Dialectics of perception and imagination: Embodied politics of atmosphere in Xiqiao Road, Nanjing

In the social media era, scholars tend to reduce the online digital images of cities to readable visual-centric texts dominated by ideologies such as platform capitalism and symbolic consumerism, treating symbols and affects as antagonistic. This study attempts to deconstruct this dichotomy and explain the visual-centric paradigm in digital images from the perspective of affective atmospheres based on an ethnography of 20 participants on Nanjing's Xiqiao Road. Built on atmosphere theory and material imagination theory, we suggest that an embodied politics of atmosphere is constituted by perception and imagination. Perceptions foster a holistic understanding of place among participants through peripheral visions, which is potentially consistent with the logic of online dissemination of digital images. In contrast, material imagination represents the creative pole of the body and establishes a new surface aesthetics of digital images. Faced with visual-centric notions of place in contemporary digital images, illustrating the embodied politics of the affective atmosphere can help motivate people to transcend existing paradigms and experience place through a more creative vision.