Following on from the “Talking Heads” painting as discussed in my previous post, I began to see the potential of a method of continually ‘blowing up’ parts of an image to create new images. As mentioned, there is the resonance with the theme of war and conflict on which the original image was based in the term ‘blow up’.
But there is a broader context in that the image is one of many, recording a single instance in a long running and widespread conflict affecting millions of different lives. Even within that single image there are many versions of events which can be told – the stories of the survivors, those who have died, or those that have lost others, the rescuers, those launching the missiles, and the politicians and military leaders.
Add to this that there are also those who espouse views which are false, either deliberately to feed an agenda, or maybe self protection/preservation, or a merely misreading or misremembering of the situation.
We have all these potential stories for each image, and these are now spread far and wide through social media and 24 hour TV coverage. And there are millions of images from which one can choose and comment upon.
Blowing up an image to highlight and reinterpret a section of the image allows us to create a new story, which will have a different meaning than the original image. Each blown up image maybe reminiscent of some thing or things, a person or people, buildings, a landscape, although originally it would have shown something completely different, such as rubble created by the explosion.
The idea of blowing up the initial image to create new images is a metaphor for how many layers of meaning and interpretations each image may convey, depending on the point of view taken. And this process can be repeated continuously allowing many different narratives to be created, so that the original aspect and meaning of the image can become lost altogether, and you are looking at something which is in effect divorced from any reality, yet may hint at an alternative world.
As an example, if we look at the picture I call Pig and Snake, below on the left, this was taken by doing a crop and blow up of the Talking Heads image on the right.
In fact, Pig and Snake is more or less an inverted and mirrored version of the bottom half of Talking Heads. Yet the pictures look fairly different, and I think few would realise the connection unaided even though the colouring and some elements are similar.
In truth to derive the development of the new image went through a few stages, such as changing the aspect ratio and emphasising certain features to obtain the desired effect, which was to create a new picture with a different subject.
But this is also true of news and stories – some people will see an event in a totally different light than another, particularly if they have heard about it through intermediate sources, each with their own interpretation and agenda. Now
It is in this way we can create ‘Fake Art’. This mimics the #Fake tag used commonly, and often incorrectly, to label anything which people find contrary to their world view. In fact ‘Fake Art’ uses the term correctly as the aim is to deliberately produce something which is not as it seems.