Scopic drive

PRELIMINARY NOTE Many years after my first visit, almost intimate, in the Pink room at the Louvre, I wanted to see —in its new location— that enigmatic smile, just like the Baptist´s with his index finger pointing up, hiding a secret. An unexpected spectacle gets me sidetracked in a drift through a series of questions till to find again the initial object where I did not imagine. SYNOPSIS An operator —which is both a spectator looking glances—, proposes a series of questions. The work isn't intended to document the panopticon of the twenty-thousand pictures —all the same and all different— that are taken daily in the proposed place, nor to illustrate the questions that are outlined regarding the media theory. The attempt is to distinguish the alienated drive [that way of looking imposed by the visual culture associated to consumerism] and desire to gaze [another way of seeing]. A reaction against excess of images and a reflection on the loss of aura and aesthetic emotion. BY WAY OF EPILOGUE The versatility in altering the timing of the filmed material and the photography fluidization have diluted, in recent years, the old separation between image-fixed and image motion, among theories on photography and video- cinematography. Moreover, art history is questioning linear time from closer to the concept of time in its multiplicity buildings. Other disciplines such as sociology of art and psychoanalysis continue to enrich the understanding of images as field and case of language. Read to know how to look and see. This experience led me to the updating of certain articles and critical texts in the propaedeutic of a subject that evolves as technology advances and changing the ways of our world, while human nature remains unchanged.