Creating a Conceptual Framework for Images

  “No, Dorothy,” there never was a Kansas.  The industry took care of that for you.  Matter of fact your parents were not who they really where, either.  You were dreamed up by some arbitrary scriptwriter that feed you into a box of moving light that gave you life, that is, at 24 different parts per second of your nature, alien to you.  A lifetime of hidden iconography and signs that were at their basic roots, illusions of emotions (usually based on violence, sexual stereotypes) and other images pacified your aura, and your need to interact with the human original in your memory.  However, what about our memory?  Before we can relate, you are not as you were.  It is as if the space between reality and the transmitted image on the screen is becoming its own event horizon.  If we ever did have an original thought, it was reduced, long ago to a mathematical equation to be fed into a cue timer.  God forbid is there is one, that we may experience an independent thought.  Like all of us, you have the ability to break free from that template.      What happened to the human race?  .  .  Some say that it was the fault of Dadaism or the rise of the futurist Manifesto.  I think not!  Dadaism like other movements was not responsible for the demise of the human race, as even today in the later days of the 26^th century; we see installation art in a majority of the public works, around our globe that can trace its influences to Dadaistic theory.  In addition, Dadaists expected the viewer to define the art.  Dadaism was anti-war and anti-art.  No, Dorothy, what happened to you is that while you were forced into that frozen non-moment, every stitch of human presence was codified and boiled down to a closer example of ‘proximity.’  “Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things "closer" spatially and humanly,” and I would venture to think that high definition home theatre video centers have pretty much closed the argument of whether they (the industry) ever want us to leave the screens again.    Dorothy, I mean (sarcastically) with all the increased violence targeted towards you, and inevitably turned towards the viewer (youth) in today’s programming it is with no wonder that the influence of televised violence on youth has increased without question.  Therefore, now that we have been relieved of any personal responsibility for what is shown in our theaters and TVs, why don’t we all just have a big ‘parade’, ‘monster’ rally, or a “sports event?”  Hell, we could have a war and draft all those 18 year olds who are only removed five or six years from knowing what pubic hair was all about, and who still don’t know what life is all about quite yet, and send them “over there.”  Then we all will truly be ‘imbedded’ with our “mechanical reproductions.”   It was my desire that you the reader came to the rapid conclusion that I went on a bender (non-alcoholic) over the weekend and decided to approach the reading from a fresh perspective.  Using Dorothy as a metaphor for the signifiers and auras of the illusive images that we constantly reach for, yet promised to us by the culture trade, and “The Wizard of Oz,” as metaphor for the inhuman and calculating corporate structures that break down accounts of human passion and identification into mathematically correct advertising icons.  In its all encompassing counterparts (Land of Oz) the all-knowing ‘trade’ while cognizant of the implications of its manifesto is bent on de-personalizing every aspect of human interaction and reduce it to mere cue points on a story board, transforming them into mechanical representations of what was.  The original aura, not unlike the image of the old shoe cobbler down at the corner that has been assumed back into the trade industry’s all-powerful machine that spits out common knock off’s using the trade’s manifesto of mechanical reproduction.  The James Dean Diner image where the actors turn the table on the camera person, and the trade by staring directly back at the camera, refusing to sell their stereotypical straight illusion, thus refusing to take part in the scene (other than their representation).  This also reminds me of Terminator II, when the machines rule, and the remnants of human experience were disapated only to highlight the mechanical representations.  In closing, I guess all we can ask now is, ‘Got Illusion?”  I got mine.  You got yours?  Awww, too bad!  Don’t you just love the smell of PC Napalm in the morning?   Allan Hill