Struth writes, “With the new, work, I attempt to take a wider, more principled point of view. I want to reconsider how the process of imagination and fantasy works in general, how something which has built up in someone’s mind has materialized and become reality. The German expression “sich etwas ausmalen”—to paint something in one’s head—refers to the picturing capacity of the human brain. It is a condition, without which we cannot create anything.
“My thoughts about this were partly inspired by Katja Eichinger’s 2008 article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) about the altered perspective and reading of Disneyland since its beginnings in the 1950s. In a time when information technology and the picture-making industry accelerate their efforts to bring imagination and physical reality closer together, thus turning the passive experience of watching a screen into something more bodily, I thought it would be interesting to return to this early example of the constructed imagination, Disneyland.
“I went to Anaheim in 2009 to test its potential for a new body of work and returned in April 2013. My focus was particularly drawn to the ambiguity between what Walt Disney had remembered from his trips to Europe and how it was later rebuilt as a kind of latent reality in California.
“The six pictures from Disneyland I combine in my exhibition with other works I have made at various research or medical facilities in Berlin, at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and at exemplary urban locations in Ulsan, South Korea and St. Petersburg, Russia. The surprise of what we have collectively created becomes more evident when one takes a more general perspective. Showing real experimental physics, a 21st-century urban landscape, or a surgical robot in action reinforces the question: How should we judge what we see? More intimately, let us consider the vulnerability of the human body and soul under these circumstances. It’s all creation; it’s made. It’s not a given.”
- Thomas Struth, Los Angeles, December 2013
I guess what I wonder is, does the creaction of technology have any diffrent influence on sociaty than the creation of law or the creation of food or the creation of literature?
