Issue Eight - uncopy

eason of unliving, life not lived. We sendzillions of images into space, into a void,as documents of an existence we want butcannot have, as documents of a hypothesis.The mapping of the world excludes thosefor whom the map is made.There is something akin to fire worshipin the glorification of the Internet, but wewouldnʼt know what.The flickering of images that volatilizevertically out of sight mimic the entrancingflames of fire. And now we can freeze &return to certain moments in a stream thatis otherwise ephemeral and passes us by.Can we really?The figure ambiguously facing the seain Rafmanʼs 16 Google Street Viewsobviously looks like David FriedrichCasparʼs Wanderer above the sea offog, and it looks circumscribed. But itis also compelling because the subjectundoubtedly recognizes that it is beingfollowed, that the narrative is a script, thatthe fog is an effect, sublimity is mappedout, but doesnʼt care. There is somethingelse on its mind. And ʻsomething elseʼis always a threat to the irrationallycircumscribed order. What is on its mind?Besides, the image also looks freer, andcaptures the moment of unknowing betterthan Casparʼs, which is symmetrical andpat in comparison to Rafmanʼs subject,which curiously looks all wrong andaberrant, freedom as calculable. GermanRomanticism was crucially philosophical,conceptualizing an aesthetic program forthe next few centuries as much as it madeits own totemic and self-prescribed art…something similar today?Caspar also painted numerous canvasesof people looking out windows, acommon trope in the 18th century(e.g. Hammershoi). There is maybesomething reminiscent of looking outinto an alien world from onesʼ abode inthe blog experience, which also bringsthat alien world into the area of singularcontemplation, as a flickering dance ofthe collective imagerie. To go out intothat natural, hellish world seems almostbesides the point of what it means toexamine a life incapable of being lived.Blogs place the arbitrary current ofexternal events back in the variegatedimpressions of discreet individuals whointerpret them differently through actively8organizing contentious impressions froma current that impresses weirdly. Theblog has to do with the image as poetrydid with the word and its simultaneousconcealing and probing of what lay behindit: something non-communicative. Thereis something about the experience of theblog that has nothing to do with imageryor communication, if only because theimagery is obviously cast as illusion, as thecurtain which … a stage for experience.…a manner of actively organizing theworld in the image of …Is there anycriteria by which to organize?The measure of the blog is the quality ofits lucidity, it is individual particularitythat is socially demanded to open up ontosomething more universal, not consciouslyof course, it exists in the way a glass sphereexists in a landscape, it distorts it butsimultaneously refracts it, all blogs arerefractions of the entire universal stream,but they are not mere illusions, thoughthey are illusions. We do not need morelight to see, we need less, to see.The metabolization of the dreamworld,and, also, the bizarre sort of refraction ofreality blended with dream that occurswhen the eyes are awakened and blurred.All image blogs are lontano effects.Undoubtedly, the best representationsof our particular moment are photoblogs, which are comprehensive withoutbragging about their openness. I donʼtspeak of a particular one—why?Thereʼs an unspeakable connection of blogimagery to ancient Greek sculpture, inthat most of the images show the crucialnexus of action, the singular moment ofgrace. Movie-stills, for example, commonon blogs, capture the moment in theimpression of the blogger, and this hasgreater flexibility than ever. But so does anunhappy ballerina.And all these images pile up as if they werealready discarded statues with peniseslopped off by barbarians, already stored insome ambiguous annal.All images crawl out from the bowels ofprehistory like cockroaches pilgrimagingfrom woodwork to the center of a roomto die. They seem to live only for thismoment, to have been practicing their