Victor Burgin

EVENT

presentation

ethics / image / individual / mass media / spectatorship / technocracy / theory / vision

1996-01-23

English

From a world in which images were once limited in number, circumscribed in meaning and contemplated at length, we have today arrived at a society inundated with images consumed "on the fly". We are ourselves "torn" in the process, not only emotionally and morally but in the fragmentary structure of the act of looking itself. In an image saturated environment which increasingly resembles the interior space of subjective fantasy turned inside out, the very subject-object distinction begins to break down, and the subject comes apart in the space of its own making. Such fragmentation, decentering and loss of subject-object boundaries, is characteristic of paranoia. Digital imaging technology however offers itself as therapy for the very anxieties it helps to produce. (V.B.)

The Butterfly Effect - The Moment Before Discovery