Old ruined walls and obscene graffiti.

This collection revolves around the idea of antiquity as intrinsic value in modern and contemporary (western) culture.

This idea I sometimes play with assumes there is a kind of diffused fetishism directed towards what physically remains from the past, a displacement of the interest from the culture of ancient civilizations to it's material vestige per se.

In this axiological context, a patina of antiquity is commonly considered qualitatively similar to an aura, such as mold on good salami skin. A salami which is the tastier the more remote is the date from which the family of the owner of the factory started chopping porks.

In my mind it's like this phenomenon started from the 18th century accelerating up to now as a misunderstood stodgy renaissance humanism, or a failed trial of its vulgarization.

What could have been fostering this attitude?

Might it be a reaction to the progressive awareness and first person experience of human condition being not immutable, but unstable and evolving, to the faded out notion of the world created "as it is", to History distancing itself from Myth and the quick multiplicity of changes in one life time?

Might it have been that one ineradicable cult of ancestors in a renewed secularized form that progressively flanked and overtook the church's religion but not the indispensability of relics and sanctuaries?

Might it have been the evolution of media, in particular the ones concerning reproducibility of images so that the transmission of past by tale got covered (and perceptively obscured) by images, images that, existing in multiple copies, have by themselves an own stand-alone iconic identity and recognizability independent from what they depict, in particular from photography invention on they are what remains of concrete past, the ruins of the physical vibrations of matter and energy that was possible to save and reproduce, it's pompeian cast?

Digital media in my questionable point of view consist more in upgraded literature than in anything else, symbolic manipulation and representation of information. The "tale" is getting rid of the cadaveric rigidity of it's pod, casting countless sprouts of representation going to cover the funerary masks of reproduction with an articulated foliage of logic and flowers of living metaphors. To me AI integrating a text with 1..n images fits well this vision of digital media.

Just an idea to play with.