114 proposed me to do Le Sacre du Printemps I had no doubt, even if I'm not a choreographer, because it is not possible to have a corps de ballet with that music, because it sweeps them away. There’s no way, there’s no possibility. Therefore only machines, and dust, could have tried to reach the level of pathos that music expresses, to me». It was 2014. Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, the story of a human sacrifice offered to the god of fertility, resounds powerfully in a former steel mill in Ruhr, directed by Castellucci. No corps de ballet, but six tons of dancing dust, littered with projector-like machinery hanging from the ceiling. The dust, equivalent in weight to the mole of seventy-five bovine animals, is a particular calcium phosphate used in agriculture as a fertilizer. It is called bone ash. The symbol. The uncanny. Art. Ethics. There is infinite beauty in what by instinct can perturb us, if we know how to interpret it; in the pas de deux between aesthetics and ethics, everything flows through the commitment of the gaze. track #06 a matter of gazes Rumor has it that we live in the era of the images, btw I have to change my profile picture on Instagram, my friend doing an unpaid internship in that famous graphic studio photoshopped it for me. I'm great photoshopped, how beautiful this image is. xxx started following you, let me check his profile - it's Sagittarius - ok, refollow, screenshot and send it to my mate via WhatsApp, look at this guy sis. The curfew, no time for happy hour, I have to express my indignation on Facebook. 45 likes, thank goodness, I thought this was not the right time neither to post nor for indignation, which in the meantime vanished because the likes of my indignant post have risen to 57, among a hyperlink for the purchase of protein pancakes and yet another RIP of yet another cultural personality whose existence nobody knew about ‘til now. I don’t want to be considered uncultured, let me look for one of his catchphrases on Wikiquote and post it on Twitter, everyone is more sensitive out there. 76 likes, I got to say that death is always a #trendtopic. Back on Instagram, I want to try the latest rainbow filter that sparks stars when I curl my mouth. Scrolling scrolling scrolling. Dua Lipa's new video, swipe up, pre-order link, done. An interview with Chiara Ferragni, swipe up, oh it’s written, too long, double tap courtesy-heart. Friend image 1 - double tap heart, friend image 2 - double tap heart, kitten image - double tap heart whatever (such a shame I'm allergic to cats, I wonder how many likes I lose). Image image image and as many hearts, love profusion, friend image 36, double tap heart. Without even reading captions, who needs to understand what are they thinking, too much freaking out, they are all followers of mine and therefore we are all friends, right? Long live to megabyte friendship. The experience we have of the world we live in passes first of all through the impression, on our retina, of it as an image. As early as 1938, Martin Heidegger, proving to get a hang of it, defined the modern period as the age of the world picture, without however knowing that today mankind produces over a trillion images a year. A trillion, a billion billion, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. It has been calculated that a medieval man came into contact throughout his entire life with about forty artificially produced images, as opposed to the contemporary man for which the number soars to twelve billion. In short we live in the age of civilization of images; but in order to consider it ethical, it must be transformed into the civilization of imaginary, the image must come alive, we must listen to it and hear what it has to say – as in the classic literary genre of the iconic epigram, in which the poet actively dialogued with the works of art. That impression on our retina must become experience in our mind. Through the image, our thought takes on a shape, becoming figurative thought; experiencing the image therefore means educating the gaze to become thinking. No longer cogito ergo sum, but imago ergo sum, as Jean-Luc Nancy pointed out. The passage from image to imaginary clearly implies a selection, in the grande bouffe of iconographic junk-food to which we are constantly invited, willy-nilly scopic bulimics, and I find it a profoundly moral act to love ourselves in this sense – as when you aim to eat well in order to improve the quality of your life. If image is our daily bread, if the one within which we are immersed is no longer so much a biosphere as an iconosphere, let's do ourselves a favor: let’s know how to recognize the quality of the images, true art from the wanna-be so, true culture from the I-could-but-I-won’t one. Let's train it, this blessed gaze that is definitely our Maginot line, because ethical practice within the iconosphere lies in knowing how to look, and the correct metabolism of images involves the correct metabolism of life. It's all a matter of gazes. For example, having ascertained that "aesthetics" implies "experience", this recent perversion of immersive art exhibitions, where you can see a great deal of special effects but not a whiff of real art, is one of the reasons why I feel like saying, together with the recent essay by Paolo D'Angelo La tirannia delle emozioni (trans. The tyranny of emotions, which begins with the analysis of an immersive installation
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