With Issue 11, IMG Journal introduces a moment of deliberate and collective reflection on its editorial trajectory, five years after the launch of the project and following the publication of ten monographic issues devoted to specific aspects of visuality. This volume is not conceived as an additional thematic special issue, but rather as a threshold issue, intended to interrogate what has changed in the field of image research, in theoretical frameworks, in project[1]based and educational practices, and within the journal itself.

This paper examines the evolving relationship between visual culture, image education, and post-digital innovation, situating these themes within the broader framework of contemporary educational theory and practice. Building on reflections developed through IMG Journal over its first five years, the contribution argues that visual culture has become a key epistemic domain for understanding how learning, knowledge construction, and subject formation are reshaped by digital and algorithmic environments. The article advances an epistemological redefinition of visual culture, understood not merely as the study of images, but as an inquiry into visuality, regimes of visibility, and the socio-technical conditions that organise seeing. Against this background, the paper identifies three interconnected trajectories for future pedagogical development: image ecologies, which frame visual environments as spaces requiring care, critical distance, and responsibility; immersive instructional design, which repositions immersive technologies as tools for meaningful and reflective learning rather than spectacular consumption; and computational aesthetics, which interrogate the impact of generative artificial intelligence on creativity, authorship, and learning. Through these perspectives, the contribution proposes a model of post-digital visual pedagogy that integrates critical awareness, creative practice, and ethical responsibility. The paper concludes by arguing that education must reclaim a generative and mediating role, enabling learners to navigate contemporary visual environments critically and to inhabit the tensions between human agency, technological systems, imagination, and power.

In numerous disciplinary fields, images are fundamental sources of information for research activities and, as such, are collected, used, and discussed within their respective theoretical and methodological frameworks. However, it is in the specific field of graphic sciences that the production of images becomes the primary focus of research and teaching activities. In this field, the scientific community focuses mainly on this aspect, although based on a complex set of theoretical, historical, geometric, and operational insights, as highlighted by the taxonomy reconstructed and discussed in this paper. Five years after the launch of the img journal publishing project this article offers a systematic reflection on the main strands of research and teaching in the field of images today. The analysis of scientific production related to graphic sciences allows us to identify some prevailing research trends, both in basic and applied research. These categories include not only individual scientific contributions —which, as already noted, may intersect and feed into several strands at the same time— but also publications such as journals and series, as well as conferences and scientific events that contribute to the structuring and dissemination of disciplinary debate.

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.

The text reflects on the five years of activity of the IMG journal, highlighting its role as a bulwark against the fragmentation of studies and the ambiguity of research focuses in the field of Drawing. In an academic context increasingly driven by quantity rather than quality, spaces of "resistance" emerge where technical sensitivity and critical vision merge into a balanced and innovative image of the future. The impact of new technologies, such as point clouds, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, is analysed, as they risk overshadowing traditional methods of architectural representation, which are essential for a critical understanding of architecture. Despite the trend towards hyper-productivity, solid research persists, integrating innovative tools with a rigorous methodological approach. The IMG journal stands out for its ability to combine past, present, and future, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and critical reflection on representation, while maintaining a balance between technological innovation and cultural depth.

This contribution critically investigates the recurring theme of the ‘death of the image’ in contemporary thought, relating diagnoses of crisis that have marked its status to the persistent proliferation of images in present-day society. Drawing on a theoretical genealogy that spans philosophy, visual studies, and media theory, the article identifies four levels at which the disappearance of the image manifests itself: technical, political, functional, and semiotic. These ‘declarations of death’ are not, however, understood as the definitive exhaustion of the image, but rather as signals of an evolution –understood in a biological sense– of its role and value. From this perspective, the crisis of the image opens onto a process of regeneration grounded in the ethical nature of the gaze, which addresses the viewer in terms of responsibility and critical awareness. The image thus survives as an unstable and mutable form, capable of adapting to media contexts and renewing its potential for meaning.

This paper examines the evolution of practice-led image research within Swiss visual communication design departments, observing a shift from basic research inquiries to concrete applications. Recent projects align with the prevailing notion that research is considered scientific if its results are quantifiable, reproducible, delegated to technical apparatus, and seemingly independent of individual aesthetic judgment. By providing an overview of the aesthetic discourse in Western philosophy relevant to practice-led image research, this paper establishes a foundation for understanding the potential and pit falls of aesthetic judgment as a methodological approach to exploring how images generate meaning. The value of aesthetic evaluation in practice-led image research is discussed and contrasted with the critical perspective of aesthetic theory, which highlights the situated nature of aesthetic evaluation.

The paper presents the main steps of digital media growing, highlighting how experiential and narrative modalities, and the related cultural issues, have evolved over time. In parallel with the development of information technology, computer graphics, the Internet, ICT and AI, the concepts and characteristics of cybernetics, virtual reality, augmented reality, hyper-connection, metaverse and artificial intelligence are studied. The paper organization is based on analysing some of the main texts that deal with these specific topics, and the texts are used to trace a fil rouge through the field of digitality. The paper is addressed to students, but at the same time to scholars to discuss the interpretation of the arguments and the issues of digital education. This paper seeks to foster a critical understanding and cultural sensitivity regarding the true nature and significance of the digital realm.

If on the one hand the legibility of a place is a shared collective ability, on the other the sensorial domain is an inevitable individual prerogative that each person experiences daily in the close connection between the micro-environmental conditions (sounds, smells, the light and chromatic atmosphere etc.) that environment presents in so particular moment and the subjective image that we form of that place, often with an indelible memory. The intent to read both these dimensions therefore implies that the urban Survey attempts to repertoire, alongside the disciplinarily shared level of “objective” descriptions based on multiscalar images and the hyperrealistic representations of the visible elements, the second level of intangible micro-environmental conditions -the atmosphere of the place- placing the objective and the subjective side by side in a holistic understanding of the ontologies of the contexts. The article summarizes an excursus on the methodology of the Identity Survey, developed since 2015, which was born to consciously bring out the “genius loci” and represent its complexity in the integral, syncretic and multisensorial experience of the corporeal dimension.