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Aesthetic studies of state violence

Book review written by Mikkel Bolt
Investigative Aesthetics
Forfatter: Eyal Weizman & Matthew Fuller
Forlag: Verso (USA)
POWER: The investigative rather than critical practice, characterizes a new generation of journalists, artists and NGOs. They process large datasets in order to point out abuses. Like the poison gas attack in Syria, or American secret prisons.

That we live in a pictorial society is shown beyond discussion, that Guy Debord and Marshal McLuhan already established in the 1960s. Since then, the image character of society has simply become more and more pronounced. Debord analyzed the process by which images of modern capitalist society paradoxically hide the yawning emptiness of society itself and the dissolution of every tradition and community, as a further through all the new technical communication prostheses from televisions and telephones to cars.

When walking down the street and every other passerby not looking up, but enchanted staring down at the glowing screen in his hand, Debord's analysis seems to have more on it. We live in the «spectacular society», where most social conditions are mediated by images and everything tends to assume character. . .

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Mikkel Bolt
Professor of political aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen.

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