"In the future everyone will be Anonymous"
Baselitz (Royal Academy of Arts)
LIGHT READING 1500 cinematic explosions
Freefall: Mediated Questions and Answers on the Digital Experience of Real and Virtual
Reserved place for more diffuse purposes (2006)
Return to the scene of a crime
Project for a film of St Paul in New York
Realities Like Straws in the Wind
It may risky, or perhaps merely predictable, to define mythology as the first tangible example of imagination. Mythology made it possible to explain the world of the senses, and imagination was the instrument used by man to face the unknown. Mythology was the consequence of imagining a different world, and the distance between the real world and the ideal world was necessary for the Greeks to realise a process of acquaintance, starting from the individual (as indicated in the inscription "Know yourself”, on the sanctuary of the oracle of Delphi, in Greece). A process of acquaintance that was manifested also in Art, targeting the representation of the divine, since for the Greeks art can give an image to an idea, resulting in an artwork that becomes then a simulacrum of the idea.
The idea is imagination and only those who can imagine can have a vision of the future, that is the only time in which – maybe - it is possible to imagine, in contrast to the present and the past. The proliferation of news and images to which we are daily subjected generates the impossibility of physical participation in the events that are represented, imposing on us the condition of spectators. This is a condition shared by million of people, who are immersed in a present where information has taken the place of the acquaintance or understanding. Imagination therefore functions presently like an intentional interruption of the invasive flow of news and images, representing (perhaps) the possibility of acquaintance for the individual who can use its potential to turn from being eternally a spectator, into a ‘connoisseur’ of himself and of his surrounding world.
