Pollock, Rauschenberg and Cage. Residual Forms of the Pictorial in the Age of Technical Reproduction describes a trajectory of small collapses in the pictorial field in the North American context between the late 1940s and the 1950s. This is an era characterized by two fundamental movements affecting critical discourse and artistic production: the end of the era of mechanics – cinema is a modernist machine – and the transition to the electronic media – television and video. This thesis explores relations between a disaggregation of the pictorial field in Pollock Jackson and Robert Rauschenberg s attempts to reorganize painting based on the integration of the photographic index. John Cage is crucial in this context. If, on the one hand, the composer becomes a spokesman for Marcel Duchamp s antiauthoritarian poetics and the search for a supposed transparency of the sensations of the body, which finds its matrix in the tradition of Zen-Buddhist thought, on the other, his poetics still bears the marks of a certain idealism, revealed by a historical context in which both the definition of an autonomous field of art and the dissolution of art and life become vain perspectives in the face of the emergence of the market – of culture, images, art, fashion and consumer objects –, traversing all instances of production and reception of the work. With references to themes from Benjaminian philosophy and the theory of the Gaze of Jaques Lacan, both emphasizing residues, remains and ruins, we examine the fraying of the pictorial in the virtualities of the photographic.