Voor ik vergeet
from catalogue 'Voor ik vergeet',
Museum Jan Cunen, Oss, NL
2004
Everything of value is defenceless, dies, becomes contaminated, wears out, slips through one's fingers, disappears. Decay reduces the number of possible transactions or devalues the value of the transaction. This is why anything valued and defenceless is protected.
Under the influence of photography and relatively inexpensive reproduction techniques, the media constantly produce and distribute images.
Multinationals and advertising agencies flood the world with images. Magazines, logos, films, the World Wide web and television channels condition perception and our behaviour.
In ‘De Capsulaire beschaving (The Capsulair Civilisation)’ Lieven de Cauter describes how communities and individuals in the' micro-electronic era' retreat into 'capsules'. As examples of this cocooning, he lists gated communities, shopping malls, amusement parks, museums, cinemas, industrial estates, airports.
We meet each other in capsules (car, train, aeroplane). Contacts are more and more made from behind our computers. Increasing mobility paradoxically makes us more inert. From our capsules we send messages. We do not move; we let ourselves be moved. The studio suddenly acquires modernity. Studios are capsules too.
The capsule can only justify its closed identity by keeping its 'information channels' open. Reality enters De Cauter's urban capsular society continuously and shamelessly as an imitation, as a copy of the world through computer screens and printed matter. in the studio capsule – the artistic laboratory – the world as a copy or imitation of reality is reviewed or rewritten, then to be transmitted to the outside world. In this transmission, in this staged meeting of realities, the world is questioned about its image quality (reality). The modern day museums shelters this encounter.
Modern architecture was familiar with the module, not the pixel. The pixel is an indivisible unit which acquires meaning in cooperation, cohesion, in a composition. Thus the computer screen is an entity, a composition of pixels without the screen expressly manifesting itself in this capacity. ( The fact that this unity was deception has been more than satisfactorily proven by deconstructivists and postmodernists).
Pixels filter or 'veil' our perception, are constantly in our sightlines.
The capsular civilisation also brought us the segment and 'zoom '. On our screens we hardly ever see anyone as they are; we only see a segment which differs from our natural perception. Zooming in becomes vital in the face of increasing inertia.
Our mobiles, for example, are constantly zooming in the distance.
The value of the capsule (cell), dot, pixel and enclave (camp) is related to the degree of connection to the raster, the network. The defencelessness of the capsule, dot, pixel, cell is partly determined by the strength (and weakness) of that same network. Intelligent terrorists understand this. When visual arts is the history of perception, it will also want to write the history of the 'pixeled view'. Various self-interested networks will move past and over each other. Sometimes they will touch each other. Often they will not.
We live in different realities. Capsules rotate at their own speeds around their axis and have various openings. It all comes down to which openings, given the individual speeds or rotation, 'meet' each other allowing a mental or material transaction to take place.
It is no coincidence that the drawings/landscapes of Van Campenhout withdrew behind 'sightless' walls. (Walls), that Banner's texts manifest themselves as 'autistic' full stops and that Palinckx' composition disintegrates into digital amputations (samples). It is not surprisingly that Van Campenhout invited the other two exhibitors, considering the pixelar character of their images.