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Simulacra
Once, the gaze would rest on a face and recognize its expression, on a landscape and understand its shape, on a photograph and find an echo of the real. Today, the gaze rests and no longer knows what it is seeing. The face may never have existed, the landscape might not belong to any place, the photograph may never have been taken by anyone. The image has lost its reference, and with it, humanity has lost its connection to the visual world.
We have gone beyond post-photography, beyond the doubt of what is real and what is artificial. Now we are in the realm of visual agnosticism, where images exist but we no longer know what they belong to, where everything can be everything and nothing at the same time. A circle is still a circle, or is it just an illusion of the context?
Once, the word gave meaning to the image. It was the logos that framed the vision, defined it, and brought it back into the realm of understanding. Now, even the word wavers. If artificial intelligence can generate images from language, without understanding their meaning, then we are observing a reflection devoid of origin.
Yet, we cannot deny the existence of what we see. Even if it was never captured by a lens, a generated face is still a face. An non-existent landscape is still a landscape. The problem is not whether these images are true, but whether we can still establish a relationship with them.
We have created tools to see into other worlds, but without the ability to recognize the threshold between the real world and the generated one. Art, once a means to question reality, today has reality questioning itself.
But what would happen if we were to undergo all of this without awareness? If the world of images closed in on us, without leaving windows onto reality? Would we still be able to wake up?
We have gone beyond post-photography, beyond the doubt of what is real and what is artificial. Now we are in the realm of visual agnosticism, where images exist but we no longer know what they belong to, where everything can be everything and nothing at the same time. A circle is still a circle, or is it just an illusion of the context?
Once, the word gave meaning to the image. It was the logos that framed the vision, defined it, and brought it back into the realm of understanding. Now, even the word wavers. If artificial intelligence can generate images from language, without understanding their meaning, then we are observing a reflection devoid of origin.
Yet, we cannot deny the existence of what we see. Even if it was never captured by a lens, a generated face is still a face. An non-existent landscape is still a landscape. The problem is not whether these images are true, but whether we can still establish a relationship with them.
We have created tools to see into other worlds, but without the ability to recognize the threshold between the real world and the generated one. Art, once a means to question reality, today has reality questioning itself.
But what would happen if we were to undergo all of this without awareness? If the world of images closed in on us, without leaving windows onto reality? Would we still be able to wake up?
