…If we have to remain with Plato, it is evident that our world has become a giant “reversed cave” in which all images are in fact shadows of themselves, doubles and inconsistent reality leftovers, where surveillance and control are becoming mandatory and freedom and difference eroded and erased. Plato again, in his four definitions, calls this form of knowledge EIKASIA; literally this means “picture-thinking”, reflecting the thinking that derives not from the reality of things but from their images in our minds. Fears, anxieties, wishes, day-dreams, phantasms, and other specific scenes or imagined scenes from which a train of thought proceeds.

EIKASIA is related in modernity to the idea of fictional finalisms in the system of psychologist Alfred Adler. Adler noticed how extensively human beings are motivated by specific imagined scenes that determine and direct our actions.

According to fictional finalisms is that we proceed as if these images were real events, even though they are only imagined. At sub or unconscious level, we tend not to make the cognitive distinction between an imagined idea and a fact.

I believe today we are already living in an induced state of EIKASIA with slightly different characteristics in different places…

…This installation is not about Art, but about Images, the images that will kill Art very soon, the images that accompany its slow agony, images that not only live with us, but design our minds: real, fictional, created, hacked, stolen, recomposed, remembered, re-imagined edited and multiplied.

Simulacra of our lost meaning, simulation of ourselves, appropriating our bodies and dissolving what is left of our souls in a Kaleidoscope of colors, light, shiny, catchy rhythms, seductive notes, and millions of other subtle pseudo-variations………as Ray Bradbury said “Bombard them with images instead of words and accentuate the details using special effects….you can get people to swallow anything by intensifying the details..”

The industrialization of prevention is a sort of panic anticipation that commits the future to the industrialization of simulation and its most important warfare target, the elimination of the appearance of the facts, the impossibility to ever catch the truth, which as Kipling said is “the first casualty of war.”

Let’s face images and their full power, redundancy and ultimate violence…

Alessandro Rolandi
Beijing, February 2015