Ojos y Capital at la Pantera Rossa
Social center and library La Pantera Rossa, Zaragoza
Presentation of Ojos y Capital by Remedios Zafra at La Pantera Rossa social center and library, Zaragoza (C/ San Vicente de Paúl, 28).
On Thursday October 29th at 19:30hrs, Remedios Zafra will present her last book. This essay about the present and thenet-culture, in its questioning of identity through visuality and the economy, cuts through concepts such as shadow, disappearance, representation, value, wastefulness, reciprocity, moral loop, capitalism and feminization, throwing into question the existing forms of value creation and new collectivity in the networks (what is to become of ethical and political links). This essay threatens to “lick the eyes”.
Within the contemporary primacy ofseeing via screens, experience is increasingly sustained within logics that dissolve old forms of collectivity and quantitatively condition new regimes of value and recognition of the other. Eyes and Capital suggests that the system becomes perverted setting in play two substantial gains: power over technological management of visibility as a guarantee of existence and value (eyes as a new currency); and involvement in what we deliver up in the networks, more or less consciously, contributing to new forms of domination and colonization of the gaze. And, although the inequality of the “non-seen”, of the excluded and non-conformists, permits today an appropriation of the net to bring into view zones of shadow and of the precariousness of what has traditionally remained outside the frame, this also shows up the illusion of a net-culture where the machine and its mechanisms have been made “invisible” to us through their ever-presentness and excess. Indeed, conflicts in our times make use not only of speedy online mobilization, but of the paralysis derived from infinite distances that makes it possible to see through technology as a new habitat, the blindness of seeing the “now” with no rest and no blinking, in a symptomatic crisis –or perhaps established status- ofattention. It is a matter of urgency to understand the individual, whose life confronts the risk that this excess will have the effect of switching off our conscience.
