Machine gun and mirror interlock in a camera, a device to select, stage, view, register and archive selves
and performances, unanimities and indignation, to patrol disputed territories and landfills, peaks
and abysses, and to subject all to a logic of big numbers. This camera occupies both blind spot and
vanishing point – it draws and organizes a world to guarantee self-reflection, and allows a political life
in its proximity only to the extent that this does not obstruct the transparent exercise of its vigilance
and the mildly narcotic pleasure of its flawlessness. It patiently enumerates its objects and adversaries,
and measures their always inferior strength: it holds to them a mirror where they are de-presented.
The mirror makes seamless, it creates symmetry as emptied-out and mummified inclusion, it projects
a falsified infinity and an endless figure to populate it, and to summon a future when all potentialities
have been exhausted, when all exchanges (commercial or martial, with expansive communication
technologies as lubricant) have been consummated. Seen through the viewfinder of the Holy Flowers,
allegories of ourselves are being dutifully performed, and inscribed into statistics of merged souls and
things, matter and time. A digital flicker of dramatic scenes and portraits, for which Holy Flowers is
both precursor and making-of.
Machine gun and mirror interlock in a camera, a device to select, stage, view, register and archive selves and performances, unanimities and indignation, to patrol disputed territories and landfills, peaks and abysses, and to subject all to a logic of big numbers. This camera occupies both blind spot and vanishing point – it draws and organizes a world to guarantee self-reflection, and allows a political life in its proximity only to the extent that this does not obstruct the transparent exercise of its vigilance and the mildly narcotic pleasure of its flawlessness. It patiently enumerates its objects and adversaries, and measures their always inferior strength: it holds to them a mirror where they are de-presented. The mirror makes seamless, it creates symmetry as emptied-out and mummified inclusion, it projects a falsified infinity and an endless figure to populate it, and to summon a future when all potentialities have been exhausted, when all exchanges (commercial or martial, with expansive communication technologies as lubricant) have been consummated. Seen through the viewfinder of the Holy Flowers, allegories of ourselves are being dutifully performed, and inscribed into statistics of merged souls and things, matter and time. A digital flicker of dramatic scenes and portraits, for which Holy Flowers is both precursor and making-of.