"Lapsus Imaginis": The Image in Ruins

Harmony's mistakes: julien donkey‐boy and the degenerations of digital cinema

“…And if we feel, as Rodowick does, that digitally captured images, with their numerical structures of reference, are ruining something essential about the experience of photography, this is only possible because photography was always tied to the experience of ruin. 26 In this sense, part of what every digital photograph references is the concept of photography itself. The digitally captured image may represent a degeneration of the indexical tracea weakening of its powers, as Rodowick lamentsbut it may only do so to the extent that its referential structure continues to emulate and reproduce the character of the photographic image.…”

Rhythm and Noise: The City, Memory and the Archive

“…This is a theme that we can also find in some of the recent work on urban ruins, phantasmagorias, ghosts and traces (Gordon, 1997; Jaguaribe, 1999; Hetherington, 2002; Edensor, 2005; Pile, 2005). Through a mixture of text and image, photographic image in particular, it is common to find those working in this field seeking to give voice to the materiality of the past so that it can not only speak to the present but provide an opportunity for a form of awakening to multiple possibilities (see Cadeva, 1997, 2001).…”

Trauma of Signification. Terms of Engagement: Averns, feldman-kiss, Stimson. 27 September to 14 December 2014, Esker Foundation, Calgary, Alberta; 18 January to 9 March 2014, Mount St-Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia; 26 April to 10 August 2014, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario

“…In his wellknown essay "Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins," Cadava posits that images of disasters are a mise en abîme (Droste effect) of their own ruined capacity to represent and function as images. 6 Cadava reiterates Walter Benjamin's observation that all images are about destruction and survival, but that this recursion is especially true for images of disasters/ruins/conflicts. An image's inability to coincide with its subject is what Cadava calls a "lapsus imaginis."…”