ALBA TORRENTS GONZÁLEZLooped Images: Play and Desire in the Age of Capitalist RealismCycle Thought-Images

Curated by Susana Camanho & Emídio Agra

Image: Elisabete Sousa, M’INA OK VITAR: 2.2 Samsun (2024)

"This talk reflects on the role of images under capitalist realism, understood not as mere representation but as an atmosphere that shapes what we can imagine and desire. Drawing on Mark Fisher, I discuss how capitalism colonizes time and desire, producing loops of repetition that foreclose alternatives. In resonance with Deleuze and Simondon, however, I suggest that the virtual persists as an inexhaustible potential that resists capture. The Japanese theorist Azuma Hiroki further enriches this perspective with his idea of “game-like realism,” where images circulate as recombinable codes within popular media such as anime and video games. By bringing these voices together, the talk proposes that even within systems of repetition and commodification, images can function as vectors of possibility—cracks where collective imagination and post-capitalist desire might still emerge." Alba Torrents González

Alba Torrents González holds a B.A. in Philosophy and an M.A. in Contemporary Philosophy from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Additionally, she earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UAB and a Ph.D. in Social Communication Studies from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC). González is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Communication Studies, UAB, where she teachs and does research in the fields of animation and the cultural and entertainment industries. Between 2019 and 2024, Alba taught a course on the foundations of gender theory. Alba is a member of two research groups: GREGAL, which focuses on cultural circulation between Spain, Korea, and Japan, and MUSSOL (UOC), dedicated to problems of contemporary philosophy. During her doctoral studies, González was awarded a research fellowship from CONICET (Argentina), conducting her research at CIECS-UNC. She has twice been a recipient of a Japan Foundation fellowship: first, as a visiting researcher at Kyoto Seika University and the Kyoto International Manga Museum, and later in 2022, as a postdoctoral fellow at Niigata University’s Archive Centre for Anime Studies.

Thought-images

Thought-images gives the title to this cycle of conferences opening a space in Sismógrafo’s program to think images and through images. The purpose of these conferences is to unite the discursive and the image, to confront them, to recognize the potential of an image, of a fragment, rescuing vital experiences threatened in an uncertain present. This age, a turbulent and disturbing age, an age of pandemic, ecological, financial, political and social crises, these times of “post-truth” and "alternative facts” are "interesting times", to use the expression popularized by Eric Hobsbawm. Interesting times especially for thinking. Thinking is already contributing to a change. This cycle calls for a cooperation between the expressive strength of art and the precision of philosophy. Without a language that embraces images, images can blind us or say nothing. With these conferences, Sismógrafo seeks to take care of what Alexander Kluge calls a “garden of cooperation”, a place that preserves the moments when word and image converge in order to produce something new, a space for discrepancy and cooperation in the face of cacophonies of information, in the face of industrial manipulation and enslavement of feelings. In difficult times, times of divisions and segregations, cooperation presents itself as an antidote to tribalism (Richard Sennett). To open this garden, this space for debate and polyphony in the city, Sismógrafo has invited speakers linked to philosophy, aesthetics, art criticism, fine arts and cinema who, at different times and from different perspectives, will try to present a diagnosis of the present.