"When one is troubled by the reality of this world, it can be comforting to consider other possibilities, even if those possibilities disturb us. So strong is the desire to escape the tyranny of consciousness and the narrow boundary's of our perceptions, to unlock the prisons of thought in which we trap ourselves all in the hope that a better world or a better version of ourselves perhaps may lie on the other side of the door."


Nobusuke Tagomi

The Man in the High Castle*

_work in progress_


Is it real? In these times when truth must compete against exciting fictions that might have been directed by Stanley Kubrick and built in a Hollywood studio, we find ourselves in a unique moment in history where the truth, regardless of the facts, is only a matter of belief. The scale of reality makes fictional representations the most comprehensible, and thus fiction becomes a reality, as "the objectively untrue is brought into operation within the everyday."**


Over the years, ambiguities have worked their way deep into the photographic vocabulary and just as easily and deeply into the audience's minds. In this series, these ambiguities are explored by juxtaposing images of the 1969 moon landing from the NASA archives over an audio recording of a conspiracy theorist's thoughts on truth. As his speech stakes an alternate claim to reality and contradicts the photographic truth, the speaker drags his audience into a competing vision of the interrogations, uncertainties and power relations around information, facts, and the very notion of truth itself.


Questioning is the cornerstone of scientific and human progress, but by agreeing limits to this statement we are shying away from an uneasy, almost religious question. What would it change if he were right?



* "The Road Less Traveled." The Man in the High Castle, season 2, episode 2, Writ. Rob Williams. Dir. Colin Bucksey. Amazon Prime Video, 2016.
** K. Shaw, and Theo Reeves-Evision, editors. Fiction as Method, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), p. 7.

         

    

     

    

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