ETHAN HARNISCH

Law and power are simulated things which react to anything thrown at them. In the case of laws against armed-robberies, the consciously simulated one (prank, whatever) must be reacted to in the same way as any real one because there is too much inability to tell if it is real and too much risk to say it isn't. Thus an armed-robbery can be committed without any arms to bear.  Laws like this would be simulations regardless of postmodern evaluation, but their simulated-aspects warping and knotting with the real becomes more and more obvious as the 'modern era' continues to move forward.  True power no longer exists, only built images of power that feed a demand for order, as well as born out of that demand. More or less born out of the bones of imperialism - seeking power through domination and resource mining - the modern forms of power are now subject to supply and demand, as well as the social demand of power through an obsession with it and its absence. Power is now the im...

The God-King must die to ensure their final and invisible simulated panopticon; in the most final event for an individual, a perpetuation of their power is seeped into the ground and atmosphere. A simulated lack of death and absence continues their reign into the invisible. The outvoting of an incumbent is a simulated death and rebirth, changing nothing of the actual heart of the God-Capital.  If the president is King, the Capital is God.  What matters to the capital is the concept of itself. Everything else will revolve around it in order to ensure its continuity, even in declarations of misuse (pointing toward but not at a deeper truth past the rulers) does the system of capital get strengthened. In declaring the King (president) as corrupt, the capital is remained constant and unscathed, reinforced as great by the temporary ruler's evil. If the King (president) is declared great and fair, the capital is remained as great.  From both directions is capital remained stron...

In a dizzying process of grabbing at shrapnel of my ideas and concepts - in nothing sticking - I have decided to start where I will end.  My final project will only exist in the many ways it does if I tell you it does, and how I tell you it does will be all you have to know of its existence (counting these).  Thus the first (last) fold of simulation is acknowledged. Everything behind the project's presentation must have the presence of flatness of meaning, but this would stick me somewhere in the second or third stage of the 'successive phases of the image '. Where I cannot accurately simulate the cultural processes that stimulate Baudrillard's phases of the image, I can simulate it. Thus the next folds of simulation are acknowledged.  The process precedes the concept... The concept precedes me... Is all that's left to do is copy something? If so, so be it, but I know I will change my direction for this project a handful of times from now, so bear in mind. My attemp...

 I do not know exactly what I want to do for my project yet, but I think this will help me as I want it to evolve greatly over the course of the term. However it ends up, I want the process to be the essential focus, with it somewhat paralleling the 'successive phases of the image' that Baudrillard describes as the process for which hyperrealism is birthed.  Here are a few fragments of ideas that I would see finding their way, however they do, into my project: - Found footage  - Genre covers (genres require certain things to be considered of that genre, but there's an invisible line you need to cross that I'd prove is imaginary) - Sound art - Fake history reports / current event articles  - Foley art  - Create images / video with as much HOLY POWER as possible while remaining dreadfully hollow I do not know what my final outcome will be, but in anticipating changing course many times, I want these idea changes to inform each other and feed into itself as the pre...

Science, in its pursuit of investigating all of the world's things to convert them into knowledge, destroys sometimes not only the true objects it investigates but the reality which they lie(d) in. Things which were/are enclosed in an environment which ensures its preservation are destroyed when investigated by the science that seeks to preserve things.  Unsealed lock on King Tut's tomb If not preserved in their true form, then in knowledge. Knowledge is not a real thing, so we must convert it into symbols which seek to represent the things that were destroyed in seeking to create the knowledge of them to the science's standards. These representations are in fact not representations of the things themselves but of our knowledge of them, with the truest thing to the original being the story of its destruction by exhumation.  (I think my biggest problem with Simulacra and Simulations is not the content or ideas but just the way it is written because I'm pretty sure it cou...

first known demonstration of abstract thought The earliest known instance of consciously created art was made by a homo Erectus around 500,000  years ago and is a rough zig-zag pattern scratched into the side of a seashell - the first conscious art was a pattern. We (evolutionary ancestry to humans "we") did patterns for a while, but eventually got interested in replicating what we saw every day, such as the animals we hunted. Those images became more important to us, possibly becoming manifestation methods for a successful hunt, and eventually we started to represent things that we didn't see at all, such as gods and other symbolic beings.       From what I think I understood in Baudrillard's Simulations , at one point we expanded our use of representing and simulating things enough that the potential within the concept of simulation itself became our obsession, not the thing we were representing. When the order of the simulation and the simulated is changed, t...

  (I suggest freezeframing it occasionally and seeing what you get.) My video is a video and a video first, and a video only.    Somewhat branching from my photo series, I went back to the trees for my video project. The video consists of layering various slowed down or sped up footage, with a gradual ascending into the complete stack of footage and a somewhat mirrored tapering off of layers back down to the most slowed-down footage.      I had many ideas for the final product, all consisting of the same sort of footage and continuing my interest in the qualities that throwaway media has (such as blurry images and footage). Once I had enough shots to work with, I tried at a few different ideas, ultimately ending up where I've done videowork before: on my phone. The entire product was completely edited and finished on my phone across three different free editing apps, which resulted in a unique degredation of resolution and quality (this or something like it...