Welcome to the Void

Abstract

As the rate at which we consume and produce imagery quickens, we see a diminishment of the faculties of any one image to remain potent. Not even the Icon; the mirror of society's hopes and dreams, can hold the attention of the overburdened minds of the internet age. Icons live through memory and die in neglect. When cultural memory is outsourced to cloud storage, what will fill the void in the Icons wake? It is my contention; that the death of the Icon-image has been integral to the opening up of a new mode of interaction between art and transcendent or sublime experience. The departure of the Icon has illuminated the rituals and physical spaces that mediate both the sublime and the Icon from new perspectives. For as the Icon has shown itself to be susceptible to the influence of technology, changing its form, and eventually losing the boundaries that once contained it, the coded responses of worship have endured. The similarities between the prescribed behaviours of the museum and those of the church are perhaps not so surprising as the etiquette of seeing art was born from the protocols of religious worship. An empty frame on a gallery wall conveys the thought 'there is nothing here,' but by its associative power confirms whatever is placed there duly becomes art. An Icon is at its heart a gateway, or interface, through which access to the metaphysical is granted. Therefore Icons are one option from a catalogue of physical interfaces that can be used to mediate connection to transcendence, the sublime in nature is another. Welcome to the Void, is a representation of the frames that have always been the true mediators of transcendence. The death of the Icon has merely allowed us to see them.