Visual Code: Managing Power and Impotence

Annotation

A human sensory experience is built around a dominant channel, which is rarely vision. However, in the cultural space, unlike the individual, it is vision, due to its special properties of distant and three-dimensional perception, that has long served as the dominant channel for the establishment and translation of perceptual structures and values. It is not by chance that the assertion of visual order leads to the differentiation of pure and impure forms of vision, forms that act as guides or obstacles to this order as a universal structure of cultural space. The article raises the question of the impact of this cultural visual code on the sensuality and perceptual attitudes of the subject. The starting thesis is the understanding of the image as a synthesis of perception and action, therefore, the impact of the visual code in the article is revealed by the example of using visual images to change the forms of perception and actions. The result of using visual images can be both an experience of strength and an increase in the possibility of action, and an experience of impotence. Visual pollution and the use of garbage visual forms creates conditions for the passive consumption of images and cultivates the experience of powerlessness as a sustainable element of modern cultural policy and cultural consumption.

Keywords

dominant code, image, line, intensity, spot, look, visual pollution, strength, impotence

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This study was conducted as part of a research project supported by grant No. 21-18-00046 from the Russian Science Foundation dated April 26, 2021, "Definition of Criteria for Visual Pollution of the Environment," St. Petersburg State University.