17 September 2022
We learn to take everything we can see (or sense) for granted that we believe what we see as real, when everything can be a representation of something. Representation comes into play when it REpresents something, which is to say that the thing it is REpresenting would be absent, in the case of atoms it perfectly demonstrates the meaning of the word "representation", it is a made-up image in the place of something that doesn't visually exist for us to have an understanding of it. Coming back to the very basics, the word "representation" is a representation of an idea and in fact, every word is a representation of an idea, and ideas are mostly representations of the sensory information we take in, the sensory information is a representation of the "real" world, and the real world is a representation of... to say something is a representation, it can also be a misrepresentation for all we know. In a way it is paradoxical to abstractly comment on this idea that is already so abstract.
It is of course unnecessary to go into these dead ends, in order to not be so entitled and take the world for granted we might as well try to enjoy and appreciate what we see as much as we can, and we need to communicate since there is no way out from this default world (be it a representation or not) for now. This is also where the concern is for me in my creative practice and just an area I'm interested in in general, the idea of authenticity, symbolism, reality, etc. We have this tendency to want to understand and think that we understand more than we do, and it becomes easy to overlook the representations and over time the line between the real and image becomes blurrier. I have been interested in the idea of uncanniness, a feeling that conjures from imagery that looks like us, or even more realistic than us that it almost feel like our identity is stolen by those representations, that we have less power as living humans than objects, and how important it is to us to be entitled to an identity, perhaps to hold on to some sort of human essence without which things become uncanny? The more realistic representation gets the more uncanny it is, and this applies to representations in general not just of humans, the harder it is to distinguish representations from the real, the more unsettling it gets.
It's interesting that this phenomenon doesn't apply to those who decide to "unknow", in another word it intrigues me that a lot of the time people refuse to dig into those ideas and would rather only (and will) believe in the things they can see with their eyes/only the comfortable facts.
