants to read, dissect, and reconstruct images together, developing a shared toolkit for and predictive media, where meaning emerges collectively rather than passively received.