Images of world: from the images-trace to the electro-numerical space

Abstract

Introduction: Although the cinematograph has appeared as an extension of the planimetric logic, thus updating the cartographic model of the Atlas, its emergence realized the dream—already potentially contained in the map’s logic—of travelling the world in a straight line, with no interruptions, overcoming every restriction of time and space.

Method: Here, I examine the cinema’s two-sided nature, its status of frontier between the spatial conception of the geometric-Euclidean system and the implementation of the spherical logic of the Globe; i.e. the evolution from the cinema’s cartographic tendency to the electro-numerical image’s creation and proliferation.

Results: Through this electro-numerical image, also due to the progressive colonization of the atmosphere, the Earth is no longer envisaged as flat, acquiring the shape of a network of lines and intersections. The planimetric logic underlying the image-trace no longer leads the world. Globalization denies the Euclidean geometry. Ubiquity and instantaneousness, implemented by the speed with which the electro-numerical image travels, cause the reality’s progressive despatialization.

Conclusions: That is the reason why the electro-numerical image no longer represents “the world becoming image” but “the imagination becoming world”, unavoidably generating a new experiential horizon.