Elegies
August, 2013
In Motherwell's "Elegies to the Spanish Republic," abstractions of bull testicals serve as symbolic links with heroic death in the bloodly tragic war with fascism. He ties the Spanish bullfighting culture—a spectacle of life and death embeded within the everyday—to the contemplation of a specific historical loss.
Similarly, the mourning of our losses requires some anchor within the features of contemporary life here. Yet the profundity of theatrical enactments like the bull fight are absent; we have only the tepid spectacularity of late capital's image culture: we have the spectacle of self-absorbtion and alienation that is computational culture in its current regime of "sociality"—contemporaneous with total surveillence. So these elligies are figures etched within meaningless generative detritis and algorithmic play of light which endeavor to hide the visage of heroic loss which constitutes the tragic sacrifice of our day.
To uncover the hidden "payload" of these images, you will need to download the Obscure Application and the original image files which are here (right/control click on links and save them to a local drive):
