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12/25/2024

The Author is πŸ’€

β€œA painting has always been a seductor or seductress, and it seduces things into its body.

And I find that such a mystical metaphor because it means that there don’t need to be any barriers, and there’s no need to be any death because it’s about letting something in to grow. And so it’s a rejection of death when you let someone into your body. It’s asking to be changed. It’s asking to be changed. And I think that that is a beautiful thing to let someone change your body by choice.”

-Cheryl Donegan,

The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020

Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago
 

Body Camera, 2024
 

Cyborg, Chimera, Golem, Homunculus, Surrogate,

I’ve been thinking of the funeral shroud, the veil that obscures the violence which was deemed unpalatable for the public’s eye. The shape of a human but with no definable face. 

Technology in the hands of the oppressor is a tool used to obscure. This is a kind of violence understood by Focault : β€œPower operates in that processing of information which results in something being labeled as a β€˜fact’.”

Do you remember the promise of the early internet?

The ambitious anonymous cyberfeminist elysium where one could escape the politics of their gender, race, class to participate in this new thing? 

These naΓ―vetΓ©s of a posthumanist movement seem quaint in the present moment with systems that inundate us with oceans of racism, misogyny, and surveillance economics. 

-

In The Mirror I am Everything, 2024

 

β€œ...the cumulative de-creation of the past (in the very act of preserving it), the fabrication of a new, parallel reality that makes the past immediate while underscoring its comic or tragic ineffectuality, that invests the specificity of the past with an unlimited irony, that transforms the present into the past and the past into pastness”- Susan Sontag

This happens so quickly that the simple act of publishing online changes the context of a work. This indexical shift creates an intellectual distance between the work and the Artist.

In this performance, the authorship is transferred to that of the online personality. 

The medium itself, a signifier, the screen, a sign of providence.

When posting, the Artist becomes a sign, a digital artifact that can be utilized. This is especially useful for reinterpreting themselves in their own archive or personal narrative. 

The Internet is particularly adept at the manipulation of signs.

Industrial and corporate interests have wrested away the agency of an artist, and each viewer recontextualizing work with their own mythologies. 

These distances and manipulation become further interpretation, not with the thumbprint of an Artist or chemical artifact, but through a social digital distortion.

The internet serves us back a copy of ourselves in pieces.  

Photo Vogue, 2024

 

β€œIt is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself”

-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

β€œBecause it [Computers} has no direct experiential reference point for the physical world …It is trying to represent the world third hand”

[…It is making a lot of assumptions of the body…So we see ourselves in that gap]

- Charlie Engman, The Messy Truth podcast

The networks that shape much of what we see label the world with bland, reductive banalities yet we have deemed them to be β€œCustodians of Reality.”

Pre-internet theorists would describe a global perspective and how the β€˜bureaucratic cataloguing’ of images served existing institutions.

Barthes believed that these global myths were crafted by the bourgeoisie, that their adaptations and manipulations of cultural symbols center their ideologies.

This more often comes across as another form of erasure.

Reframing the vernacular.

It is important that we see these divisions and address them with careful consideration.

I think Artists are trying to untwist these cultural myths that are interwoven into these technologies, and so in these spaces where we decode ideology.

-

Alexander Gouletas Photography, 916 W BELMONT AVE, CHICAGO, United States

Thank you so much reading. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many new faces this year and I’d love to talk to you in the new year. I can be reached at : AlexanderGphotography@gmail.com (If this reached your desk by mistake please consider forwarding it to the appropriate party.) Not your vibe, hit unsubscribe β†’

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