Focus

Focus

Image Traps: Camouflage, Illusion, Masquerade

»THE ILLUSIONARY IMAGE DOES NOT KEEP AN ADEQUATE DISTANCE TO THE MIMETIC IMAGE OR THE ARCHETYPE: IT PENETRATES THINGS AND REPLACES THE REFERENCE TO ONE SPECIFIC PROTOTYPE (THE DESIGN) WITH A MULTITUDE OF IDEAS THAT COEXIST IN AN OBJECT, WHICH AS A RESULT LOSES ITS CONSTANCY OF FORM.« FRIEDRICH BALKE: ›EINLEITUNG‹, IN: MIMESIS ZUR EINFÜHRUNG, JUNIUS VERLAG, 2018, PAGE 15

An illusion has enormous power. An illusion momentarily turns what we refer to as the truth upside-down and allows it to float mid-air. The above statement from Bochum media scholar Friedrich Balke touches on almost all the issues under discussion in the festival’s focus Image Traps. Therefore, let’s take another look at it

So, an illusion does not follow its parents, mimetic image and archetype, after an adequate distance, like an obedient child; it defiantly rejects the prescribed linear and hierarchical sequence which we have considered progressive at the latest since the modern age in the early 19th century. The illusion, the image trap, does not progress, instead it sticks, freezes, »penetrates«, says Balke. Imitating, embodying, disguising and camouflaging − all these practices disrupt our understanding of an intact, clearly defined body. Indeed, the corporality of an illusion is uncanny. Julia Kristeva explained the phenomenon in 1980: The abject and the abjection frighten us, because they allow death to intrude into life prematurely. But the image trap is also uncanny in the Freudian sense because it takes us back to our early childhood and the experiences that are engraved within us, without us having any recollection of them. Penetrating the body, being obsessed by something, also makes us feel uncomfortable because physical imitation is taboo, as it has been since the early modern age, let’s say since the emergence of Greek philosophy. The travelling mimetics of ancient Greece had a hard time with Plato. Balke writes: »Mimetics compete with philosophers for nothing less than the truth: Because if truth can be defined quite simply as ›that which is imaginable‹ […], then mimetic techniques can do this with even greater emphasis than the complex theoretical discourse pursued by the philosophers«. (Friedrich Balke, Mimesis zur Einführung, ibid).

A two-thousand-year-old philosophical tradition undoubtedly still defines us today, even if it has been disrupted by other discourses and practices. What happens if the house of cards, upon which a society (and probably also the ›self‹) is built, begins to topple? And here we return to the quotation again: The defiant illusion replaces the reference to a prototype with a variety of ideas. The image trap thus becomes a disruptor not of things per se, but of their references to each other. In other words, the image trap creates space and time between things which can suddenly move freely. Judith Butler picks up on these philosophical ideas in her ground-breaking article Gender Trouble, in which she argues that ›gender‹ is in fact a repetition inscribed in time and in the body (she calls it ‚performativity‘). In this sense, there is no essence. Instead, we think of ourselves as infinite gestures inscribed in time.

In the programmes Fake Space, New Archives and Kaleidoscorpse, the focus section of the festival asks what image traps reveal to us and what insights we can gain through them. _Maxa Zoller