Age of the Image

Age of the Image Started on 27th September 2021. 4 Episodes. BBC Four BBC Episode 1 explores the notion of science and technology influencing art. In particular, the idea of space-time and how it is incorporated into photography and painting. Critically, films made it possible to incorporate these 4 dimensions into a piece of art. However, challenges existed since the beginning when Holywood artists created the continuity method. Episode 2 explores the relationship between image and power. It starts by analysing how two german women used their image and films to benefit from its powerful influences. One was exploring gender issues, the other bringing Nazi propaganda into mainstream movies. It talks about comics and how Jewish immigrants into the US exploted the media to include their perspectives of Nazism. Episode 3 explores the use that mases gave to image making. From the early times when people used the brownie, all the way to how celebrities explote images this episode is an interesting perspective into our modern times. It covers MTV and the transformation that singers underwent, from artists to celebreties thanks to the image and a global consumerism of images makes of it. It also covers the use that marketing exploted of the images to the point that it convinces us on daily basis that we will get or be or achieve whatever it is fed to us by images. Think of Marlborohg and how the image of masculinity it portrays changed habits among millions of men. It also explores how image use by politicians achieved its peak when the US used images beamed in real time from the moon to pass a very american vision. Episode 4. Can we really trust what we see? It starts by describing the cave story by Plato. The prisioners were so used to the images that they could not believe reality and took it as fake. Are we modern humans prisioners? Is the image so real that we no longer know what to trust? It seems so, the work by Allison Jackson is brilliant as it convince us that fake is real but at the end it shows us, cinically maybe, that it is fake. Deep fake techniques are now so pervasive that we need to always asume images are fake. Instagram has made the motto I post therefore I am, the modern age motto. And, using another analogy, Google has made an image of the world, so real that some people use google Earth for travelling. Google art has digitalized some of the old images (art in form of paintings) allowing us not only to see individual strokes but details that would not be possible to observe otherwhise. The episode ends making a reference to Plato's cavern, are we prisioners? Well, it seems that even though our means to make images has improve dramatically, see the 3D model of Chauvet caves, we have the need, the compulsion, the instinct to make images. Why? Because we need to not forget, we need to show the Universe we were here, we need others to be aware of our existence so we don't get forgotten in the inevitable and predictable end towards chaos. Ended on 5th October 2021.

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