4. Epilogue

Notions of Opacity

4-part slide presentation, 2015
Parts 1+2 - Discipline lecture delivered at The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne & Westspace Gallery, Melbourne, 2015
Parts 3+4 - Discipline lecture continued at Westspace Gallery, Melbourne, 2015
Parts 1+2 - Keynote for the Artspace Finissage, Artspace, Sydney, 2015
Notes only

Post-Internet Society

62-64. Spam - 2015

The nearest qualification of the ISIS videos specificity by political journalists is their being derived from ‘social media’ and ‘digital online data’.
The reality of the 'online' world into which the ISIS videos are inserted is one defined by spam.
Spam as terrorized language.

Global/Social/Political Art

65. 'Political Art' spam - 2015

A human versus the image of a human.
Humanism as a delivery platform.
Critiquing humanism is inhuman, anti-human, unhuman.


66. Artforum May 2015 - conversation between Hito Steyerl [How Not To Be Seen (2013)] & Laura Poitras [CITIZENFOUR (2014)]
67. Wired June 2015 - Inside The Magic Factory – Industrial Light & Magic

Steyerl & Poitras - narcissistic authors and affected performativity.
Contemporary Art and its politicization = scripted rebel forces in dystopian Hollywood sci-fi.
ISIS videos reconfigured as a 'Dream Works' production house.


Bomb Disneyland

68. Forever Fireworks at Disneyland (2015)
69, 70. Night Vision videos of Iraq War (2003) uploaded to Military.com
71, 72. Walt Disney’s Disneyland opening (1954)

Night. Castles. Smoke. Fire. Lights. Bombs. Forever. Disneyland fireworks = Iraq War night bombing.
Advocating media transparency leads to an inability to read opacity.
How to read oneself as image - and as implicated.


Invisible Petrol

Forever magic. Forever war. Forever semiotics.
Analysis = “what is this image?”, not “what does this image say about the world in which we live?”


73. BP website front page graphic (2015)
74, 75. BP website promotion pages (2015)

Every desiring image we see of a car is an Improvized Explosive Device.


76. Advertisement graphic for the 2015 release of the Mazda 2 (2015)

The ISIS burning of the Jordanian pilot uses petrol to ignite the flame.


Special thanks to Helen Hughes (Discipline), Amita Kirpalani (The Wheeler Centre), Liang Luscombe (Westspace) & Anthony Kitchener.

Text © Philip Brophy 2015. Images © respective copyright holders