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The Illustration, the Idealism and the Historicism. The three most significant currents after the invention of the letterpress. Linear constructs, responsible for the elevation of human reason to the highest intellectual authority, the reduction of reality to a deceiving illusion, and the coronation of technological progress as the new & absolute ideal. The meaning of the letterpress for humanity is the annunciation of the age of the machine...
Image
As quick as a flash the reality of naturalistic art was overtaken by the photographic technology. Over night, the aesthetics of mere representation became obsolete. A real painter became not he who painted things the way they were, but he who painted them the way he felt them. The so-called reality was no longer of interest. New currents and techniques emerged, which, unknowingly, devoted themselves to the real behind reality...
Technology
Already early enough one could observe that the signs of the first order, complex and full of illusions, had turned with the machines into signs without an echo. Today, the defined identity of the illustrated individual dissolves into the undefined existence of the electronic-mediatized human-being – quite in the sense of the digital sign. Whose value is merely tactic. Whose structure is a micro-molecular code of command & control.
