Indifferent Looks: Visual Inattention and the Composition of Strangers

The majority of visual images circulating in contemporary media-saturated societies are experienced, it is probably safe to say, as fleeting and unremarkable ephemera. Visual inattention will be explored as a category of social-material practice. The iconic similarity attributed inattentively to photographs as a routinely encountered visual environment complements the same-world disclosure that emerges, paradoxically, from their indexical nature. Television introduces a socially novel form of visual connectivity: nonreciprocal face-to-face communication. Audiovisual media technologies create non-reciprocal non-encounters between viewers and viewed and are perceived to insulate the viewer from ethical responsibility to those represented on the screen. The culture of media and image-saturation has become, ultimately, second nature to the extent that humanity has become auto-totemic. The composite-image produced by inattentive viewing, image-mobility and media-ubiquity is, like the totem, animated. The composite image itself is both indexical and emblematic, singular and general, someone and anyone, change and repetition, concrete particular and abstract universal.