The documentary got me to really question the authenticity of art itself – where art is acknowledged to be an autonomous realm of human expression that connects with someone enough for them to translate its meaning and what it means to them.

How much does the artist’s being and their background have to do with the way a work of art is perceived, the way it is socially accepted and how much it sells for?

How does media coverage and advertising affect individual spectator’s perception to a work of art? The documentary also brings to mind Mr. Brainwash from Banksy’s ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ documentary, is what the art represents meaningless and secondary to profit from selling?

- Nikolai Gagol – “Without even leaving we are already no longer there”

- Paul Klee – “To define the present in isolation is to kill it”. Technologies of real time (such as telecommunication techniques) are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favor of communicative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our ‘concrete presence’ in the world

- speed not only allows us to get around more easily; but to see, to hear, to perceive, and thus conceive the world more intensely.

- Long distance telepresence technologies: a civilisation of forgetting, a live (live-coverage) society that has no future and no past, loss of traveller’s tale and possibility of some kind of interpretation coupled with a sharp loss of memory. A real-time image no longer offering concrete (explicit) information but discreet (implicit) information, a sort of illumination of the reality of the facts.

- Gustave Flaubert – “the better telescopes become, the more stars there would be”. The real is hidden in the reduction of images on the screen.

- present (or telepresent) man no longer actually inhabits the energy of any machinery whatsoever. It is ‘energy that instantaneously inhabits and governs him’.

- With the transport revolution of the 19th century, movement from one place to another has undergone mutation. Since the ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’ at a destination were particularly privileged to the detriment (damage) of the ‘journey’…the passivity, the somnolence of bullet train passengers and screening of films on long haul flights.

- With the instantaneous transmission revolution, it is now ‘departure’ that gets wiped out and ‘arrival’ gets promoted, the generalised arrival of data from television to telecommuting, to the teleaction made possible by remote control of domestic systems of the smart house.

- Are we free, truly free to choose what we see? Clearly not. On the other hand, are we obligated, absolutly forced against our will to percieve what is first meley suggested then imposed on everyone’s gaze? not at all!

- the Internet; a gravitationalless space

- (instantaneous transmission such as the Internet and instant messaging has resulted to) globalisation of the present; time-world of an instantaneous trajectography  bearing no reference to the ground or surface (geography)

- technologies can not exist without the potential for accidents. Growth of technology or television separates us directly from the events of real space and real time, we lose wisdom, sight of our immediate horizon and respect to our dissimulated environment.

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” – Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst book

Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City by William J. Mitchell

The book by the same name should also be an interesting read

PIPILOTTI RIST AT SOUTHBANK CENTRE

For over one hundred years, moving images have been recorded onto frames on expensive celluloid tape and projected by fairly simple machines. This has been a remarkably reliable way of recording and exhibiting, but also a remarkably static media technology. Films cannot easily be reproduced, delivered or manipulated ….