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Rene’ Magritte painted the image of a pipe with a caption: “This is not a pipe.” It was part of the Treachery of Images series:
[Magritte] consistently interrogated conventions of language and visual representation, using methods that included the misnaming of objects…
These paintings occurred two decades before George Orwell penned 1984. It prefigured a time when the psychological disruption of inverting the past meaning of words would be used as a tool to make a society less capable of forming independent thought.
Our society has been prepared for this by the increasing rate of change. How long has it been since your smart devices received new updates? How many updates have upended the prior user “interface”? Are you using emojis, acronyms, and alternative spellings in your text messages?
Have you gotten the picture yet — that you, as much or more, are being “updated”? We are being taught by machines. And one of the things we are being taught is to adopt, with less and less resistance, new meanings and understandings; that two and two is five (or whatever number the machine wants you to believe).
Discussion (20)
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I dont even want to think about it. I'd surely be completely overwhelmed!
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Bravo, Rodin, bravo.
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CONTRIBUTOR
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My cousin used to carve pipes for the fun of it. I asked him if he was going to inscribe one 'this is not an image', but as he'd never heard of the painting it led to awkward explanations.
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