The theme of the eleventh edition of the La Nuu Festival in October 2025 is All Tomorrow's Screens.
In 1984, the year that gave its title to George Orwell's dystopian novel, another author, William Gibson, published Neuromancer. A work that began with the following description: ‘The sky above the harbour was the colour of a television screen tuned to a dead channel’.
In 1989, Dom, the heroin-addicted protagonist of Miquel Creus' novel Òpera àcid, is lying on the sofa watching two televisions at the same time. On one, he watches a rock concert, while the other is showing a crime film. Bored, he turns off the volume on both sets, puts on an Albinoni record and continues to watch the images.
In the first example, reality is tinged with the colour of the screens. In the second, we see a succession of simultaneous images on the screens as a kind of anaesthetic for anxiety and a narcotic against tedium.
Also from the 1980s is David Cronenberg's disturbing film Videodrome, in which violent images broadcast by a strange television channel are connected directly to the viewer's brain and modify their body through disturbing hallucinations. In a television debate in the film itself, the character of Professor Brian O'Blivion (forgetfulness in English) appears and comments that the screen has become the retina of the mind, a prosthesis of the nervous system. A technology of control that dilutes individual identity through the incessant flow of one's own desires.
Today, forty years later, we walk down the street with a screen in our hands and a few inches from our eyes.
Not so long ago, personality tests included the following question: When you are on the train, do you prefer to look at the landscape outside the window or at the faces of the other passengers?
A question that now makes no sense.
We live immersed in a turbulent time of incessant immediacy. Images seem to have lost all connection with the past and with the prolongation of memory. Images are now at the service of an eternal present linked to an infinite chain of emotions that deny any narrative with the slightest desire for the future.

According to Norval Baitello, we live in the age of iconophagy. As captive spectators, we are surrounded by a continuous and omnipresent screen. Its digital surface becomes a distorting liquid mirror, brimming with mirages. A screen that promises us a supposed window open to the world and, on the contrary, invades our existence to distance us from reality and life. We think we create and consume images, but it is the images that devour us. Some say that they are also the ones who create us. Without constant exposure and visual self-exhibition, we have no real existence within the new capitalism of fiction.
The world has become a screen. We live in an image-world that makes the classic myth of the cave more relevant than ever. The new use value of images is at the service of a narcotic and alienating labyrinth whose goal is oblivion and perceptual collapse. An uncritical gaze driven by the new actors and monetary interests of surveillance capitalism and the attention economy.
Surrounded by constant visual noise, images have become transparent and our eyes blind. We are incapable of assimilating so many images, so much unnecessary banality. We have stopped looking.

Images become transparent, as philosopher Byung-Hul Chan reminds us, when they are freed from all hermeneutic depth, from all meaning, and become pornographic. Chan understands the pornographic as an immediate contact between image and eye.
The current crisis of the image is closely linked to a profound crisis of perception. An ontological crisis and a scopic crisis, both linked to a tangible and evident social crisis.
Political polarisation and the deterioration, if not elimination, of spaces for dialogue and exchange are linked to the narrow and reductionist environment of the new virtual media of social networks and their mechanisms for visually ordering the world. A compressed and dark horizon chained to this capitalism of images and dangerous concepts such as post-truth and post-democracy.

The exhibition slogan, All Tomorrow's Screens, is intended as a warning to navigators, but also as a title full of promise for the future. This year's motto is a play on words and a tribute to The Velvet Underground's song, All Tomorrow's Parties, while also referencing the essay by painter and poet Antón Patiño, All Screens Lit.
All the screens of tomorrow can be a party because it is in our hands to defend and fight for visual democracy and maintain a creative resistance of the gaze.
The screen is the new medium for images, and the history of photography is also the history of its media. If we look at the etymology of the word, Coromines tells us that it has a Catalan origin and is a cross between the words pámpano (vine shoot) and abanico (fan). Vines and fans. What is dangerous about them? Neither apocalyptic nor integrated. Neither technophiles nor technophobes. Neither retro-nostalgic nor futurophobic.

We must open our eyes again and learn to look. Advocate for the image-time and live the creative experience of the gaze, the poetic dimension of the vision of necessary images. Learn the art of living anew.

As in each edition, the exhibition's theme serves to bring together and curate different works by photographers and visual artists who, in this case, will help us reflect on the dangers of living under the addiction of this totalitarian and narrow visual regime to which we are subjugated, supposedly voluntarily. They will also point us towards new paths of creative resistance of the gaze in order to escape the optical hegemony of images and their narcotic and alienating spider's web.