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May 22, 2010
The Ubiquity of the Image is the title of a dialogue between Joan Fontcuberta, Christian Caujolle and Radu Stern. They are a part of SCAN, and they invite us to reflect on the ubiquity of the image and its social, artistic, psychological and other implications.
Ubiquity means the state or capacity of being everywhere at the same time; omnipresent. The image in postmodernity is everywhere and omnipresent, and we live within a maelstrom of images that is all around us in the spaces of our urban landscape.
In this post Fontcuberta points to the implications of this in a digital age:
Vilém Flusser explained very graphically that images are screens charged with meaning that interpose themselves between us and the world. The reality remains remote and inaccessible, and we are left with no other option but to react and make do with the images, which constitute a metareality, but at least an accessible metareality. If the images in Plato’s cave were simply shadows, images have since become very complex ideological constructs: no longer the mere reflection of the world, they have now, as we have said, managed to supplant the world and leave us immersed in a state of ‘hallucination’
He says--and rightly---that the contemporary creative arts cannot ignore this state of affairs where everyone is producing and circulating images on a global scale. We are producers and consumers of digital media at the same time.
Alasdair Foster recently pointed out in Zone Zero that the world of art, of photography and visual communication in general the hierarchical separation between professionals and public is tending to diminish, even disappear altogether, with the result that their positions are becoming interchangeable. The image is ubiquitous today because we all make or deal with photographs, we all generate and receive graphic information, irrespective of the meaning that we invest it.
In spite of this emergence of user generated images we have no real means of acting on or intervening in the dominant vectors of the image, which are controlled by ever greater and more concentrated financial powers.
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In this interview with Chris Boyd Alasdair Foster says:
Flickr has ensured that.