Modernité, Merdonité, and The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat

Mike Zahn
January 2023

Julianne, Julia, and / or Julie, 2023
Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG)
544 x 544 RGB
20 KB

Novel innovation in the visual arts proceeds from depiction of the human face. The features of another present a special type of social signal with roots in ritual, interaction, and exchange.

AI photo applications such as Lensa promise the capability of turning conventional selfies into “magic avatars”. The app deploys digital tools which don’t require skills for their use, and however basic, actualizes trust in universal creativity as a meta-modern impulse.

Artworks founded upon the imagination of networked objects, distributed consciousness, and the displacement of authorship may likewise envisage new conditions of interiority. If so, it follows that circumscribed notions of gesture, structured by the coincidence of opposites in their fundamental inscription, would be freed from mere binary constraints.