From Colonial Gaze to Digital Visuality: Landscape, Power, and Collapse

Abstract

This article investigates Landscape as a historical construction of power, in which cultural conventions are consolidated as natural expressions of the world. It aims to understand how the shift from the colonial gaze to digital forms of visuality both prolongs inherited hierarchies and opens pathways to other critical and poetic practices. The research is grounded in the hypothesis that modernity and colonialism remain interconnected in the technical and symbolic structures that shape contemporary perception. Methodologically, it combines theoretical analysis with interpretive readings of works that bring together art, technology, and ecology, privileging those that challenge the link between representation and control. The approach is interdisciplinary, integrating perspectives from philosophy, geography, anthropology, and visual arts, with emphasis on contributions from value-critique and decolonial thought. The results indicate that the digital gaze does not break with the colonial past but reconfigures it through algorithmic devices that regulate visibility and the production of meaning. In this context, art is understood as a practice of translation and confrontation between different forms of knowledge, capable of establishing dialogues between distinct cosmologies and techniques and of proposing other forms of relation among image, territory, and life. Such a perspective supports a praxis that unites reflection, sensibility, and social transformation.