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Leonardo Abstracts Service

  • 4217
    Choubassi, Hassan "The Masses: From the implosion of fantasies to the explosion of the political." PhD. , European Graduate School, 2014
    Keywords/Fields of Study : Mobile Connectivity, Augmented Media, New Media Technology,

    Abstract: Technology was always considered a drive of history and of social change; the technological tools of image production and media dictated the way the image is produced and to whom it is produced and thus how it is perceived. The physical status of the perceiver is the most important variable that will dictate the interpretation of the image, whether moving or static whether fast or slow whether paying attention or not. With the industrial technologies of “mechanical reproduction” of information, the perceiver will value the image in reference to its ubiquitous state coming from its exhibition value and mass reproducibility. With the information technologies of digital reproduction, the perceiver will value the image in reference to its instantaneous and interactive state coming from live broadcast and online virtual reality with a negation of the elements of physical space and present time and thus a creation of an image that becomes itself reality. Furthermore, with mobile technologies of smartphones, the perceiver will value the image in reference to its ubiquity, its instantaneity, and its mobility altogether as a result of a mixture of the criteria of the previous technologies coming from space augmentation and mobile connectivity. The three types of images produced with three different types of technologies imply three different types of image interpretation, in the first, the image is perceived as chronicle and linear signification, in the second the image is perceived as a fragmented and spherical signification, in the third, the image is perceived as chronicle and fragmented together, an image that is so present, ubiquitous, actual and virtual at the same time, an inflated image to the extent of violence, an aggressive image that negates the cleavage between the two realities and combines them together in an exploding manner. The explosion of the political is this exact clash of the combination of the two opposite realities, opposite statuses that can, sometimes, be very dissimilar and contradictory. When the new technologies of media augmentation allowed for both realities to clash they exploded, directly and violently in some cases, like the case of the Arab revolutions, and indirectly in some other cases, like social surveillance, movement monitoring, and tracking, and also the cases of the global economic crisis and the new consumption habits that resulted from new advertising augmentation and dumbing down. This explosion of the political was also apparent in the mode of production of the human bodily image, where the fantastic image of the human figure that was created in virtual reality with computer plasticity eventually started to surface in the actual as physiological plastic surgeries. The imagined, malleable, and perfect body of a virtual avatar exploded in actual reality as plastic surgery syndrome that followed all the standards and categories of the perfect and imagined body of virtual utopia, and thus changing yet again the status of activity of the human body that lived the indolence of physicality and the hyperactivity of the mind during the virtual era, but know, with media augmentation, the active physical body regain its presence and exploded on the stage of actual reality ready to perform with all its plasticity as a cyborg to create the ultimate apparatus of a spectacle. A spectacle that is only capable of producing a repetitive sameness on the level of the bodily images and pop-stars categories of styles and on all other levels of information, where knowledge was lost for the sake of the replication of information and obscenity.

    Department: Media and Communication , European Graduate School
    Advisor(s): Dr. Hubertus V. Amelunxen, Dr. Wolfgang Schirmacher Prof. Dr. Paul Virilio