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The Treachery of Digital Art
An Essay by JD Jarvis
March-June, 2009
In a 1929 painting entitled "The Treachery of Images," Rene Magritte wrote, in careful
script, under his precise rendition of a gentleman's tobacco pipe the seemingly obvious
yet deeply enigmatic message, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (this is not a pipe). Taken in
context with the painting's title the message is clear; images, as well as words, are not
the
things they represent. On the surface this is a light-hearted reminder of the abstract
nature
of all artistic representation. At a deeper level we are also presented the opportunity to
consider the illusion behind the very process the human brain has evolved to extract our
daily reality from the wordless and meaningless background of experience.
What we call reality is but a highly selected and filtered assortment of sensory
impressions gathered by our mind out of all the random electromagnetic or atmospheric
pressure waves awash in an undifferentiated chemical soup. Our brain has evolved as a
central processing unit designed to: first, differentiate the things we can sense from
within a very narrow band of this vast random ocean of experience then; secondly, attach
meaning to this sensory data so that we ultimately experience such everyday things as "red"
or "hydrogen sulfide" or "cold." This construct then provides the construct for ...
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