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Video: The Labyrinth of Reflections: Man and the TV Screen in Contemporary Art
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The famous writer Viktor Pelevin likened television a pit of fire in which the souls of the people of our age are burned. Such a harsh metaphor has a right to exist, but sometimes it seems that it is wrong to blame the TV screen for the troubles of the modern world and the poverty of the modern soul. After all the TV screen is just a reflection of us - as we are, and the world as we see it. So why don't we take a walk around a maze of reflectionsdiscarded by the TV itself in the mirrors of contemporary art?
Reflection of a man
Television in contemporary art often becomes metaphor of man … In fact, all the problems of society and civilization during the day are collected in this black box, and then, in the evening, they pour directly into the eyes of the viewer, thereby creating a vicious circle. We broadcast our mass loneliness, uncertainty, fear of an indifferent world. Is it any wonder he gives it back to us a hundredfold?
That is why the relationship between a person and a TV sometimes resembles the connection between a voodoo sorcerer and his thoughtless servant. People who value the veracity of information call TV exclusively zombie box … But it's not the cathode-ray tube that cheats! This is us, we ourselves love to hang noodles on each other's ears. This means that we are also zombifying each other.
And where there is a lie, there is power. The real strength lies with the one who can make everyone see the world as it SHOULD. TV - favorite toy of tyrants and high-ranking liars: they can make any news good, and any person - bad by their own will. Not a single dictatorship of the second half of the 20th century is unthinkable without the help of television. But is the TV screen to blame for people enslaving each other through it?
Abyss of Hungry Eyes
In fact, it is an exaggeration to say that TV looks like a person. In fact, it looks like only one, but a very important organ - the eye. The watchful eye of the TV is constantly caught in the maze of reflections of the TV screen in paintings, photos and movies.
This eye can express sadness, pain, longing, fear - but almost never anything joyful. This image is too strong: it is usually used to show the whole abyss of a person's amazement at the cruelty of the world. In such paintings and photographs, the TV screen looks like a magnifying glass through which a person looks at the Universe.
Reflection reflection
But, despite its dependence and subordination to the human gaze, the TV still carries a mystery. It is as inexhaustible as a pair of mirrors opposed to each other: in the misty haze of the reflections of one, the reflections of the other are lost.
All the same Pelevin pointed out that modern man is like a television program, which is on a TV in a completely empty room. We would venture to continue this analogy further and say that the whole universe is like such a program, shot about a program dedicated to the filming of a program about a television program that …
But the most important miracle is that all this evil infinity of worlds and reflections nevertheless … changes, and all at the same time. And now the era of television, with which, as we saw, so many feelings and images were associated, is approaching sunset … A world without televisions - we partly live in it now. And although it has enough of its own problems, we can already say that it is freer, more diverse and brighter than the era of the dominance of the television screen. So the sunset of television gives way to a new dawn, which we will meet in the same place where you are at the moment - on the Internet.
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