Remember the movie „The Bourne Identity“ ? Matt Damon plays a brainwashed elite CIA special forces guy, whose identity and memory was erased. So he finds himself one day in a complete state of amnesia. The only way to find out who he is, is to look at his own body and his environment. Today, a museum in Florida claims that it has brought back the surrealist painter Salvador Dali back to life. You can talk to him, and he will offer to take a selfie with you. But wait, he died in 1989, didn't he? Still, he is just on the other side of the line, having face-time with you, just as any regular, alive fried of yours would do. Another recent example of a collective quest for identity can be found in the case known as ‘Maddie’. However, this case reverses the case of Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity. Bourne is a body without an identity, while in the case of Maddie, there’s an identity without a body. Maddie is the nickname of the British girl Madeleine McCann who disappeared without trace when she was on holidays with her parents in Portugal’s Algarve. In the newspapers we have all been presented a photograph of her: she was four years old at the time of her disappearance; as the years go by, it becomes tricky to continue to be on the lookout for a girl with the depicted features on the snapshot. Maddie, assumed that she is still alive, would look different now, and Scotland Yard regularly issues (presents) an actualised, but nonetheless virtual image (not a photograph in the strict sense of the term), which is produced with the help of a so-called age progression computer software, using the same principles of forensic science used by the police to work out what missing children such as Madeleine McCann would look like today. Though these images may indeed be very helpful for police investigations, they remain mere assumptions of how Maddie could look like, since nobody is able to provide an accurate, actual photograph of her. Today, this technology is going mainstream with a new App, called „FaceApp“ and it is causing already major problems because it messes with the whole face recognition technology that has recently been installed in airports and other facilities where „identity“ is a major concern. These examples should illustrate the different qualities of (analog) representation and (digital) presentation. The question that is at the heart of these cases is a very pertinent one: How is an identity to be conceived and represented, when the very concept of „representation“ is under siege? Put simply, all identity must be conceived in the realm of the Real. Identity cannot be conceived in the realm of the Symbolic, so it can't be conceived in the Digital realm. This is an easy thing to say, but we are already so far down the foxhole of the symbolic that we take for real what we see. Our brains are designed that way. They are designed to compute a stable reality. Everything else would be pure psychosis. Surrealism, Paranoia, Madness. The ancients had their own way of knowing these things, long before digital technology. They used the Greek term „Symbolic“ to say that something real „throws“ a shadow, and in the case of the Symbolic, this cast refers to the real in a coherent way. Then, there is the "Hyper-bolic", the "Para-bolic", and of course, the „Dia-bolic“. Whenever you chose to look at „(re-) presentations“, you have to first find out, what kind of shadowplay you are dealing with. That is the difficult part, and digital makes it even more difficult.
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AuthorThomas Behrens Visual Communication is not only taking part in the digital transformation - actively and passively - he will also reflect on it. Hence the blog. Archives
January 2021
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