Into the image

Culture and politics in the field of vision Introduction: image technologies and visual culture; The touch of the unknown; The space of the screen; Sights of war; Cyberspace and the world we live in; consuming images: from the symbolic to the psychotic; the city in the field of vision; Will images move us sitll? We are constantly being told that we are living through an image revolution. In this critical exploration of the politics of visual culture, Kevin Robins assesses the nature of our emotional and imaginary investment in the visual media, form photography to virutal reality. He lliks at how modern image technologies allow us to monitor and survey the `real`world while maintaining a distance that somehow denies its reality, and he asks what pressures lie behind the utopian fantasies of cyberspace with its alternative realities and virutal cimmunities. Rahter than accepting the fashionable idea that the new visual technologies are displacing the real, Into the image examiens them sociologically, as shaped by forces and events in the real world, and demonstrates that what continues to matter is the relation of image and screen culture to the way we interact with that world.