The subject of my final project at Central Saint Martins is what I would call Screen Realities. Primarily it addresses the electronic screens that had been invented with television in the early 20s of the last century and that are dominating our perception of the world nowadays (through the tele, monitors, projections and mobile devices) and therewith the realities these electronic screens are creating and how they are perceived by the recipient.

In conclusion of my research, moving images break down into four categories: fiction, faction, simulation and operational images. The term Operational Images relates to the German filmmaker Harun Farocki who himself references to Jean-Luc Goddard. Operational Images are images without any mythologic charge. Farocki correlated the term with the quest of French philosopher Roland Barthes for something similar in language. Figurative examples of operative images are the guidance cameras on the tip of autonomous bombs capturing highly engineered images whose only purpose is technological. Men are inspecting these images merely to check the mode of operation of its parent machine. In this manner these images hold an intense functional aesthetic.

Screen Realities is a very blurry term by intention. The hypothesis is that the boundaries between the categories of moving images mentioned above are tumbling down and the different realities are increasingly merging. The main cause is the Internet. Its anarchic hierarchies and the overall democratic structure also means an equality of the different images. These forms of image taking are emancipating from their primary purpose into a universal language where all the various forms become part of our common memory.

The place where all those Screen Realities are collected is the control room – the modern editing room. These rooms are everywhere nowadays. They are like massive routers. I examined one of those huge control facilities on a trip to the ESA (European Space Agency) and their ESOC (European Space Operations Centre). On-site I was briefed about the functionality of the main and the other, smaller, control rooms that monitor the several satellites in space.^[1] Consequential the form of my final project will be an abstract recreation of a control room. The aesthetic will make use of collage techniques as a reference to pop art which always took parts of reality and reassembled them to emphasize and criticize. The work itself will examine the importance of the crash for shifts in the mass media, referencing Paul Virillio (“There is no technical invention without accidents. Each time a technology is invented, a technology of transport, of transmission, or of information, a specific accident is born.”) and Guy Debord (“In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it.“).

The crash is both, the witness of technological and social progress, and the culmination of the spectacle and as such the evolutionary moment, the mutation, of mass media. The same mass media that tend to over-aestheticise the crash by converging the four Screen Realities.