Trifle III (2014)

Photography by EE Berger.

Performance Installation.

CultureFix Gallery in the LES of NYC, as part of the group exhibit, “Emergency Nothing”.

Sofa Chair, Television, Video, Hog Intestine, Glass Beads, human hair.

The expansion of the capitalist economy involves the continual creation of ‘the lack’ and ‘the satisfaction’. ‘The satisfaction’ created ‘the lack’ by calling up a new satisfaction, a vicious cycle of which we are imprisoned consumers. The media commonly exists as a structure that belongs to the extension of our technical thought, and the use of the image is the most simple form to send feelings of pleasure through. Today, the reign of consumption and pleasure belongs to the image : “Pictorial Turn”

The society of consumption and entertainment tries, through this means, to save us from the boredom, from the pain, from the concern and from the fear. The offered ideal is to soak in an atmosphere of pure pleasure. Yet the real consequence of today's digital space, takes the shape of various frustrations and sufferings, all of which increase even more under the pressure of this ephemeral pleasure. When the latter eventually wears out, bored and de-facto create torment and despair. The abuse of the pleasure on one side buys itself a new suffering on the other. The psychic universe of the contemporary is governed by ‘this image’, which becomes the mistress of one's true feelings and emotions, and forces him into an extreme state of laziness. No longer a need to push one's self to the limit and excel… just one click, and everything is offered to us. Frenzied connections dissipates time, the thought of reflexion and elaboration, even daydreaming.

Nowadays, all areas of our society are affected by the phenomenon: Politics, Morality, Economics… They are all about the image. All data in the global world rushes onto the screen. In this era of digital technology, it has become the best way to transfer knowledge. Is the picture more important than reality? "In too fast societies like ours, the effect of reality becomes blurred: the acceleration is showing the effects and causes, the linearity is lost in the turbulence, the reality (...) has no longer time to occur“[1]. Essentially, our everyday life is flooded by the image: the constant stream of TV, video, film and photography have become the main food source of our mind. This, especially means that we must renounce the claims of metaphysics when it forges for itself "a set of conceptions so abstract and consequently so vast, that they could contain all the possible, and even the impossible, alongside the real " [2] , whereas, in order to be a precise philosophical thought, it must constantly " stick to its object " [3]. —Kenza Amrouk

[1] J. Baudrillard, l’Illusion de la fin, Galilée, 1992, p.21

[2] G.Didi-Huberman, The butterfly Image, A.S.S.N., 2007, p.15

[3] H.Bergson, La pensée et le mouvement (1934), éd.A. Robinet, Œuvres, Paris, PUF, 1959 (éd.1970),p.1253.