Common Image: Towards a Larger Than Human Communism

Western humanism has established a reifying and predatory relation to the world. While its collateral visual regime, the perspectival image, is still saturating our screens, this relation has reached a dead end. Rather than desperately turning towards transhumanism and geoengineering, we need to readjust our position within community Earth. Facing this predicament, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie develop the notion of the common image – understood as a multisensory perception across species; and common ethics – a comportment that transcends species-bound ways of living. Highlighting the notion of the common as opposed to the immune, the authors ultimately advocate otherness as a common ground for a larger than human communism.

Ingrid Hoelzl is an independent scholar specializing in digital and environmental image theory, and the artistic director of the General Humanity collective bringing together theory, poetry, and performance. She holds a PhD from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a diploma in Fine Arts/Visual Culture Studies from the Universität der Künste Berlin. She has worked as a researcher and educator at universities and art academies worldwide. Her research on the soft- and postimage has been published in journals and anthologies, most recently in The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (2021).

Rémi Marie is an independent writer and editor of the French online journal Art Debout. His work has been shown in museums, galleries, and theatres, such as the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, and Montevideo, Marseille, and published in reviews, such as Nioques and Le Quartanier. Since 2014, he has collaborated with Ingrid Hoelzl, coining the terms softimage and postimage. This work has been published in Photographies, Visual Studies, and Leonardo, among others.