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In the last two decades, mobile, locative and wireless media have profoundly reconfigured our experience of the image as well as our experience of the urban space. Based on a critical revision of one of the first accounts of this new experience of the city, Lev Manovich’s ‘Poetics of Augmented Space’ (2006), and on Adrian Mackenzie’s concept of ‘wirelessness’ (2011), the authors define the urban as a data-space where physical and digital data, bodies and signals commute and connect via mobile devices and wireless networks. In this urban data-space, the screen, as our local access point to the networks, coincides with the image as the visual part of multitudinous data exchanges. In this Brave New City, where we are permanently assisted/monitored by a plethora of digital devices, software agents and sensors, the role of the image is no longer to screen the world but to screen our data, turning us into an ambulant real-time database, a mobile corps de données. The data gathered from each and every move in the city allows for infinite and invisible operations of surveillance and control by both government and commercial stakeholders. This hidden operativity is all the more powerful as it is dissimulated in the form of proliferating image-screens.

With the digital revolution, the photographic paradigm of the image has become supplemented with an algorithmic paradigm. The result is a new kind of image capable to gather, compute, merge and display heterogeneous data in real time; no longer a solid representation of a solid world but a softimage—a program-mable database view. In today’s neurosciences and machine vision, the very concept of “image” as a stable visual entity becomes questionable. As a result, the authors propose that the need exists to radically expand the definition of image and abandon its humanist and subjective frame: The posthuman image—which the authors propose to call the postimage—is a collaborative image created through the process of distributed vision involving humans, animals and machines.

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