IMG Journal: Critical Genealogies and Emerging Pathways in Image Research

Abstract

This paper reflects on the first ten issues of IMG Journal – International and Interdisciplinary Journal on Image, Imagery and Imagination as a coherent intellectual project that has progressively articulated a critical genealogy of the image as a form of knowledge, cultural mediation, and situated social practice. Rather than offering a merely chronological or thematic overview, the article adopts a dual analytical perspective: a Status Quaestionis, reconstructing the epistemological foundations and internal coherence of the journal through its editorials (2019–2024), and a Potentialitas, aimed at identifying the generative trajectories that this corpus prefigures for future research. The analysis highlights three interconnected directions that structure the journal’s evolving agenda: an ecological perspective on visuality, which frames images as epistemic and operative environments embedded in material, technical, and infrastructural conditions; a reformulation of educational and project-based devices, in which images function as cognitive, relational, and participatory environments within learning and design processes; and a critical reflection on computational aesthetics and artificial intelligence, addressing the transformation of authorship, creativity, and regimes of visibility in algorithmically mediated cultures. Through these axes, the paper argues that IMG Journal operates as an open theoretical laboratory, capable of crossing disciplinary boundaries while maintaining analytical rigour, and of translating critical genealogies into operative perspectives for research, education, and cultural practice.