“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”
Ways of Seeing by John Berger was a book I picked up during the summer holidays and it made for an extremely stimulating read. The book and the ideas presented in it will serve as the basis for this project.
To summarise 167 pages of content – The whole book is based on the premise that the way we see things is affected by our knowledge and beliefs. An image is a sight that has been recreated or reproduced. It is a set of appearances, which has been removed from the place and time of its first appearance. I’ve always been fascinated by conundrums and this apparent disconnect that Berger highlights (between that which is seen and that which is known) is very worthy of delving into, as a practitioner of the visual arts.
In particular, I find this paragraph below to be very reflective of visual media and our indiscriminate consumption of it, in this day and age (especially poignant since the book was published in 1972).
“In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored; information carries no special authority within itself. When a painting is put to use, its meaning is either modified or totally changes. One should be quite clear about what this involves. It is not a question of reproduction failing to reproduce certain aspect of an image faithfully; it is a question of reproduction making it possible, even inevitable, that an image will be used for many different purposes and that the reproduced image, unlike an original work, can lend itself them all.”
Visual media comes at us through almost every avenue of our lives these days. What do we make out of it? How much of it is real (if at all)? I will be steering my project in this direction – exploring context and its misappropriation in current visual media.
TL;DR
This project will revolve around images, and how removing context can result in it having inherently different properties.
Paradigm Lost 