The Technological Gaze in Advertising

This article is concerned with what a technological gaze might mean; what regimes of truth and what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through it. By drawing on television and print advertising, we can see the pervasiveness of a gaze that is technological in contemporary Western consumer culture. This article argues that, far from being a simple “ high-tech” effect, a technological gaze is a way of seeing that may be deconstructed. To this end, it will call on visual culture studies, feminism, film theory and Derridean deconstruction to highlight how high-tech images are cultural artefacts, which underscore contemporary imaginings about bodies and environments. The technological gaze uses specific methods to put its meaning together- impossible subject-positioning, the codification of flesh, a visualisation of scientific narratives and the aestheticisation of information- all of which tell us about a longer line of cultural fantasies about information, code and technology.