In this meeting we will look at your works and reflect on some passages from the “The technical Image’
Here are some statements in the I would like you to come prepared to discuss:
– Technical images, for their part, are third-degree abstractions
-Technical images owe their origins to a new type of imagination, the capacity to transcode concepts from texts into images
– The function of technical images is to emancipate their receivers from the need to think conceptually, by substituting an imagination of the second degree for conceptualization
– Civilization split three ways: one for the “fine arts,” nourished by traditional images enriched by concepts; one for science and technology, nourished by hermetic texts; and one for the masses, nourished by cheap texts. Technical images wereinvented in order to prevent civilization from falling apart at the seams, and their purpose was to be a general code valid for society as a whole
– Technical images were meant to constitute a common denominator for the arts, science and politics in the sense of generally accepted values. They were meant simultaneously to be “beautiful,” “true,” and “good,” to be generally valid as a code capable of overcoming the crisis of civilization, of art, of science, of politics.
– Technical images thus suck all of history into their surfaces, and they come to constitute an eternally rotating memory of society
Technical Images as a form of Material Abstraction:
“The way that physical objects, like rocks and trees, have being differs from the way that properties of abstract concepts or relations have being. That difference accounts for the ontological usefulness of the word “abstract”. The word applies to properties & relations to mark the fact that, if they exist, they do not exist in space or time, but that instances of them can exist, potentially in many different places and times” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction)