Immagine. Testo. Politica.: Interrompere il flusso delle immagini attraverso il codice

Giulia Cordin; Eva Leitolf

doi:10.82068/pgjournal.2025.22.41.06

Authors

Giulia Cordin Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Author
Eva Leitolf Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.82068/pgjournal.2025.22.41.06

Keywords:

Image Overflow, Digital Image, Book as Medium, Reader Agency, Critical Practice

Abstract

In the age of visual overproduction, the digital image has become a continuous and ubiquitous stream—characterized by speed, excess, and instant accessibility. This perceptual overload leads to a passive and superficial consumption of visual content, hindering a critical and in-depth understanding of reality. Within this context, the book—not only as a physical object but as a media device with its own pace, rhythms, and languages—regains a strategic function: that of interrupting, defusing, and reframing the flow. When examined for its critical and projective potential, the book emerges as a space of resistance, a site for deceleration, and a tool for renegotiating the gaze.

This paper explores this hypothesis through a selection of publications developed in recent years at Studio Image, a visual research lab experimenting with hybrid editorial forms that intersect photography, text, and editorial design. The analyzed works, conceived as alternative ‘codices’ to dominant visual communication, challenge the immediacy of images by offering modes of reading and interpretation that are deeper, layered, and more conscious. In this sense, the book is not an analog relic, but an active device capable of critically engaging with the visual present and restoring agency to the viewer/reader.

Author Biographies

Giulia Cordin, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Designer and researcher working at the intersection of design and visual arts. Her work specifically investigates the politics of visual representation and image contextualization practices through editorial projects, digital media, and exhibition contexts. She collaborates with cultural institutions, museums, and publishers. Since 2017, she has been teaching Visual Communication at Studio Image at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. She holds a summa cum laude PhD in Media Theories and Interface Cultures (Kunstuniversität Linz, Austria).
Eva Leitolf, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Artist, educator, and curator. She is currently a full professor and head of Studio Image at the Faculty of Design and Arts at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. She studied visual communication with a specialization in photography at the University of Applied Sciences (FH) of Essen and earned an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts with Allan Sekula. The common thread of her research is the critical analysis of image production and contextualization practices, with a focus on complex social phenomena such as colonialism, racism, and migration. Her works have been exhibited at international institutions including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Wallach Art Gallery/Columbia University in New York, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

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Image. Text. Politics.

Disrupting the Stream of Images Through the Codex

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