The Saturation of Vision: Apathy in the Age of Scrolling
It’s no longer a matter of visibility.
The images are already here. Everywhere. At every moment.
We don’t need to seek them out, they find us. They pass through us, slip into the gaps of our attention, strike the retina, overlap, are forgotten. Art, video art, design, politics, advertising, pain, entertainment. Everything presents itself in the same place: the horizontal, infinite, indifferent space of the feed.
And so, the artist no longer exhibits. They publish.
They share the image of their work knowing, deep down, it won’t truly be seen. They know it will be scrolled past. They know it will appear somewhere between a dance clip and a tragedy, between a meme and a sponsored post. They know that even if the work is important, necessary, intense, it will still be absorbed into the visual noise, reduced to mere content.
And yet, they do it. Because the alternative is to disappear. Because attention is now bought by the second. Because today, a work can be both powerful and irrelevant in the same instant.
We live in a paradoxical form of overexposure.
Seeing has become automatic, but no longer implies engagement. The images are present, but create no friction. They do not disturb, do not pierce, do not compel. Trauma is aestheticized. Disaster is carefully edited. The artwork is optimized to look good within the vertical 4:5 format of the new Instagram feed. Complexity flattens. Depth contracts.
At Fakewhale, we have been questioning this very condition for some time.
We feel the urgency to ask a fundamental question that cuts through the heart of contemporary visual culture:
What is the relationship between art, reproduction, and digitalization today?
How are these dynamics not only reshaping the ways images are produced and circulated, but more crucially, how they are perceived, archived, neutralized, or dissolved.
What was once rare is now readily available.
What was once context has become surface.
Art is not lacking. It is everywhere. And precisely because of that, it has become invisible.
Anesthesia is not silence. It is excess.
It is the accumulation of stimuli that no longer reach a sensitive threshold. The image is not less intense. It is less anticipated. It comes after everything: after the gesture of opening an app, after the movement of a thumb, after an algorithm has decided when, how much, and to whom it will be shown.
In the present, indifference is not disinterest. It is form.
A psychological and cultural form that protects us from overload. That distances us from anything that might otherwise affect us. A strategy of visual survival. Because when everything carries the same urgency, nothing requires understanding anymore.
Thus, even great art appears like a notification.
Like something that shows up, but leaves no imprint.
Like one voice among many.
Like a light that doesn’t pierce the night, but flickers briefly,
and then disappears.
Too Many Images for a Single Gaze
We are not facing a crisis of the image, but a crisis of the gaze.
Images today proliferate, multiply, and spread without obstacles. They circulate across platforms with the same fluidity as information, advertisements, and personal stories. There are no more access barriers, no thresholds of intention to cross: it is enough to open any app to be instantly overwhelmed by a potentially infinite, uninterrupted stream of visual stimuli, all displayed on the same plane.
In this landscape, what is lacking is neither the quality of production nor the intelligence of many works, but rather the very possibility for the viewer to dispose of a psychic and perceptual space capable of receiving them.
The gaze, by its nature, is selective, finite. It requires pauses, emptiness, preparation. Every authentic act of seeing is a threshold to cross, a temporality to inhabit. But the visual present allows for no pause: we scroll, we consume, we forget. The feed, the true stage of contemporary imagery, allows no lingering, because everything happens simultaneously, in the same form, with the same urgency and accessibility.
Art, inserted into this context, has no choice but to adopt the codes of the space that hosts it: it must be legible, captivating, instantly recognizable, and ideally shareable. Even when it succeeds, it is forced to compete with every other image that, for entirely different reasons, exerts the same kind of immediate attraction.
The effect is not so much a loss of meaning as it is a collapse of difference.
We are no longer able, perceptually and cognitively, to distinguish between a work of video art and a commercial fragment, between a performative gesture and an aesthetic trend of the moment, between an image constructed to produce meaning and an image designed to generate attention. Everything presents itself as content; everything demands a quick glance; everything positions itself within a horizontal logic that flattens any tension.
As a result, even that which holds the potential to open critical space, to interrupt, deviate, or wound, becomes neutralized. Not because it is ineffective, but because the context of consumption absorbs it in advance, draining it of its capacity for resistance.
This does not mean that images capable of producing transformation no longer exist, but that they now find themselves forced to compete within an ecosystem that is not designed to accommodate them.
The digital, with its speed, its logic of accumulation, and its algorithmic architecture, is not neutral. It directs the gaze, dictates its rhythm, and determines what is seen and what is ignored, not according to quality or necessity, but according to compatibility with the system itself.
Art that does not adapt is ignored. Art that does adapt risks becoming something else.
For the visual work to continue existing as experience, it must find new ways to re-establish thresholds, reintroduce time, and defend the asymmetry that every true image carries within itself. For when the gaze no longer has space to choose, it no longer sees. It slides. And what slides leaves no trace.
The Artwork as Content, the Viewer as Cursor
Scrolling has replaced contemplation.
The feed has taken the place of the exhibition wall, the catalog, the book, the dialogue. In fact, these very formats are often poured into the feed themselves. How many times have we felt that we had seen that gallery wall, that catalog with its distinctive design photographed from every angle? But it was only in yesterday’s feed.
We are no longer called to look, but simply to move on.
The time of the artwork has contracted to fit the rhythm of the thumb: just a few seconds, a minimal visual threshold, the brief moment needed to decide whether to stay or skip. But staying has become almost obsolete. We scroll. Always. Toward the next image, the next piece of content, the next stimulus.
In this landscape, the artwork is no longer that which resists the gaze, but that which adapts to the visual grammar of the platform.
It becomes content. And content is, by definition, interchangeable, repeatable, optimized.
To survive, art is forced to perform within the parameters of algorithmic visibility. It must be codifiable, replicable, frictionless (adaptable like any other content). As a result, even the deepest artistic research risks being confined within the dimensions of a thumbnail, a preview, a fragment extracted and decontextualized.
We no longer view the artwork itself. We view its synthesized version, formatted for the feed. Its aesthetic-image.
This dynamic, of course, did not originate today, nor exclusively with the digital.
It was already inscribed in the logic of technical reproduction that Walter Benjamin described in 1936. But today it has taken on a much more extreme, and above all, more automated form. Benjamin saw in reproducibility a potential for perceptual emancipation, but also a threat to the aura of the work. In the feed, that aura is not only lost; it is replaced by anonymous performativity, by a forced equivalence.
The artwork enters a flow that no longer allows for exceptions. Its presence is no longer an event. It is a fleeting appearance in an archive without memory.
In a little-known essay from the 1990s, Paul Virilio spoke of the “logistics of perception” as an invisible battlefield.
Whoever controls the time of vision controls the very possibility of experience.
In the accelerated world of media, he argued, the image is no longer a reflection of the world, but its replacement. It is no longer a matter of seeing reality, but of seeing through a visual system that has already decided for us what to show and how to show it. The feed is not just a container. It is an ideological filter, a structure that directs the gaze even before the viewer can exercise any intention.
This new algorithmic logistics requires a redefinition of the viewer.
The viewer is no longer someone who observes and interprets, but a cursor that scrolls. There is no action, only reaction. Interaction is reduced to the act of passing by. Even when one pauses, it happens within the language of acceleration.
The artwork that demands time, that operates through density, through waiting, through accumulation, risks ceasing to exist. Not because it is not published, but because it is no longer read on its own temporal terms. Its complexity is perceived as slowness, and slowness as failure.
But the most unsettling issue is not the disappearance of the work, but the normalization of this process.
The artist, fully aware of this destiny, begins to conceive their work already anticipating its fate in the feed.
The artwork is no longer created for a space, for a body, for a gaze. It is created to be adapted, translated, compressed. It is born for a preview, like a trailer before the film.
One could say that what we are losing is not the image itself, but the critical distance required to perceive it as such.
Everything is too close, too available, too immediate.
The image ceases to be a surface to enter and becomes a surface that retains nothing. A smooth sheet, an interface that offers no resistance.
The problem is not the banalization of art. It is its silent assimilation into everything else. A disappearance not through absence, but through perfect integration.
If the artwork today can no longer produce rupture, it is because the visual system has learned to absorb it, to incorporate it into the flow, to turn it into one voice among many.
And if the artwork no longer creates discontinuity, the viewer can no longer be pierced by it.
What remains is a constant vision, but without impact.
An aesthetic without incision.
A presence that leaves no trace.
The Aesthetics of Indifference
There is a point beyond which constant presence no longer intensifies perception, but erases it, not through absence, but through saturation. This is where the paradox of contemporary indifference emerges: we do not ignore images because we fail to see them, but because we see too many. It is a form of anesthesia that stems not from a lack of stimuli, but from their excess. The eye, bombarded by a continuous flow of images, develops a defensive reflex. It protects itself not by shutting down, but by letting everything pass through. It sees everything, but nothing truly reaches it.
This desensitized threshold reveals itself in subtle ways: the inability to dwell on an image for more than a few seconds, the loss of surprise, the indifference toward exceptionality. Even the most radical work can be scrolled past. Even a powerful gesture, a disturbing vision, a sharp conceptual incision is absorbed as part of the landscape, processed as just another variation within a visual fabric that no longer possesses hierarchy. For intensity to emerge, it requires context, anticipation, subtraction. But in a world of permanent vision, these resonant spaces have vanished.
What has emerged is not an aesthetics of ugliness or banality, but an aesthetics of lowered thresholds, of habituation as condition. Jean Baudrillard had already anticipated this in the 1980s when he spoke of the “pornography of information”, not in the erotic sense, but as hypervisibility. When everything is shown, nothing reveals itself any longer. The effect is not trauma, but immunity. The image loses its function as wound, as opening, as enigma. It no longer provokes questions, nor seeks answers. It is no longer an object of contemplation or a symbolic battleground. It becomes background.
In front of this scenario, the artist occupies a complex position. They know that every work risks irrelevance not due to a lack of quality, but due to overexposure. They know that any message can be neutralized by its proximity to incongruent, ironic, or commercial content. Art has become a presence that no longer creates friction. And the audience, conditioned by a gaze rhythmically driven by entertainment, struggles to recognize the otherness of that which requires a different temporality. They are no longer able to distinguish between content and condition. Even the most sophisticated works are received as thematic variations rather than fractures in language.
In this context, a tragic consequence emerges: the image survives only at the cost of losing itself. Only what adapts, what performs according to the rules of digital visibility, survives. But survival does not necessarily mean being seen. Survival today may simply mean being registered, but not inhabited; archived, but not read; present, but not received.
What is missing, therefore, is not production. Nor is it the audience. What is missing is friction, the interval, the necessary obstacle that transforms seeing into an act, rather than a reflex. Art has always needed a threshold to exist as such: a distance to traverse, a resistance to overcome, a time to share. The aesthetic indifference that prevails today is not a lack of interest, but a perceptual mutation that has rendered everything equally available, equally visible, equally dismissible.
Because even great art, if seen at the wrong moment, in the wrong format, in the wrong context, may make no sound at all. And what makes no sound within today’s visual landscape risks ceasing to exist altogether.
Art as a Space of Resistance
In a time when every surface becomes a display, art can choose not to be visible. Or rather: not to be immediately visible. It can choose resistance to speed, slowness as a form of insubordination. It can refuse the obligation of instant accessibility, the aesthetics of adaptability, the equation of presence with performance. Not out of a desire to retreat, but out of the understanding that without friction, the image cannot take root. And if it does not take root, it cannot act.
This is not nostalgia. It is critical intentionality. It is not about opposing the artwork to the screen, but about imagining new conditions of vision within, and against, the fluid architecture of the network. It means creating mechanisms that slow down rather than accelerate, that select rather than accumulate, that question rather than confirm. Today, art must no longer be simply content; it must become a zone. A zone where seeing is still possible, where the perceptual threshold has not been dismantled, where the gaze is not reduced to an automatic gesture.
To achieve this, new visual spaces must be built. Spaces that do not merely exhibit, but that know how to protect, not the artwork itself, which may remain fluid, unstable, immaterial, but the time of experience. What is needed is to reintroduce the interval, the void, the context. Not to make art less accessible, but to restore its depth. Because an image matters only to the extent that it forces us to pause, to deviate, to feel its weight.
From this radical attentiveness, another form of visibility can emerge: less spectacular, but harder to erase. A visibility that does not coincide with virality, that is not measured in clicks, but in transformative presence. Where the work is not consumed, but inhabited. Where the time of art is not subordinate to the time of the network, but transcends it, interrupts it, resists it.
In an era where everything tends to dissolve into the flow, art can still be what remains. But for that to happen, it must stop running. It must create obstacles, detours, thresholds. It must renounce the desire to please, in order to demand attention once again. Because today, more than ever, we do not need more images. We need more vision. And true vision never happens by accident.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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