The Vision Factory
Image as God & the Apostilization of the Self


The hand manipulates the image and then the image manipulates the mind.

It has been known for hundreds of years that the mass media is a required tool for sustaining power and control in a Democratic system. If you cannot rule by the sword, you must rule by influencing opinion¹. The ideas of information flow and influence, and the relationship between power and mass media play a key role in this political structure. (I would say 'media' here, to imply the importance of personal media as differentiated from mass media, but in current culture, personal has become mass.)

The Vision Factory goes on to illustrate the unparalleled historic levels of consumption prevalent in today's society: buy, buy, buy and you can be happy, too, we're told through an onslaught of images, commercials and ads, again and again. But, with some help from Vilem Flusser I came to the realization that the commodity is not the end in this process, but the means to an end. The end goal of this largely philosophical movement toward outer "happiness" is the right image -- the image, an image, your image, their image -- as long as things appear to be shiny, new, hip and cool, that is all that matters: you've made it. If you appear as if the only thing differentiating you and your favorite TV star is the TV, then, you've made it -- Or have you?.. Theodore Adorno called it The Culture Industry. Jean Baudrillard gave us the term hyper real. Flusser clarifies the role of imagery in popular culture today with his revolutionary method of aligning the ancient image, linear text, and technological image as an uncoded, post-historic media text, not as a window to what is happening in the world around us².

This project attempts to show the pervasive power of image and how, in today's culture, it has become the thing we go to for answers, how it is omnipresent by our own accord, and, how, for some, it has become like God. The Vision Factory explores and records some of the dynamism of essential cultural contexts and attempts to illustrate the ways in which the media contrive and control information in order to influence public opinion in the areas of art, literature, education, politics, journalism, entertainment, and labor. These instances are not often obvious amidst the prevailing condition, but they indeed impact us all as citizens of our global planet.

These comparisons and conclusions are drawn from a process of investigating the relationships between power and the use of image as part of the current cultural phenomenon we are witnessing of not only a decrease in the emphasis on civics, but, to the contrary, and indeed -- through the use of digital media -- a clear focus, if not emphasis, on the self. With this in mind, the question arises "Can community exist in the midst of mass individualization?" As the foundation of its argument and investigation, the research project references popular culture from the early 20th century to the present.


1 Noam Chomsky, The Myth of the Liberal Media. Media Education Foundation.
2 Vilem Flusser, Toward a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books, London.

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