From His Palace in The Dust

Another Resurrection Series

This series explores the mythology of a fictional past and the anonymity of cultural narratives through forged and manipulated blueprints of nostalgic vestiges resuscitated.

Contemporary cultural narratives speak to our common aspirations, fears and perplexities. Ritually retold, these stories reinforce a constructed history and sustained narrative that collectively we buy into. Infiltrating our collective imagination, the ideological contradiction at the heart of this myth is the delusion. The simulacrum does not hide the truth, but rather reveals its absence. Amongst the composite of semiotic signs, ‘surreality’ is defined as a kind of writing, photographs as a form of capturing.  The medium has swallowed the message, the multi-medium proliferated it in all directions.  There is no reality outside representation, but rather a socially constructed system of meaning. Subconsciously, we are structured by this repertoire of codes and grammar of meaning that dissects binary structures. However, the principal of reality is dead now. In its excess we stopped believing in it. The poverty of experience at the hands of our hyper-accelerated society brings into question the politics of memory. 

How do we come to understand ourselves if not in relation to our past, our history, our heritage?  If selfhood is built on an accumulation of the memories, what happens when they are diluted by the countless narratives flickering on screen? The arbitrariness of identity is an affect of the spectacle. It complicates how we internalise our past and understand ourselves in relation to others.

Sam Heydt 2014

Glossary

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