OFLUXO

Looking to our medieval ancestors for help in understanding current shifts towards the growing dominance of the visual in communication would seem to be a backward step. Those were the days, we think, of supernatural forces intervening in human affairs, and with views of medicine, biology and psychology that strike the modern intellectual as primitive and unsatisfyingly pre-scientific. However a progressive view of human knowledge should also consider that the concept we have of the so-called dark ages are most likely not our own at all, rather ideas imposed on us by a growing Capitalist empire that needed to build a fervent belief in the dawn of a modern age and create a dark past from which we could emerge. To enter the state of mind of a distant epoch requires a great shift of belief systems.In crossing a river, one gathered the clay and, engrossed in thought, began to mold it.
Imagining an image. Pause, and imagine an era, itself a huge span of time (from the late classical period to the 15th century) where every single physical rendering of an image was made by an artist. Most likely one would only rarely encounter a material image, and this rare image would have without a doubt been produced by a tradesman whose craft was visual communication. Today we encounter thousands of images daily, images made by everyone, made by marketing firms, made by your grandmother and her Azuri Samsung Galaxy J6, we see a hundred scrolling images for each bowel movement. No doubt our minds are a very different place. Could we now be experiencing a revival of an era where illiteracy was the norm, where we read in images rather than abstract symbols (letters), right brain over left.