Mirar el dispositivo. Variaciones sobre el ojo y la máquina

Résumé

With the development of the technical tools of visualization in the 20th century, the gaze was transformed from subject to object of representation. The infinity of images of the world fostered by cinema and photography, from its beginnings to its digital developments, has transformed technical devices into reproducers and producers of worlds. The reflection on this double, imitative and creative, power of the visual techniques has required the artistic gaze to turn on itself and on the devices that make it possible and in which the eye is confused with the objective and the man with the machine. This paper wants to point out some variations on the recurrent theme of the representation of the devices that make possible the representation itself: from the promise, incarnated by Vertov's cinema, of an infinite gaze at the service of a full self-consciousness, to the threat, dissected by the film essayism of Farocki, of a totalitarian gaze to the service of instruments of surveillance and technological control of men.