What does photography mean today?

“The photograph is an extended, loaded evidence - as if caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence. The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the photography, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it it also, by one and the same movement on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing expect by intermediaries; but with the photography, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The photography becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak … a mad image, chafed by reality.”

Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida

I read this passage, and immediately thought that while entirely accurate in its day - and still holds true for most people - these claims on photography are true in a different way.  The arrival of photoshop (and CS5 particularly, with its content-aware fill feature) has irrevocably changed the authenticity of photographs and my belief in their honesty.  Any look through a magazine and its advertisements are a clear indication of the multiple realities allowed by modern technology: the face on a magazine cover is represented not how it appeared then and there as the photograph was taken, but has been adjusted to appeal to and reinforce a set system of aesthetics.  Not only that, but it is ever the more possible to take images from various sources, and combine them together in a new image/event (I think of the band pictures featured on the cover of modern music magazines, with each member being photographed separately and then grouped together in post production). Each individual image is still locked into the past as Barthes states, but their combination makes of them a new image - a patchwork of past true occurances to make a falsified event that exists only in the present, as it is viewed.

picture post guessing game: some are mine, most are found online

Note to self: never say "I could do that", because fact is, I didn't.

If the fall into love happened so rapidly, it is perhaps because the wish to love has preceded the beloved - the need has invented its solution.  The appearance of the beloved is only the second stage of a prior (but largely unconscious) need to love someone - our hunger for love moulding their features, our desire crystallizing around them

-Alain de Botton "Essays in Love"

Found a good site/blog that covers happenings, participatory art, etc.

click

Found a short,  interesting video on TED that talks about how news media shapes our worldview:

Click

culture jam

What I found most interesting about Mark Dey's article was the ending section, in which he discusses the future of culture jamming, especially in the context of "cyberculture".  In our society, where it seems like new inventions and innovations are appearing faster than we can understand how they should fit into our world, the future is a potentially terrifying mystery.  I'm not sure if I can pinpoint a specific direction the future will take, since there are so many options.  I am fairly confident that Dey's outlook may not be far off from the soon-to-be truth, since there is already of evidence of it today.  The possibility of everyone having a spot of their own, published on the internet, is easily imaginable, the way things are going.  However, an important question to ask is how important will these spots be?  I do not see mulitnational corporations being defeating by the mere cyber-presence of a few thousand dissenters.  Convincing the general public that the status quo is not the way things should be will take more than just that.

More than anything though, this essay made me feel paranoid and afraid.  Not in a way that makes me want to culture jam in order to change the way things are, but in a way that makes me want to hide.  

Two interventionist artists:

In May 1985, a Demented biology professor broke the noses off of eighty stone statues found in the Villa Borghese Gardens in Rome.  He attacked a variety of different figures from Italian History.  When caught, he claimed "The KGB are after me".  He also gave the police a slip of paper that he had with him, which stated "I am a UFO".

In 1993, Pierre Pinoncelli urinated into one of the eight Urinals that Marcel Duchamp recreated after the original was lost, while it was on display in Nimes, France.