Bulimia

‘All this digital, numeric, electronic equipment is related to the deep-seated virtualization of human beings. We are already in a state of photo-videosynthesis: the virtual and the media are our chlorophyllous function’ Jean Baudrillard. In the hyper-mediatization of food, pleasure is mutilated and reduced to pure unsatisfied contemplation. Food-porn, gastronomic onanism-voyeurism, should celebrate the materiality of food but it becomes pure image, a ghost of itself. It’s the sex appeal of inorganic: a confusion of something alive with something not alive, a crisis of inside-outside separation, a contamination of man and machine, a fetishism. Fetish is indeed something that is nothing in itself but it’s just a screen on which desireis projected. These image-fetishes don’t respond to an aestethic demand but just to desire for image, they communicate with each other through the haste of dreaming, they follow an immediate chain reaction and assume a phantasmagoric spectral intensity. The spectator alienates himself in the mystical abandonment of the transcendence of commodity: the more he accepts to recognize himself in the dominant images, the less he understands his own desire.

Pasin Matteo