It was an interesting talk and brought up things I had briefly thought about in the past but not to this depth.
One of his first comments really seem to drive home the point on how much the digital age has taken over. "Images have no future, they are all code." He displayed this with 2 images, one was a cave painting and the other was a scene from Jurassic Park.
But how did it come to this point?
The Odyssey of the Image
The Path of Animals
The first images were wall paintings of animal hunts. These held a magic and mysticism, primitive humans believed by making these paintings would help insure good hunts, by which increasing their chances of survival.
Then people began looking to animals for guidance or thinking themselves the same as the animal they believed themselves to be. And totems came into being. The first tactile image.
From this point forward, images took on their roles in our life. They lead to the creation of written languages, sculpture, mosaics, painted portraits and landscapes. Everything connected back to a simple cave painting done for survival.
Then came the first camera.
While the first camera weren't anything we would recognize today, they changed images forever. They gave us the ability to have a hand-held image of a person, without the expense of a painting.
As cameras evolved, images became readily available and were used as business cards or as proof of being somewhere in the world or that an animal/person did exist.
Then came the digital age.
At it's beginnings, I doubt that about would have thought that the trust in images would fail. But it did.
The digital brought back to life animals no humans have every seen living. Dinosaurs and dragons, fairies and elves, these creatures fill our movie screens and cover our walls in pictures.
It is at this point is when images diverged into 3 loosely based groups, Naked, Ostensive, and Metaphoric.
Naked images invoke an Ethical/Political response. These would be images from the Holocaust or "ethnic" cleansing in Africa. The tend to invoke an emotional response make us want to do or not to do something, make us horrified that such thing actually happened, and to shed light onto that which we tend to ignore.
Ostensive images are more of images that look back at us and try to engage us. Examples of these are the "Uncle Sam" posters or Byzantine portraits. They look at you, engaging you, trying to get you to interact with them.
Last is the Metaphoric images. This is a place for images that don't if into the first 2 categories. Yet by it's very nature could be either of the first 2 categories and could be considered a "catch all".
Metaphoric images are more installation art and montages, works that lead us down strange paths or into dark recesses, show us the whimsy of life or absurdness.
One of the greatest metaphoric images in history, an Icon of Hope and Change, isn't what is seems.
These 2 images are on opposite end of the political spectrum. Yet it is easy to see the similarities. The question becomes, Which one is an Icon of Hope and Change?
Depending on your political views, either could be.
While some would argue the similarities between them, or not, there is one last image, from the NY Post, that can draw us back.
The cartoonist "claimed" to be unaware of this nation's past. Unaware of what the slang term "monkey" was used for. Unaware of what the impact of this image could have.
As Mitchell remarked, "he must have lived on a planet with no animals"
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