Session 1 - Doctoral seminar Memory, Poetics, Hermeneutics

This talk examines Diva, sculpture-excavation by Juliana Notari, as a paradigmatic case of the ontological transformations of art in the age of interconnected images. The work, immediately caught up in digital circulation, is constituted through a set of socio-technical mediations - platforms, algorithms, metadata, interactions and controversies - that go far beyond its materiality and its insertion in a former sugar factory in Northeastern Brazil. Drawing on Dewdney's notion of the interconnected image, we show that the photographic image now functions as a post-representational assemblage, combining data, computational automatisms, public reappropriation and the dynamics of recommendation. Analysis of online reactions reveals a multiplicity of public spaces - conservative, progressive, identitarian, environmentalist, feminist or misogynist - whose interventions contribute directly to the ontological constitution of the work. The emergence of "progressive detractors" shows that the binary schemas opposing contemporary art and conservatism are no longer sufficient to account for the cultural conflicts structuring the reception of works on social networks. Diva thus exemplifies an aesthetic condition in which art and mediation co-produce sympohetically. In conclusion, this study invites us to rethink the ontology of art based on the operations of interconnected images, digital infrastructures and contemporary modes of participation and controversy.