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Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathDocument and Abstraction
 
Suchbilder (Selichar, Günther), 1992
 
 
 

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you are.» [12] Political campaigns have also begun selling products designed by the same agencies that reach into their bags of tricks for margarine and the like. Paul Virilio once wrote: «The revolution of direct information is also the revolution of denunciation. Rumor is no longer a local phenomenon; it is becoming a global one. The broadly structured system of informers, regardless of its nature, becomes a true power.» [13]

Another consequence of this is that today information acquisition has never been more difficult despite the previously unavailable volumes of data. Program content is being increasingly projected as scenery that supplies the appropriate stage set for the advertising economy. A consistent leveling of the boundaries between editorial parts and advertising through ‹product placements› or so-called advertorials, or through appearances by television news celebrities in commercials (and in politics), which are frequently shown directly before or after their regular broadcasts—only to cite a few examples—reduces the different information qualities to a common level and also makes principle conflicts of interest apparent.

 

Photography today has spread out into a mass media conglomerate; we find ourselves in a multimedia environment that is characterized by a ‹photographic regime,› as Michel Frizot calls it. Film, video, television, the Internet, magazines, posters are the carrier media in which we are communicated with. But it is above all the area with demand character, advertising, that is courting us in ever more subtle strategies and in an increasing number of variations (quite in the spirit of Virilio’s «logistics of perception»). The boundaries between advertising as information and manipulation as well as between politics and propaganda have proven to have become more permeable. And curiously enough, it is precisely those democratic countries which were originally able to develop into these constructions with the aid of a different use of mass media systems—which e.g. excluded one-sided economic availability—that have recently come under pressure.

4.1. «In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality.»

[14]

«Suchbilder», a project that occurred in 1993 in

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