What is a successful image? Are the images that have made and are still making globalization stronger and more viral than the others? And what is their role in the astonishing cultural, social, economic and political phenomenon that is globalization?

The Visual Contagions Project takes the question head on, studying the images that have made globalization since the era of the illustrated print. It is indeed a wild project. It requires gigantic digital corpora, overpowering machines, and elaborate computational strategies to identify, visualize, and map visual globalization for over a century. This exhibition presents the milestones of this project. Starting from a computational and theoretical approach, we map visual globalization in the twentieth century, in order to go beyond the logic of "center and periphery" and Darwinian readings of the circulation of images. The experiment is artistic as well as scientific: the project is confronted with the practice of six young creators reflecting on the deluge of images. Through their multi sensorial interfaces, their works make us consider the multiple dimensions of the problem, between past and present, materiality and digital interface, realism and onirism, submersion and control, joke and scientificity...

INTRODUCTION IMPRESSUM