Gerhard Johann Lischka
AlienSelfImage
PICTURE
What do we see, when we look at anything in the
world, in our surroundings? To begin with, a picture that
corresponds to the vista formed by both our eyes is
determinate. In other words, it is a wide format that we do not
see as framed, but rather that appears appropriately holistic
and round according to the direction of our gaze. Impressions
succeed impressions seamlessly, without appearing to us
particularly as a picture; we dive into the continuum of being
in the world and do not concern ourselves further with
pictorialness of the perception of our surroundings. Of course,
a momentary state is complemented by the way in which the
standpoint, where we find ourselves, is structured, our state
of mind, the atmosphere, meaning both the climate and the
social setting, etc. Yet we are part of a scene, a
three-dimensional picture, which is in turn part of our image
of the world.
REPRESENTATION
If we make techno-pictures of scenes, we
retreat behind the apparatuses and frame a scene that is, to
put it simply, either documentary or staged. In fact, every
image we have of the world is a representation composed of
colors and shapes and reduced to a surface. This representation
is either ornamental or written, realistic or abstract. If a
third and fourth dimension is added, the scene itself becomes
an installation, a room arrangement, a stage, etc., and the
documentary scene is replaced by a staged one. The interchange
between two-dimensionality and multidimensionality cannot be
mentally fixed, because the zoom of our optical perception is
constantly in motion, focussing and registering erratic full
pictures and close-ups. We get the picture of the picture.
PICTORIAL LANGUAGE
Since pictures have existed, a
picture is not only a picture, but also an ideal formation, a
representation of life, of fauna and flora, of things, spaces,
people and ideas, a step back, a distancing, and at the same
time a representative. Because we see concepts when we observe
the world, pictures are also a language, yet they should not be
confused with language. Together, pictorial language, vocal
language and written language form an incessantly restless
unit, a mutually rejecting attraction or an attracting
rejection, explaining the world to us and creating it at the
same time. The picture dominates language, just as language
dominates pictures. In referring to one another, they form a
presentation through representation; they are an assessment,
exploration and creation of the world beyond the silence of
nature (as nature).
PERFECT IMAGE
Until images started being generated
through apparatuses, we kept a certain distance to pictures, or
rather they stayed at a distance, because they embodied
domination, the numinous; we revered them or they delighted us.
Even where images were forbidden, they developed the power of
the non-depicted as an inner image, as an idea. The perfect
image (God's own) was the model, the original, that captivated
everyone and had to be unique. Idolatry and iconoclasm are two
sides of the same coin, because they are the image of the other
that we cannot be, the separation between "up there" and "down
here." The image also marks the border between life and death,
between reality and possibility, between subject and object.
INTERMEDIA
Yet is it still possible today to assign
images so clearly to the pole of objects? Have not images
become a medium that blurs the border between subject and
object and assumes an in-between state of the indeterminate,
the intermediate, mingling our self with the Other and
transforming subjective identity into objective difference?
Through the apparative dynamics of growth, we can be called up
instantaneously as images ourselves, and we lead our lives in
and with images in a reality filtered through the real. As
strangers, images turn us into old acquaintances just by way of
the media. We discover ourselves in the Other, appearing to us
through the media. How can we still speak of an ego of our own
here? Or is it the images themselves that first make it
possible?
MONITOR
There is no doubt that we generate our own
image in dealing with images and that we no longer face only a
human counterpart and our mirror image, but an implacable
counterpart through and with ourselves. In the monitor image
(photo, film, video), we register ourselves as a "realistic"
record and no longer encounter ourselves actually or in a
reversed mirror image, but rather we see ourselves fixed in
many situations or live as mediatized beings. In
black&white or in color, on paper or celluloid, as a
composition of pixels, we become one pixel among all the other
pixels on the screen of humanity on this planet. We pass
through ourselves and find our self as part of the others in
the emergence and disappearance of corporeal or media presence.
The image enables us to get the picture and construct our own
imagination.
MEDIATIZATION
In the mega-machine of image formation,
every symbolic picture is certainly in danger of dissolving
into cliches. Like icons, contours that are endlessly diverse
and chaotic, even fractal, harden into solid outlines
delineating the boundaries of power. This is the conventional
image strategy used by exclusive management that builds
negatively on the human measure. However, it is contrasted
positively by the inclusive construction of our own
being-in-the-picture, which begins with an acceptance of
mediatization and its de/coding. Yet this autopoetic
being-in-the-picture can also be poetically aggrandized, if we
take too much delight in the power of artistic inspiration and
implementation and see that images through images by way of
images so deeply move us that our eyes are opened and we step
outside ourselves in a way that evokes the mystery of the
world. Then we see that we are confronted in the picture with a
picture of ourselves through the others, to be in the picture
ourselves in the others' picture.
ALIENSELFIMAGE
Pictures are, in the best sense of the
word, ambivalent: they are alien and they express the self (our
own self or that of the other). We have to understand their
language, learn to read them; they are strange to us at first,
or they remain strange to us. Yet pictures enable us to put
ourselves into the picture so that the pictures speak for us.
Every picture is an alien-self-image, in that we find ourselves
through the other and we conduct ourselves in such a way that
the others get a picture of us. If we remain self-alienated,
the picture has power over us as a dominant image. If we use
the Other of the picture to adopt our own self, we are in the
picture and have, together with language, a sophisticated code
for generating reality. As pixels in the picture ourselves,
including the exclusivity of images enables us to access a
multitude of images and join in shaping them.