--- ENVIRONMENTAL / BERKELEY, HONG KONG, SAN FRANCISCO : EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IMAGE AND OBJECT ---
--- PRINTS / EVERYTHING THAT WAS DIRECTLY LIVED HAS MOVED AWAY INTO A REPRESENTATION _GUY DEBORD ---
--- POSTERS / AGI + AIGA + CCA + BERKELEY HILLSIDE CLUB : COMBINING EVENT, TEXT & FORM INTO REPRESENTATION ---
SOCRATES And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: —Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
GLAUCON I see.
SOCRATES And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
GLAUCON You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
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HANS-ULRICH OBRIST The one who observes becomes the one who is observed?
There are those who make images, those who show them, those who see them and those who are seen in them. Then there are those who are at once the makers and the subjects. We then are seeing creator and creation as one. The power of creators is in turning the void into something, in a gesture that turns creations into extensions of themselves. Such creations are never as complete as when they are self portraits.
___Image performs for itself as well as for its creator. As such it rarely does it better than with self portraits. With selfies, they are no more than self aggrandizing bytes, they are the fusion of creator and created. The vertiginous idea that one can be the center of the universe as well as its creator, consumer and user. Ultimately, with the automation of image capture and the tracking apparatus personalized for each one of us, our self portrait is in a permanent state of refinement and updating.
ELIZABETH GILBERT Ancient Greece and ancient Rome people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from
some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.
Every minute, 136,000 images are uploaded to Facebook, joining, updating and further dating the billions already there.
___Little by little the idea of pure invention fades and we move toward new creative notions: the idea of change as creation, and the idea of participation as collective creation.
PAUL VIRILIO It is not the painter who makes pictures, it is not the one who acts, it is the spectator. It is the one who looks over the shoulder. One never looks alone, one always looks together, that means a monumental, pictorial, or other work can only come into existence if there are two perspectives, the one being the view of the one who acts, the one who paints the picture, the one who constructs the building, and the other one being the view of the spectator who appreciates the picture. Therefore the view multiplies, there is no individual view.
At first creation follows the self, later the self follows the creation.
TITUS Alas, I think I am becoming a god.
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