About the “new” images

Between ephemeral fashion effects and genuine artistic revolutions, “new images” often reveal more about our relationship to the present than to the future, and often more about the seduction of fashion than constructive innovation for the future.

The ambiguous seduction of novelty

Novelty exerts an undeniable attraction on us: it sells because it enriches our experience, broadens our knowledge, our sensations and our representations. However, it must not be too disruptive, because too radical a questioning will disturb rather than seduce us, and we will resist it. The “new images,” which give their title to so many cultural and industrial events in the audiovisual and media field, must therefore bring their share of innovation without excess, at the risk of being rejected.

The seductive power of “novelty” attracts spectators and mobilizes funding, whether public or private, all eager to associate their image with modernity, a sine qua non condition for continuing to exist tomorrow. Human beings, for their part, will evolve naturally, their social practices will transform as they always have. Cultural and artistic structures, organizations and proposals have no choice but to adapt to new needs, if not to precede them.

This is why, on an institutional level, “new images” constitute a “winning” recipe; they seem to guarantee organizations their longevity, the sale of their cultural products and access to funding. There are a few bold ones who dare to truly question the frameworks established by industrialists and their commercial strategies, but paradoxically, behind the “new images” label, we most often discover surprisingly conventional projects, reproducing very classic patterns in the relationships between authors, producers and spectators. Many projects presented as innovative in innovation-focused aid commissions adopt an almost advertising aesthetic, their very form becoming a selling point.

We hardly find in these approaches any deep anthropological reflection on the future transformations of relationships between humans and images. Rather, it is about validating seductive projects that have only the appearance of the future, a superficial representation of what is perceived, at a given moment, as modernity. These “inventions” quickly fall into oblivion because their real objective was not to explore the future, but to convince funders to finance them immediately, which is often not even conscious for the project authors, who may themselves believe in these representations.

We thus delude ourselves with the illusion of writing the future when basically, we are only concerned with the present. Take the example of “web-documentaries,” those interactive audiovisual objects presented as the future of audiovisual between approximately 2007 and 2015.

Technological mirages: from CD-ROM to web-documentary

The technological modalities of CD-ROMs from the 90s and web-documentaries from the 2010s, twenty years later, were actually very similar. When I dared make this comparison at the time, it was almost a crime of lèse-majesté: the future was there, in the web-documentary, it must not be contested! Yet, it was obvious that these productions resembled feature for feature experiments conducted fifteen to twenty years earlier, experiments that had not produced memorable works and, above all, that had created objects that quickly became unreadable, victims of technological obsolescence.

Chris Marker’s interactive CD-ROM Immemory (1997) perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. An interesting project but less rich, in my opinion, than his films, which were technically much simpler, it quickly became unreadable on computers, a few years after its release. The Centre Pompidou finally gave up investing in its technical update, as the operation proved so complex. This experience should have served as a lesson: these objects, widely funded and celebrated as embodiments of modernity, quickly fell into oblivion and became technically inaccessible, well before the disappearance of physical media. The compatibility problems of CD-ROMs and then DVD-ROMs made these contents obsolete at high speed.

When the web-documentary era began in 2007, Flash technology allowed interactivity in web browsers. However, this proprietary technology was already doomed, its publisher Adobe itself officialized its disappearance a few years later. I and others warned producers very early on about the need to use free technologies, certainly less accessible but much more sustainable, rather than this system doomed to obsolescence. I met with categorical refusals and even contempt.

Why this resistance? Flash was fashionable, mastered by developers, allowing for the rapid creation of attractive objects and therefore obtaining funding. Exploring the true technologies of the future, that is to say creating with the free languages HTML and JavaScript and CSS, still alive today, would have required more effort. These subsidized “innovators” were actually prisoners of the present. Their “new images” were condemned to rapid obsolescence and inaccessibility.

Today, despite our warnings, the vast majority of web-documentaries are nothing more than gray rectangles on our screens. Even if the technical object still exists, it is unreadable, and has been for a long time. We would have to resurrect period computers with their obsolete software. This situation should encourage us to cultivate critical thinking and be wary of fashion effects, those moments when everyone proclaims that there is only one path to follow.

Now consider virtual reality: these 360° videos viewed in headsets, which allow you to turn your head in the filmed space. Fascinating experiences, certainly, which triggered almost a gold rush. All innovation funding focused on this technology, convinced that every household would soon be equipped with a headset. Facebook itself rebranded and acquired Oculus at a premium price to massively develop these technologies. However, the announced revolution still hasn’t happened.

Personally, from 2016, I explored these tools with a critical approach, seeking to divert them and understand what they meant, through creativity. I used these cameras to create strange images, to question the very notion of immersion. Rather than broadcasting in a headset, why not project in space? Rediscover the spirit of pre-cinema, of old panoramas? The Théâtre du Rond-Point and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, with their circular architecture, still bear witness to these immersive experiences prior to cinema.

And what really works today? These vast immersive installations. L’Atelier des Lumières, a successful private initiative, simply offers monumental video projections in spaces, with still, moving or interactive images. This trend has developed by creating viable economic models and experiences that durably touch the public. Yet these projects have not been subsidized as “new images” experiments. They were not perceived as innovative because they offered singular, assumed visual experiences, rather than supposedly new ones.

The future is built by our courageous and grounded choices, not by commercial opportunities. Those who have worked outside of trends, deepening their projects without yielding to the sirens of apparent novelty, are those who endure and will endure. The phenomenal success of TikTok and its impact on our lives is overwhelming proof of this.

Outside academicism: where the future is really invented

I remember that in 1995, my first feature film, La tête dans l’eau, was selected at the “New Cinema Festival” in Pesaro, Italy, a prestigious festival established for a long time. The films screened, including mine, had nothing to do with any technical or commercial novelty. They belonged to avant-garde cinema, which is cinema considered as a plastic art, privileging formal research over conventional narrative. The term “new” here designated the representation of a non-academic, timeless art, resolutely outside fashion effects.

These were proposals that were precisely not fashionable. My film explored audiovisual language, images and sounds, rhythms and sensations. The narrative, although present, remained secondary to the plastic dimension of the work. Perhaps the true new images are those that, outside of trends, dig into the representations of tomorrow’s world without seeking to satisfy the academic criteria of the moment, because trends are only disguised academicisms.

Authentic new images come out of academicism. It is outside these frameworks that the future is truly invented.

True revolutions: when usage prevails over technology

Let’s return to TikTok: what are these videos, if not very simple sequence shots, filmed by everyone with their phone and shared online? The application certainly facilitates editing, adding titles and effects, but what creates massive adoption is not technological innovation, TikTok actually contains very little, the innovation lies in new uses, in the redistribution of roles: spectators become actor-participants in a collective audiovisual narrative that is built through interaction. This may seem familiar, YouTube already allowed these exchanges, and before that classes sent video letters from one country to another. But TikTok democratized the practice by directly integrating the camera into the broadcast application, a function that has been technically possible for a long time and was already present before in other applications.

The real change brought about by TikTok is anthropological: it disrupts the hierarchy of cultural productions by valuing amateur creation. Commercially speaking, this enhancement of amateurism goes against the interests of professionals, who innovate precisely to maintain their symbolic power.

So yes to new images, but above all yes to new practices, to paradigm shifts on the nature of art and culture. Yes to fundamental questioning, not in a commercial but humanistic logic, on relationships between human beings. This is where we can truly speak of new images.