Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century

By Alessandro Sbordoni

A guide to understanding the degraded state of images in the 21st century, from social media to AI and beyond

From brainrot to deepfakes, from NFTs to AI slop, the function of the image in contemporary life has devolved from representation to the reproduction of capital, resulting in our Baudrillardean hyperreality. From the Kardashians to Donald Trump, from Pepe the Frog to Paris Hilton, the nihilism of the image is trending right now. Beyond the Image is an attempted revaluation of visual culture in the age of video monetization and artificial intelligence. Across a collection of essays, the book makes a case for the continued aesthetic and epistemological significance of the image.
Italian writer and editor Alessandro Sbordoni (born 1995) is the author of Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023) and The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 908360523X
• ISBN13: 9789083605234
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Set Margins' Publications
• Length: 112 Pages