Giselle Beiguelman's 'Políticas da imagem' Analyzes Viral Images and Surveillance in Data Sphere

Giselle Beiguelman's 2021 book 'Políticas da imagem – Vigilância e resistência na dadosfera' examines how images proliferate like viruses within a data sphere, contaminating perception and shaping political dynamics. She argues contemporary images are infinite, fragmented, and irrepressible, driven by algorithms that serve corporate surveillance. The work connects this viral circulation to psychological pathologies like anxiety and depression, exacerbated by digital phenotyping. Beiguelman critiques how deepfakes and AI subvert ontological truths, creating a reality where distinguishing real from false becomes impossible. She analyzes the 2018 Brazilian election of Jair Bolsonaro as a case of extreme identification through image, where the candidate expressed his voters' habits rather than speaking to them. The book challenges positivist data processing methods that homogenize images into searchable data, failing to capture their plural potentials. Beiguelman references theorists like Georges Didi-Huberman and draws parallels to Aby Warburg's image collisions, proposing a new epistemology for navigating the data sphere. The text is published by Ubu.