Screen Without Organs

The article explores the key paradigms of representing the body in visual arts — from mimetic wholeness, where the body was perceived as a complete object, to its dynamic reassembly in the digital age. By analyzing the language of visual art, the authors demonstrate that the body has always been a complex construct, assembled through the available technologies and epistemological frameworks of each era. Crucially, new methods of assembling the body have emerged over time: from the sacred canon of the ancient world to modernist montage techniques and the algorithms structuring the visual field of contemporary media. In every historical period, technologies not only altered perception but also transformed the ontology of the body. The article traces how knowledge (religious, scientific, and mundane) shapes representations that later solidify in culture as phenomenological patterns. The authors examine the distortions introduced by the development of media — particularly perspective as the dominant model and technique for representing the visible world (photography and moving image) — while also revealing the potential of aspectivity as an alternative optics that may seem less objective but offers a more comprehensive visual experience. Thus, the history of bodily representation appears not as a linear progression toward realism but as a series of transformations, each redefining the very possibility of “being a body.” The article emphasizes the role of contemporary art as an experimental space where existing cultural patterns are analyzed and alternatives to established constructs are developed

Ontology · Perception · Realism · Structuring · Cultural Studies and Postmodernism · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory