“Everything faded into mist.
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”
George Orwell, 1984

The End of Facts series

I
As a child, an image stuck with me. After the December holidays, I would walk the streets early in the morning, littered with paper bits, half charred. The debris of words and images, the aftermath of cracking fireworks made with newsprint. Hand rolled like Habano cigars as is traditional in México. Little did I know, a prophetic quality would be later confirmed, in a post-factual society. Narratives surpass the events that produced them.

II
What would an image look like if it crashed into another? A bullet shot colliding with another mid flight. Large Hadron Collider logic. Will their signifiers finally settle like mud on a fish tank, or dust on the floor? Unrecognizable, fragmented and incomplete.

The sheer volume of digital photographs surpasses any sense-making human ergonomics. Thinking of thunder. Images arriving at the speed of light and their meaning arriving, if ever, later, at the speed of sound. The vertigo of photography as pure image. Representation representing itself.

Reflections about the nature of digital images and photographs. Wheat pasted photographs on a wall, removed; leaving behind only a partial register of their own visual existence.

Erased, deleted and obliterated. Algorithmically deleted photographs. Visual eschatological semiotics.

The End of Facts series is based on scanned printed matter. In this case page 03 of the June 1978 issue of Penthouse magazine (shown above).

This page, a whisky ad, was algorithmically erased and deformed through several cycles. Every cycle generating new data over and over again. The photographic image on the page, its indexicality, has been obliterated. Only its galaxy of shattered bits remains.

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Video about this series:
https://youtu.be/TJS8N7k2DAY