1Can an image say what we are even before we speak in our own name? In the different spaces in which we appear—family-related, mediatic, etc.—can an image precede us, assign us, box us in, or conversely, can it open doors?
2These questions were born first and foremost from my own experience. In 2017, I undertook a study on sexual racism on dating sites, both as a researcher and as an involved subject (Jahjah, 2022a). Within those spaces, my image came back to me in an unexpected form, shaped by racial stereotypes: I was no longer a unique individual, but a body immediately assigned to a colonial, orientalist and exotic imaginary. “Virile Arab,” “dominant,” “animal force”: such were the scripts attached to my body before even any interaction. These categorisations were not just words, they were fantasies projected onto me until they formed a web of images, a net, a trap.
3This observation led me to a first shift. Until then, I had approached images as objects for analysis, corpuses to be examined with the distance that characterises critical social science with its Platonic premises. The image, defined in the classic sense according to Plato, as an imitation of the real (mimêsis), which leads to its degradation through simulacre (eidôlon) and hallucination (phantasma), is a zone of instability, an inconsistent manner, capable of a thousand turns, of fragmentation and recomposition. This holds even more for the digital environment, where ruse—jokes, hoaxes, etc.—has proliferated and been reinvented, playing on all the modalities of images (Jahjah, 2022b). From this perspective, the task of the philosopher and of social science is clear, one could even say causal: they must identify the illusion and lift the veil which obscures our knowledge of the real.
4This lens, which shapes academic work and journalism, is important and necessary—it is a contribution to digital media literacy. In my case, this positioning, however, was no longer sufficient. My image revealed more than just a discourse to be “deciphered”; it was also producing an experience, a mode of existence imposed by a regime of visibility that had preceded me, like many others (Jahjah, 2024a). The inquiry therefore had to shift: it was no longer a case of analysing these images, exposing simulacra and hallucinations, but of understanding how they acted, how they circulated and how they could be imbued with different meanings.
5This is where a second shift occurred, this time methodological: if my image was a terrain, could it also become a space of experimentation to enrichen the repertory of political action? I started to intervene directly on my own image, in the way I presented myself on social media (Jahjah, 2025a; 2025b). My avatars on various platforms changed, my presence became fragmented, I tested alterations using glitch, filters and AI following other artistic, political and academic acts from diverse traditions. First, that of sociophotography which interrogates the image as a space of action, of disorienting the gaze (Azoulay, 2008), of contesting dominant regimes of visibility (Edwards, 2014; Pinney, 2017). Here, the image acts in the social field, reconfiguring the real by altering modes of attention and interpretation. I also ascribe to the field of digital or “magical” arts (Almiron et al., 2020) which since the 1980s has leveraged digital materiality to oppose nationalism and populism, all the proponents of pure, fixed, rigid identities, using fissured images (Rutten & Vos, 2023), like “glitch” images (Sakr, 2023). These acts belong to a material politics of ambiguity, or even illegibility (Saemmer, 2022), which articulates actants, enunciations, platforms and contradictory values to engender uncertainty (Jarvis & Savage, 2021), altering the world by fissuring its visual regime. Such poetics of ambiguity is ancient: traces of it are found in the literary Middle Age (Boutet, 2017) and no doubt in other eras where the threat of meaning rigidifying was felt, or where descriptive categories were taken to be reality; each time that we became smaller by becoming occurrences, copies, classifications, images.
6Academics, artists and writers always sensed such a threat and intervened. Intervene: etymologically “to come between,” to “get involved,” in short, to participate in the democratic effort with your own means and at your own pace. As an academic, how does one get involved in public affairs? Such a passage, from analysis to intervention, can notably be achieved through “auto-theoretical narrative” [autohistoria-teoría] a concept developed by the queer chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa (2023 [1987]) for thinking about border identities. It consists in using writing to articulate one’s lived experience, testimonies, and self-narrative as a door towards a wider social, mediatic and political reality. Moreover, the process crosses personal situations, theorisations, conversations and different registers of writing in a continuous, dynamic and corrective way. Today I propose to integrate into my auto-theoretical narrative, begun elsewhere (Jahjah, 2024b), the question of the image. It will serve as a tool for me to read afresh a continuous assemblage, that is ongoing, never finished, and of which this article represents but a step.
7I use the term image in its wide sense, in the sense used in information and communication sciences (Bonaccorsi, 2023): it does not designate visual figures but a set of mediations that engage a relationship to the world and power dynamics; which provide power (Marin, 1993). An image acts because it is taken from a wider whole which confers it force and authority. There can be no “avatar” without a theory of identity, there can be no “profile” without a conceptualisation of the person. What can an academic do within this assemblage? How can they work their image, insert it into the spaces where they are, or even invent “technologies of visibility” (Cesaris & Lingua, 2021), to turn their image into a lever for political action which does not endanger them, which allows them to intervene prudently, by starting to listen to their own voice, by inventing their own “style of presence for the battles of [their] time” (Barthes, 1978)?
8To answer this question, I will show how I used the image under different regimes. My journey can be read as a series of transitions between several statuses of image, which marked my relationship to visibility and my development as a researcher and political subject. This work subscribes to an approach close to both sociophotography and digital arts, where the image is not solely an object of study but also a dispositif for action and where the researcher-creator is invited to find their material within sociomediatic spaces (Saemmer, 2020). By modifying the regimes of appearance, my experiments extend this questioning, taking the image from being an illusion to denounce to being an image that acts as space, knowledge and power.
9Barthes defines the effigy as everything that has to do with “the reproduction of the body as image” and underscores that with photography, the “infinite reproducibility of effigy changes the entire collective conscience that we have of our body” (Barthes, 2002, p. 564-565). This reproducibility induces a doubling of the body, where the image no longer limits itself to representing; it becomes an autonomous object, which eludes us, circulates, fragments and recomposes.
10The effigy, as Barthes evokes it and as I understand it, is a process which can freeze, which can capture a presence in a visible and collective surface. Within digital spaces, the effigy is not limited to just a photograph: it constitutes a regime of identification, a mode of recognition which precedes the subject and configures them before they can even declare themselves. In 2017, I thus embarked on an ethnographic inquiry into the way that I was perceived on male dating platforms (Grindr). My image was manifestly an archive just waiting to be activated. My interlocutors did not see me, they instead put into circulation a racialised image for which my perceived body was just a platform, a clutch (Jahjah, 2022a). A second inquiry (Jahjah, 2024a) was broadened to other spaces and other experiences and strongly confirmed this racial reading of effigies, which led Arab or Black people to self-fetishize, to adjust to the assumed expectations of their audiences to make the most of reputational, media, sexual and economic capital In this scopic regime, this neocolonial visual regime, racialised people will present themselves as virile, violent, heterosexual, frustrated by their religion, in baggy clothes or track suits, so as to correspond to the fantasies in circulation in gay circles since the 1980s.
11Faced with this, I turned myself into a “monster.” A monster in the philosophical sense: that is, what is born from the intertwining of a body with its technical environment (Nirta & Pavoni, 2021). I became both subject and artefact, product of algorithmic regimes and collective fantasies.
Figure 1
My effigy (L@dy Booba): an altered representation of my body thanks to Snapchat and Instagram “filters.”
Alt text: The illustration is composed of two selfies showing Lady Booba that have been modified using filters. The first selfie shows Lady Booba in a beige t-shirt, arms and neck covered in tattoos; he is wearing an earring. His hair is close-shaved, and he sports a beard and a moustache. In the second selfie, Lady Booba is wearing a white t-shirt under a grey hoodie sweatshirt. He wears a thick beard and a completely shaven head.
Source: Marc Jahjah.
- 1 This term, in French “gayservateur,” was recently coined in the research world to reflect the rally (...)
12L@dy Booba [fig. 1] is the result of this process, materialised through the at-symbol. I fashioned a semi-profile based on my body and thanks to self-alteration technologies (Snapchat and Instagram “filters”). Unlike the previously described adjustments, this monster introduced some gashes: it did not correspond to iconicity, that is, the highest degree of resemblance between a thing and a sign for a given viewer (Marrone, 2016). This monster rather fell under disidentification (Muñoz, 1999): it perverted iconicity, giving the viewer what they want to hook them and then gradually reorient their reading of signs. For example, my monster, L@dy Booba, presents both a virile figure from the social media world (the rapper Booba), a name (Lady) and contradictory signs (nail polish and shaved head, among others) so as to curtail from the get-go binary expectations, while also presenting some flaws as clues to the attentive viewer (tattoos slightly misplaced, an erased hand on fig. 1). By introducing ambiguity, I tried to transform an imposed effigy into visual disturbance, into a space of questioning. L@dy Booba, materialised both on dating sites (Grindr) and generalist social media (Instagram, Twitter/X), started disrupting racial expectations, as a study of the main interactions with this monster revealed (Jahjah, 2025a). It also enabled me to educate people on sexual racism [fig. 2] without exposing myself dangerously, by practicing a form of ventriloquy: not knowing that it was this assemblage who was really speaking, the “gayservator”1 audience has so far been less lively than when I commented the corpus from the earlier investigations.
Figure 2
Political practice of ventriloquy on Twitter/X.
Alt text: Tweet text: “You come to debase yourself, you choose your own degradation to the smallest millimetre, you impose on me the scenario of your offense. The ‘Arab-master’ is slave. Lady Booba.” Under the text, is a screenshot of an exchange of messages. Message 1: “On my knees and I swallow and you insult me in Arabic.” Message 2: “Open, when it comes to the...” The last word of message 2 is cut off.
Source: Marc Jahjah. Origin: screenshot taken on 31 May 2024 from the Twitter/X account @A_La_Rasbaille.
13My work around L@dy Booba falls under a broader logic of visual and sound experiments aimed at troubling frames of perception. Another significant performance in this register was my work in ASMR [fig. 3] in which I recite racist phrases addressed to me on social media, transforming violent discourse into a sound dispositif designed to soothe. This contrast creates a deep unease for audiences, who waver between relaxation and malaise, between a sweet sensorial experience of ASMR and the raw violence of racist discourse. This kind of process corresponds to “breaking the frame” (Goffman, 1991): for a moment, the viewer no longer knows what kind of meaning to attribute to the course of things. They can no longer act by rote: they are obliged to stop in their tracks to listen to the un-hearable, what is normally banalised or euphemised behind the vocabulary of “taste” or of racial “preference.”
Figure 3
ASMR performances using racists phrases on my YouTube account in 2022 and more recently on TikTok. ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response) is a synaesthetic sensation which became popular in the 2010s, and has today been taken up on several mass media platforms (YouTube, TikTok, etc.) by a wide community to create narratives, as a sleep aid and to explore new subjects.
Alt text: The screenshot is that of a YouTube video entitled: “You’re smart for an Arab” [T’es intelligent pour un arabe] part 1: ASMR application of gay dating and racial fetishization.” The image is a live capture of the ASMR and shows the face of man in half-light, in front of a microphone.
Source: Marc Jahjah. Origin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDvzd92m_R4
14This act, which extends that of L@dy Booba, actuates a shift: it renders audible who you are, it amplifies the inaudible by making it pass through contradictory mediation. While a detailed study on reception is yet to be done, my first observations are positive: ambiguity, illegibility, the breaking of the frame, paradoxically leads to greater attention. They seem to open the field of perception by neutralising reasoning. In this context, the image can be thought of as not only visual matter to be manipulated but, with Deleuze (1983), as the manifestation of a power balance that engages all the senses.
15It is in this tension between the visible and the inaudible, between figuration and sonic vibration, that I started to perceive an indetermined space where conventional categorisation no longer held. It was not a stable place, but a gradual discovery that arose from successive experiments: as I increased my interventions, I realised that what I was looking for was not just a counter-narrative, but a fluid mode of presence, not possible to grasp, not possible to situate. Thus, the effigy which first was set and constrained started to mutate, to dissolve in a space where image and sound, the visible and the audible, ceased to be distinct categories.
16From the first experiments, I discovered that a recurrent effect emerged: for those who received the images, of course, but also for myself. The ASMR in which I read out racist insults in a soothing voice elicited contradictory reactions, a state where reception could not be fully categorised neither as violence nor as care. The identity oscillation on Twitter/X [fig. 4 & 5], recently tested, potentially made me elusive to those who tried to assign a stable figure to me: each avatar or name change produced hesitation, a form of latency in recognition and, by consequence, in the very interpretation of an enunciation produced in this type of space. I mobilise them today whenever I have to take a stand on sensitive topics, such as national identity or gender issues. That an elderly Arab man [fig. 5] can be progressive can be disconcerting for some. On the other hand, that a bearded woman sometimes expresses conservative views spreads doubts on the meaning to bestow onto my Twitter/X profile in its entirety, overall favourable to “progressist” views and “minority” causes.
Figure 4
Identity oscillation on my Twitter/X profile. The header of the account @La_Rasbaille.
Alt text: Screenshot of the profile of the account @La_Rasbaille with the profile photo of a face with feminine features, with long hair styled in curls, dangling earrings, heavy makeup and sporting a pink top.
Source: Marc Jahjah.
Figure 5
Identity oscillation on my Twitter/X profile. The header of the account @La_Rasbaille.
Alt text: Screenshot of the profile of the account @La_Rasbaille with the profile photo of a face with masculine features and who seems elderly, sporting short thinning and grey hair, and a white tshirt.
Source: Marc Jahjah.
17These monstruous effigies manifestly do not generate just a temporary disturbance, they reveal a space in which assignment becomes impossible. It is not a simple zone of contradiction, ambiguity or illegibility, but truly an intermediate, liminal place, where the usual categories—identity, representation, recognition—cease to function as they should. It is at that moment, that I perceived the need for a more precise conceptual framework to name this phenomenon: the “zone of indistinction” (Jarvis & Savage, 2021).
18In intermedial studies, the zone of indistinction designates a space where borders between binary categories (real/fiction, subject/object, image/body) become porous, where “frames of experience” (Goffman, 1991), whether from the waking or the sleeping world, intermingle. It is not a space of confusion but a field of tensions, where meanings are reconfigured according to usage and where points of reference are suspended. Spaces like “social media” fit this definition admirably because they bring together extremely varied modes of presence, registers of enunciation and entities—from human to algorithm, from the political editorial to the amusing meme, from literary fiction to spats. Can the articulation of diverse genres, different forms, different enunciations, different entities reconfigure our frames of interpretation, of what we see, what we perceive, to bring us to see the visible, that which normally goes unseen and yet is right in front of our eyes?
Figure 6
Marguerite Stern stolen.
Alt text: Screenshot of a tweet from the account @la_rasbaille which reads: “My computer viruses @MargueriteStern and @doramoutot have accomplished their mission: spread far-right ideas while sporting a feminist cape, give themselves a free pass to bash Blacks, Arabs and trans in the name of a higher cause. Lady Booba.” The image that follows is taken from a video which shows the FaceSwap process.
Source: Marc Jahjah, screenshot of a Tweet posted on 3 April 2024 on the Twitter/X profile @la_rasbaille.
19It is a hypothesis that I have pursued for some months now, by transforming public figures from the far right into characters [fig. 6]. With an image generator (FaceSwap), I “steal” their face to give them one of a monster, L@dy Booba. The aim is to hollow them out, dispossess them, show their interchangeability in order to expose their homogeneous discourses. The novel-like dimension also makes it possible to serialise these media productions and to caricature conspiracy theory codes, by claiming unrealistically (“my viruses”) to be the puppeteer. The initial ambiguity here takes the form of a joke: the French word “blague” etymologically is a “blister,” something that can be seen, which makes itself seen and from which a certain complicity, a game, a contract becomes possible. In this light, the image discovers one of its modern functions: a function less about miming reality and more about revealing the processes based on which an image is perceived as an image (Vladova, 2007). What is the viewer supposed to see from L@dy Booba? Everything that takes part in the frames of interpretation, that L@dy Booba carries, and whose altered form it takes to monstrously reveal: conspiracy theory epistemologies, tools of disinformation, binarities of gender, media scripting and naturalisations.
20From this perspective, identity oscillation and face theft [fig. 4 & 5] are no longer just about monstrosity. In a first phase of my experiments, I was still attached to technical systems, my body extended by digital dispositifs and their regimes of assignment (filters, algorithms, avatars). I was a monster, in the sense defined by philosophy: a being born of the interconnection between a subjectivity and a technical environment. But as I multiplied these acts—oscillating between identities on Twitter/X, changing my face using saturation—I became something else. What I became in this zone of indistinction was no longer simply a hybrid being locked in a paradoxical relationship with the machine; I propose considering this thing as beast.
21Tavia Nyong’o (2018) speaks of the Auroch, that figure from afro-fabulation which symbolises a return to ferality, a form of rediscovered freedom within the very systems of assignment. Contrary to the monster, who remains visible like an artefact of the dominant gaze, the beast escapes capture. The beast is no longer an observable individual, but a movement, a dynamic, an indistinct form that aggregates with other entities. I am no longer alone in this state. I mix with bots, with algorithms, with floating fragments of identities. The image which I produce is no longer a stable signature: it is a furtive imprint, a passage, a current. It is, to cite Deleuze (1983), a field of forces from which emerge perhaps less an individual than a modal individualisation, that is, unpredictable trajectories, albeit limited in part by the meeting between all elements of the field.
22This was an important moment as it marked a shift in the way I intervene in images. I am no longer a subject manipulating an image: I am in the image, in the flow, without a fixed position being assignable to me. My actions become collective: they imbricate themselves in other movements of visual and identity disruptions. The zone of indistinction becomes both a tool, a lived space and a space of transformation. From that perspective, the image, as Deleuze saw it, ceases to be a surface to become a field of interaction.
- 2 I develop my approach of the Neutral more extensively in a forthcoming article (Jahjah, 2025b).
23These practices could have been characterised as “activism” or subversion of norms, but these terms imply direct opposition between power and counter-power. Yet, all the media productions presented avoided direct confrontation. Barthesʼ (1978) passage on The Neutral allows me to characterise these practices differently: they are not just a case of avoiding conflict, but a mode of action which transforms the dynamics of visibility and intervention, by depriving these of their binary charge and opening up a space of strategic fluctuation. The Neutral is not neutrality, but a way of inhabiting suspension, the interval, a mode of avoiding binary oppositions, a way of disarming assignment. It is no longer about refuting or opposing, but about slipping beyond the grip of normative capture, by opening up spaces where points of reference are erased in favour of a modulation.2
Figure 7
“The Neutral Avenger:” a robot programmed to disrupt meaning on Twitter/X.
Alt text: the profile photo shows an illustration of the scales of justice. The bio line reads: “Neither for, nor against, just here. If you are hounded by the hordes, call me. Go and rest, I will stand between the chaos and the silence.”
Source: Marc Jahjah, screenshot of the profile of the account @JusticierNeutre.
24An example of the agency of the Neutral is my autonomous bot [fig. 7]. This bot, which I programmed to interact erratically with certain flows of information, appears to act alone, sometimes responding to violent enunciations on Twitter/X, taking up fragments of discourse without taking an explicit position. The bot makes no demands, opposes nothing, but produces disruption, a moment of hesitation in reception. Some internet users think that the bot is monitored, some that it follows a random algorithm, and others project their intentions on it. The bot deploys a form of intervention which passes neither through affirmation, nor through negation, but through a modulation of the visible and the legible. It participates in a mode of action which distances itself from opposition, taking up instead a logic of drift and strategic vagueness.
25These acts are not classic forms of subversion. They are rather a mode of action where subtraction, drift and erasure become political strategies. If the image can escape assignment, it can also reintroduce new forms of power. What I witnessed with my bot, I also witnessed in other experiments: some images, subverted, manipulated, reappropriated, end up producing unexpected effects. They are no longer just interpreted surfaces, they become actants that modify their own circulation. The Neutral asks a formidable question: what remains of action when it no longer passes through an identified subject, when it is dispersed in a network, when it seems to take on a life of its own? When frames of recognition are disrupted, who or what still governs the apparition of an image? Little by little, my experiments revealed that the image no longer limited itself to disrupting, it acted alone, spread and recomposed itself outside of my own intention. Far from a simple subversion, I started to perceive that the image itself possesses its own form of agency. That moment marked the transition towards the agent image: an image which no longer depends on a gaze or a discourse to exist. What I call the network epic is an illustration of this: a mode of existence in which the image is no longer a tool for recognition but a force which guides without freezing things, as if it had its own agency, in which it would only be a matter of manifesting that which demands to exist through the image.
26The zone of indistinction allowed for the blurring of frames of perception and for the neutralisation of certain oppressive scripts, but it was just a step towards a much wider mode of presence. Another image emerges: an image that is not merely reactive, but which also becomes a force in and of itself, an agent image. This transition corresponds to a gradual displacement in which the image ceases to be a mere question of representation or reconfiguration to become a mode of existence in and of itself, a way of inhabiting the world. This shift, which coincides with Henry Corbin’s (1964) distinction between the imaginary and the “imaginal,” also marks an exit from the subjective experience towards a collective enunciation, where the issue becomes allowing other voices to burst forth and other directions to be formulated. It is no longer a case of exposing images as fake, deceptive, fruits of an “imaginary,” but to let yourself be appealed to, challenged, summoned by those who inhabit us, who persist in manifesting in diverse forms until they are heard and count in our existences.
27My deceased grandmother and brother have continued to invite themselves to my space, whether it is in my dreams, during meditation or while I daydream in a work meeting. Their image can be likened to a “survivance” (Didi-Huberman, 2002), a refusal to disappear, which here takes the form of breaking out of spaces (cemeteries, shrines), escaping the allotted places which allow the community of living to celebrate their deceased separated from them as if they were trying to forget them. The field of anthropology came up with a new concept to describe this process of breaking out, of de-framing: that of “haunting” (Delaplace, 2024). Unlike haunting by ghosts, the concept does not imply possession that must be undone: rather it invites us to think of dispositifs of welcome that are not fixed, rigid, separated; where a continuum between presences, sometimes situated at distant levels, would exist.
28In my case, this continuum takes the form of a body of work distributed in various media spaces (Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok): the network epic. This includes L@dy Booba, as it does the performances, identity oscillations, face thefts and the neutral bot. Everything mixes in the network epic (genres, categories, spaces, enunciations) to respond to hauntings: at first the ghost of colonialism, more recently family memory. Today I respond to these agent images (memories, dreams, etc.) that break in, that take the form of hauntings, with other images: microscapes, small landscapes to explore, graves that I let drift across the surface of screens [fig. 8 & 9] without imposing on them a fixed place in order to forget them. On the contrary, these graves are made to uncalm the living: they carry the demands of the dead, they recount the condition of their deaths, they demand reparation. This act aligns with the approach of Queer Death Studies, a strand launched in 2016, which places death in a materialist, conflictual logic and seeks expressive forms to make the dead count other than through commemoration. From whence research papers in the form a dialogue between Indigenous academics and their assassinated ancestors (Molina Vargas et al., 2020), from which a shared political horizon is woven.
Figure 8
My grandmother’s grave (Téta Mahassen) posted on Instagram and Twitter/X.
Alt text: Creation in blue-green and ochre-yellow, composed of various superposed images. The barely visible face of a person appears in the lower middle section of the image and the following phrase can be made out: “Let me become an ancestor” in the middle left of the image, just above the head of the person, whom we imagine to be Téta Mahassen.
Source: Marc Jahjah.
Figure 9
Grave for Shireen Abu Akleh posted on Instagram and Twitter/X.
Alt text: Creation in cyan, magenta and yellow tones, with cyan dominating, composed of an image with seems saturated with glitches. The image is cut up and we hear a crackling sound by synaesthesia. A face can be made out and it seems to be surrounded by a flower wreath in saturated colours and glitched. We imagine that it must be Shireen Abu Akleh.
Source: Marc Jahjah.
29I created a digital grave for my grandmother [fig. 8] who passed away in her village in Lebanon during the Covid epidemic which drifts across the surface of screens, in family spaces (WhatsApp) and beyond (Instagram). For it was not just the Lebanese health system responsible for her death; family negligence also played a role. The floating grave functions like a haunting: it regularly bursts forth during conversations, it appears to punch holes in a comfortable narrative, without however offending the living.
30The grave for Shireen Abu Akleh [fig. 9], a Palestinian journalist killed by the Israeli army in May 2022, extends and widens this ambition: it is no longer myself or my family who are concerned, but persistent presences which circulate from media spaces to our personal spaces, in the form of material or mental images. The epic becomes a collective adventure, a polyphony in which different presents intermingle and agent images converse.
31Thus, the agent-image is not simply an image which circulates autonomously: it is a force which guides, which produces affects, which inscribes absent bodies in the visible. It is no longer us looking at an image, but an image looking at us and passing through us.
32The role of the artist-researcher is no longer to analyse or to denounce, but rather to mediate visual forces that are bigger than them. It is no longer a matter of explaining images, but of accompanying them, of translating them, of offering them language capable of relating what is insisted upon and manifested in the images. Being a researcher within this ecosystem thus means inventing mechanisms of translation (Imhoff & Quirós, 2022) that allow the images to become hospitable spaces. In The Neutral, Barthes (1977) characterises the paradoxical nature of this mode of action where “I am not the conductor of my own score.” That is why I do not subscribe to the idea of the digital artist as an “alchemist” (Benjamin, 2020) implying that they act in their own name, with their own intention, their own means. The role of the digital artist, in my case, is more akin to the Neutral. But its discovery requires long steps, a continual work of metamorphoses and articulation between personal experiences, conceptualisation, forms of expression, introspection and dispossession of the self that auto-theoretical narrative renders possible and documents.
33This dispossession however does raise some formidable questions: if the images act beyond my intention, if they produce effects that I do not control, how do I ensure that the images are not coopted, hijacked and reinscribed in other regimes of power? Could the strategies of blurring and indistinction that I explored, aiming to neutralise certain oppressive dispositifs, be reappropriated by these same dispositifs? Recent history of political memes and campaigns of disinformation show that blurring and subversion strategies can be reappropriated by regimes of power, and turned against their initiators. The agent image, by refusing to be fixed in a single direction, thus becomes vulnerable to instrumentalisation. These tensions underscore how the agent image is not an intrinsically liberating force: it opens up a field of indetermination, but that space remains a battleground, where the challenge is both to let the images be or act, as to invent ways to navigate between their unpredictable effects.
34The network epic thus marks a transformation of my relationship to the image. It is no longer just a matter of deconstructing, nor even of subverting an image, but of understanding how it acts outside of myself, how it opens up relationships, welcomes voices without shutting them in, modifies perception of the real. From the effigy to the agent image, from disruption to the imaginal, the passage is not simply a switch from one mode of visibility to another; it describes a mutation in the way we inhabit the world through an image, in how, to follow Bachelard, we let ourselves be inhabited by an image.
35In this journey, The Neutral’s asset [our translation] allows us to rethink the positioning of the researcher and the creator: it is no longer about being at the centre, nor about being a demiurge manipulating signs, but of letting oneself be traversed by images, to accompany their force without trying to fix them in place. The image no longer bears witness, it no longer represents one sole subject or situation: it becomes a hospitable space, which momentarily welcomes existences, fragile voices, narratives that otherwise would be impossible.
36From this perspective, the image becomes a passage: between visible and invisible, between assignment and dissolution, between presence and erasure, between shelter and wandering. It constitutes a field of energy (Deleuze, 1983) where political, social, media and sensory tensions are played out anew. Accompanying these dynamics means refusing to produce a stable and identifiable image, it means agreeing to take part in a flow where the power of the image resides precisely in its capacity to never let itself be enclosed in one sole regime of meaning.
37Thus, the network epic does not close with a definitive conclusion. The epic is a permanent opening, a call to think of the image as a space of tensions, of transformations, of circulations, of contact where the challenge is no longer so much about beating an established order but about inventing other ecologies of attention, other forms of shared existence.