Image Out of Place

Abstract

The article deals with the search for the sources of visual pollution. While the information environment, alongside with pollution of air, water and food, has been already recognized as the new area of contamination, the pollution of visual environment has not yet been listed among the spheres monitored by the ecologists. The symptoms of visual contamination are not identified, and the sources – apart from advertising – are unknown not only to environmental activists, but also to the specialists. The main thesis of the article is as follows: the pollution of visual environment affects the health of people no less negatively than traditional sources of environmental threats. However, visual pollution is not visible; it has not yet been the subject of close study, so we do not yet have any record of its species, or the criteria for the dangerous level of pollution exceedance, nor recommendations for prevention and ways and techniques of getting rid of it. The uncertainty of the sources of visual pollution leads in the long term to disastrous health consequences, because the moral, spiritual and physical well-being of a person living in it depends on how healthy and favourable the visual environment is. Huge fields of plastic packaging and disposable dishes floating in the ocean are not only visual pollution, but also pollution of water, marine inhabitants, and soil; while in the urban environment it is difficult to separate visual dirt from pollution of air, water, land. It is concluded that the source of the pollution is a substance both out of place, without a place or outside the place. The source of pollution can be the reverse side of purity of the visual environment brought to the limit, to sterility, to geometric rigidity, which accompanies the “pathos of colonization of nature by geometry”.

Keywords

• visual environment
• visual ecology
• visual pollution
• purity
• geometry of space
• place
• visual art