Absolute Value 

THE SHORT-LIVED GLAMOUR OF IMAGES  

 

 

… All history was a palimpsest that was scraped clean and rewritten as many time as was necessary….

 

Long before the age of artificial reproduction of images our ability to digitally manipulate them, the crime of total deletion of an ancient written text or images already existed.  Palimpsests (from the Greek to re-scrape) were texts which had been written on older documents that were scraped away because they were deemed either useless or dangerous.... This allowed certain names to fall into oblivion, others into immortality.

Although the new media are revolutionary, from the outset they were manipulated for propaganda and military purposes. A battle of symbols, concepts and ideas began to be waged on the surface of images. That battle is being waged all the more beneath that surface. Thanks the development of computers and our ability to digitise any record, the interior of images became a field akin to surgery where, just as in the case of Benjamin, the 'surgeon' refuses at the critical moment to face reality as reality.

The elimination of reality has occurred. What we see now are digital ghosts of people, where the position of people is taken by configuring the distance between their features; images of spaces containing potential targeting information; information barriers buried deep down within records; virtual worlds replacing real ones.

Just as glamour and lustre played a role for the last time with the first daguerreotypes, in the age when technical media no longer need the assistance of a real world to capture their image, despite their ostensible brilliance images gradually fade when removed from a glamour similar to the glamour of a distant thing which will never exist again. Space is sliding into virtuality and the Fata Morgana (mirage) device is already prepared.