I Like Ike

There is a stupendous painting of Dwight D. Eisenhower in Butler library, up the right main stairs as you enter. Ike is dressed in academic regalia and his trademark smile, and the painting easily tricks unsuspecting visitors and first-years into thinking Ike was influential and respected president of Columbia University (he did one good thing during his time here however – creating School of General Studies). But of course, painting doesn't really have to reflect reality. My painting instructor insisted “paint as things ought to be, not as they are”, or something to that effect.

It was interesting that Matt Keegan mentioned phenomenology. Since vision is the most dominant sense (arguably), visual information constitutes most of our conscious experiences. Men are visual creatures – in Korea there is a saying that eyes are worth 9 part of body’s worth-  so if what we see constructs our reality, to alter what people see is to alter their reality (interestingly enough, other senses – smell, sound, taste and touch are much harder to fool and more closely linked to memory). In this sense, images –real or fabricated- are building blocks of one’s individual sense of realities. So the people who are trained in creating or altering visual information as they see, are people who creates and alters core of how realities are perceived by others, and themselves.

One possible answer, by the logic of understanding what images are by understanding what they do, is that images creates the realities we live in, or at the very least, represent how we want it to be. In grand sense, Images-creators are builders of the world we live in.

There is a digression I must make, though - for those who constructs image of self as they’d like it to be, can use social networking tools to present themselves as they see want, by ‘sharing’ contents – pictures most effective among them- that are cherry-picked and/or edited. And others exposed to only this kind of information about the ‘sharer’ perceives them as more fun, more beautiful, more intelligent, and generally more interesting. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this (it’s actually almost natural and certainly predates contemporary social networking tools), but increased intensity of such manufactured self-image can create jarring disparity from how things actually are.

This poses problem for those who want to understand, and even represent things as they are. First, it’s impossible to reproduce something as they exactly are - mere act of reproduction alters the state of it. More importantly (for me at least), accurate representation of reality as they really are, might not be worth presenting in first place. Realities are often much more pedestrian and grim than we’d like it to be.

Tony Lee