#5imag001w

this is one of the most interesting talks i have ever seen on veganism and the meat industry. it explains it in such a relatable and easily understandable way, with a twist that makes you think about and deep the whole situation. he highlights how the culture we live in, controls our outlook on eating meat, and what meat is acceptable for us to eat and what isn’t. for example, in our culture it is unacceptable for us to eat cats and dogs. we are taught this from birth through our culture, but then at the same time we are also taught that slaughtering animals such as cows and pigs, is acceptable

“you can be manipulated like that *clicks fingers* to believe in something that goes against your natural instincts. if you say it enough times you convince yourself that that’s the truth. if you’re told the lie enough times, it becomes part of your reality and if enough people are taught that lie... well now it becomes part of the culture. and if that culture then passes that misinformation along to the next generation, well now it becomes tradition. and what we have to remember is that, just because we have a tradition, that doesn’t mean its morally acceptable. tradition and morality are not always the same”

we had traditions such as slavery, which aren’t around today because they weren’t morally acceptable. just because something is a tradition that doesn’t make it okay, and mean that we shouldn’t do what we can to change something we view as morally incorrect “as we evolve as a culture, so do our traditions”

“the matrix is a story, it’s a story when told enough times to enough people, it becomes part of that culture, it becomes the tradition. and this story is being told over and over. everyday”

Ruff, T. (2006), jpeg n 2

jpegs demonstrate the new cultural and economic logic of post-industrial societies in which, as Manovich points out, new media cultural objects are not fixed but can exist in different versions, and this quality enables ‘production on demand’, because the consumer can determine the exact features of the commodity: ‘In industrial mass society everyone was supposed to enjoy the same goods  …  . In a post-industrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and “select” her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices  …  . The logic of new media technology reflects this new social logic’. In practice, that means that media users are given options to modify programmes, interface features, and file size, file type, type of compression used, file format, and so on. Yet, what enables ‘variability’ and ‘mutability’, programmability and quantification, is also what delimits it, because ‘choices’ are always pre-programmed in advance by designers, programmers, media corporations, advertisers, etc. And this is precisely what is demonstrated in jpegs because individual changes are possible but only within the realm of possibilities and choices predetermined in advance by a standards committee.

Luigi Ghirri, Bastia, 1976

My origins goes back to Italy, where Luigi Ghirri was one of the most significant artists of the late twentieth century.

I am taken aback by his picture, as they represent what I would like to pursue, namely the research of unreality through photography.