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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 23, 2014 2:35:35 GMT 5.5
I came across a photograph (put as a wallpaper on a friend's laptop) which did something familiarly strange to my consciousness the very moment I saw it. mad world by *iskandar, on Flickr On my request she opened the web page she had downloaded the picture from. The writer of the article put the photograph without acknowledgement, and I did not believe it was his/her photograph. Tracing the origin of the photograph for about three or four minutes through several unacknowledged reproductions, we found what we fairly reasonably assumed must be the original photograph, because it was the earliest post (dated 7 June 2010) available online, and a closer look into the page revealed we were right in our assumption--one the page the photographer provides the technical specifications of the work (a sign of professionalism, which I appreciate, and that shows the effect this photograph has on the looker is not because of luck, or chance, but a product of vision and belief and professional knowledge combined): - Canon EOS 450D
- Settings: 1/4000ƒ/3.2 ISO 20050 mm
The photographer, if I'm not wrong, is Noor Iskandar, and she adds the following information below her photograph: - Taken on June 7, 2010
- Central Singapore, SG
As I put above, this photograph was very well aforethought--she had a vision, and he repeated the shooting several times until he got it exactly, or more or less, as she wanted, and that involved her getting the two people above their own reflections on the puddle to zip on their track several times. "Got lucky after 26262 successive shots", he says. Well, this is how I came across this photo, how I traced it, and how Noor Iskandar took it. In my next post, I will write about how it gave me the effect, and why it did so.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 23, 2014 5:06:47 GMT 5.5
The title of the photograph is from song composer and lyricist Roland Orzabal’s “Mad World” (sung first by Curt Smith (1982) of the British band Tears for Fear, and then variously by a few composers and singers including Michael Andrews and Gary Jules (2001)), the first few lines of which Noor Iskandar reproduces below her work posted on Flicker: All around me are familiar faces Worn out places, worn out faces Bright and early for the daily races Going nowhere, going nowhere I don’t know what Noor had in her mind thematically when she planned for the photograph; however, the picture, the very moment I saw it first (and ever since then), poked its semantic finger far deep into my consciousness. It disturbed me by stoking the fire of my hatred for crazy celebritism and insane consumerism up. Interestingly, however, this disturbance turned in my mind with some strange pleasure—the pleasure of companionship in hardship and hopelessness. I don’t know Noor in person, and she does not know me either, but, while I’m not very sure of what she had in her mind when creating this photograph, it seems safe for me to assume that we share a same displeasure with the world’s madness which in a large way affects us all, sane and insane—all of us. What is this madness? That’s where I’m coming. Most of us in our world today in which media plays a dominant role in guiding our daily practices are living in a hyperreality, in which reality is as good as dead, and it has been replaced by its “photoshopped” image. For example, we consume Hollywood and Bollywood films, and the culture of a virtual reality highly unreal films (and film industries for that matter) produce. Our print media, audio visual media such as TV channels, and the internet produce a culture of impossible people (technically) unimaginably beautified in super-pixel qualities, making us believe we are ugly like beasts and our wives and husbands inadequate, and our children not up to the mark! There is a culture machine functioning now profitably, making us believe that we are inadequate, and the adequate are the resplendent beauty models and actors and actresses living in some paradise somewhere in our world but none of our wonted roads and streets leading to that paradise. You approach them, and the road just disappears just beneath your feet, and the space before you is misted over by the smog of hyperreality. You can never reach them. You are a dirty, ugly human, and they are angels, and princes and princesses in a paradise! See what the United Kingdom-based graffiti artist, Banksy, says about this phenomenon: Very persuasive story-tellers write stories for these angels to live in, put the word in their mouth for them to speak. Make-up specialists put make up all over their body, making themselves more beautiful than they are. Lighting, costume, set designers put all their creativity into making these ethereal creatures the most beautiful and sexiest of the world. The cinematographer/photographer waves his magic wand giving your heart and abnormal throb wanting it to thump out through chest. The editors sprinkle lustrous Aphrodite beads of sweat all over their unearthly flesh…The final product turns you all to jelly! You forget about yourself, and you spend your life talking about them. About their affairs, breakups, prides, follies… Delhi Times tells us the fairly-tale of Aishwarya Rai catching cold and suffering from fever, at quite some pleasing length (when several people died of dangue fever peacefully—their death produced no sound within media’s hearable frequency range. It was silent, noiseless. Pleaceful. Captain Sunil James enjoyed a Togo prison’s nine month peace when his eleven month son was breathing his last in Mumbai, and our media cares for human welfare that they don’t want to be too realistic to shake people from the fairy tales of the ethereal creatures.) Are the models and actors and actresses are as beautiful as their screen or media selves? Are they exactly as the media has made them to be, which we consume, something that has largely gone into the making of our popular imagination, which in turn informs our behavior and further expectations. The real selves of these people are not so beautiful as their commercialized, resplendent, high-pixel media selves (and the rest—us—are not so ugly or inadequate as the popular culture media machine has us to believe). The lives of these people are no so unearthly as we are made to believe, and as we consume, which makes us believe we are living in a hell, in comparison with them. Their “enhanced” and hence unreal images (pictures and stories) have replaced their real selves, and the media culture, and the popular culture machine makes us believe in a world composed of enhanced/unreal images, making us lose contact with the reality, our own reality, and making the fairy tale characters themselves live in a increasingly schizophrenic mental set-up manufactured for them by the culture machine, which is a wheel in the madhouse of capitalism machine. Reality is replaced by its image. Nowadays, most people love their own enhanced images than themselves (ugly or beautiful). These images don’t look like their own selves. They look different; and more than that, the images and the real selves are "visually" different, and the copy (which is now without original) is preferred and "more real than real".
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 23, 2014 7:55:09 GMT 5.5
In Noor’s Mad World, reality and reality’s reflection are mixed, but interestingly most of the reality which has been cut off from the frame is seen in the reflection, the reflection thus dominating the reality in content, and replacing the reality which is absent, the result of which being the reflection (which was originally a copy) becoming now a “copy without original” (to borrow Deleuze’s phrase), real in its own right.
Reflection, simulation and simulacrum—processes that create hyperreality—are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad, and hence problematic because reality itself is not enough, fragile, and transient, and hence problematic. Humans are mortal, our loved once are humans and they are mortal. They do not exist eternally. And even while they are alive, they cannot be present wherever they are missed simultaneously. So to us humans, creatures of memory, identity and culture, we sometimes need copies/replacements such as photographs and video clips of our dear(s) departed or away from us. We also preserve our past, construct villages of various ages, and other things such as the models of dinosaurs and mammoths, etc. in heritage centers, put in museums wax or metal or alloy versions of people who contributed to the making of our civilization such as Leonardo, Irabot, Gandhi, Lincoln, etc. whose original versions are no more available. The unavailability of the original or the real makes their replacement by their “authentic fakes” become paradoxically essential in the world of the living. Thus, reality which loses to time its reality piece by piece incessantly with every passing grains of time is problematically unreliable beyond certain point, and everything we regard as reality needs to be replaced by its reflection, or simulation, and when the culture of lost reality is the norm, simulacrum reigns.
This is the sad reality of reality. Reality ceases to be, and their simulation takes over, and simulacrum reigns.
The 16:02 min short film, Logorama (François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy, Ludovic Houplain, 2009), is a world of hyperreality.
That said putting to death of the existing, living and kicking reality when it’s transient and already dying is a deception, now commercially run by the popular culture machines of the few of our time and consumed by the deceived mass. At the same time, I should not be understood as a realist or a representationist, who maintains that art should represent/reflect (social) reality. My position in this regard is non-reactive, but proactive, meaning that art should ideally create new worlds, express possibilities not yet actualized, rather than be the “mirror of society”. And we can do art with everything—we do art with our dresses, our architecture, vehicles, landscapes, utensils, pieces of furniture, and everything. In the same way, we can do art with our bodies, by dressing it, painting it, covering it, showing it, etc. When we have done art with our body, our body may look different from our raw animal bodies without any art on it, and some arts on our body last longer while others last just for a short while. Life is itself short, but our media popularizes the new selves the attributes of which we take on in such even more momentary instances, killing the living real. Thus, most film stars, and their fans, tend to think they live in a world like those of the films in which they take roles, forgetting their own real selves in a real world of real relations, not the fictional worlds they populate. Yes, this imagination has its ontology and exerts tangible effects on the imagining subjects, effects which are more harmful than innocuous.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 23, 2014 13:55:48 GMT 5.5
Reflections of things on water are obviously “visually” beautiful and capture our attention in a sense real in their own right, differently from the things they are reflections of. Not all reflection-on-water photographs or paintings or shots necessarily engage with hyperreality. Some photographs are just images of things, and they are not intended to mean anything. Even the photographs or painting or shots whose makers did plan well compositionally and semantically/thematically are rarely appreciated by others as the artists intended. Having chanced upon only yesterday, and not having studied any other of her photographs, I don’t know about Noor and her photography. What I can say safely in my ignorance is that she is in love with reflections on water, at least the visual beauty such images lend themselves on her artistic consciousness. Whether or not she photographs reflections of water for any purposes, such as to visually examine and understand hyperreality phenomenon, as in one of my cases, she has quite a few reflection photographs, which are all visually enchanting, some of which (the ones I’ve seen posted on her Flicker account) are:
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