Blog #8 - an image is ‘an infinity of contingencies’

Link to artwork

Maybe we are already familiar with the idea that we should not trust anything that is said or shown on social media. Every photo or video can be distorted and edited before they are posted, in a way that expresses what the authors want their audience to see. Thus, we can never be sure what we see in the media is 100% authentic, in other words, an image is ‘an infinity of contingencies’ - Jurgenson. I have been practicing using photoshop in my artwork. And none of the work I posted on social media is original, some of them used obvious photoshop effects, like the one above, and some at least were color-corrected before being posted online. The picture I posted on this blog, as you can see, is heavily edited. The goldfish was an image I got online, the glow around it was drawn by hand, my facial features were edited into something more "animated", and the color of the entire was corrected. Only the artists know what is going on behind the scene, and what the audience sees is an image with so many unknown factors.