Cave To Cloud: the entropy of image investigates the changes that have affected the world of image in the last decade. This mutation due to social media is perhaps more profound than when image went from the permanence of mosaic walls to the mobility of paintings, or from industrial engraving to celluloid. One could argue that the mix of mobile and social media has irreversibly changed the meaning and value of the image. Image is no longer just pictorial, it is an environment and an ecology, it can appear like a passing snowflake or a meme of tsunamic proportions. This phenomenon didn’t exist as recently as ten years ago. Image has both imploded and exploded. Overwhelmingly abundant, it is less valuable than ever before, but has nonetheless supplanted the power of traditional language systems by merging with the culture of interfaces.
Three axioms come to mind when considering the ontology of today's image:
1. The power base of image has shifted away from the makers toward the viewers, and from images as discrete objects to organic and networked ones.
2. From a designer’s perspective, the production, distribution and function of image has grown beyond creative concerns and now must be reconsidered through its interdependency with economy, culture and technology.
3. The ‘smart image’ is among us with its apparatus of surveillance cameras, scanners, filters, bots and triggers. It is autonomic and metabolic in the sense that it can self manage and dictate its own functions without human interventions.
In this research, Rome is a conceptual framework. It appears as a cradle of imagery, manifesting both imperial expansion, and its extinction, decay and burials. Three creations in particular stand for the shifting yet eternal notions of empire, cosmos and faith: the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Sistine Chapel. The iconic power of these monuments has turned them into virtual images—a “Romanization of and by image”.
/ / / “SIMAGE”
There are 13,000 Colosseum visitors a day, most taking photos that are often disseminated and demultiplied on social networks.
We have never seen, made, owned, edited, published, appeared in and shared so many images, in so many modes, types, media and places. These images often blend into people, places and things as well as into each other, hence collectively turning into new sorts of swarm-like patterns. This latter phenomenon calls for a new term in the lexicon of ‘image’. One could call such a metabolism a ‘simage’—with “sim” referring to “simultaneous’ and ‘similar’. Simage combines archetypal, indexing and relational aspects. It stands for the merger of many images into a singular typology or paradigm, e.g. “Annunciations”, “wall clocks”, “human skulls”, etc. Within these groups, each image can stand for any of the others while encompassing the scope of the whole.
Simages are fundamentally fluid, scalable, physical as well as digital, fragmentable, diffused and ambiguous. Simages reflect an evolution toward the plural, atmospheric and continuous, but they may in some ways be considered as meta images in their own right when the photos of 13,000 visitors are combined into one “simage”.
/ / / NOTIONS & TOPICS
Plato's "cave"
evolution & creationism
creative falsification
revelation & technovelty
aggregation & clusters
icon vs. image
masks & dolls
figure, forms & shapes
the super-real
relational image
mass-social media
distributed media
mobile & moving
reverse archeology
future archeology
colonization
landscape invented by Romans
orientalism
objectivation
image industrial complex
sketch forward
the future is an image
Eiffel Tower as most visited
100,000-BC image workshop
continua
the new cosmos
voids & saturations
"isomorphismes"
metaphysics of mass imagery
the shock factor
generative image
drawing criticism
future of interface
end of skeumorphics
optical space
/ / / QUOTES
A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
_Umberto Eco
What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
_Umberto Eco
All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
_Leonardo da Vinci
The house was there, but I designed the landscape.
_Malaparte
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
_Michelangelo
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.__Aristotle It is through image that we find our place in the world.
_MAD
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
_Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
_Michelangelo
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
_Marcel Proust
More is never enough.
_MAD
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
_Plato
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
_Ansel Adams
A picture is worth a thousand words.
_Napoleon Bonaparte
You can’t really say what is beautiful about a place, but the image of the place will remain vividly with you.
_Tadao Ando
Our idea of nature is increasingly being determined by scientific developments. And they have become decisive for our image of reality.
_Thom Mayne
The photographic image...is a message without a code.
_Roland Barthes
The illiterate of the future will will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
_Walter Benjamin
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
_Marshall McLuhan
Rome was once intended as a blueprint for all men to live by. Today, a new blueprint may be found in the Cloud.
_MAD
Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.
_Anish Kapoor
Now you have earned the right to pronounce sentence of death on the works of other masters.
_Hadrian
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
_Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Alas, I think I am becoming a god.
_Titus
Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?
_Andy Warhol
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
_Pablo Picasso
Children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature.
_Giorgio Vasari
I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.
_Augustus
There’s always been a network connected to an iconic image.
_Ben Cerveny Images contaminate us like viruses.
_Paul Virilio
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
_Marshall McLuhan
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
_Ayn Rand
/ / / PRESS
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The Cave: a video sketch