The ubiquity of the image

When back in the dark night of time images first prized themselves off the walls of the grottoes and temples and proclaimed themselves independent, they started out on a long road that would lead them through the necessary age of reproducibility to arrive at something the object could not attain: ubiquity. Perhaps no one could have imagined then that for this to be their acme they would first have to become intangible, or that on this long road toward independence we would come to forget that the image was once itself an object. And that, however hard it might be, the image would also have to detach itself from the reproduction that had sustained it for so many years and adhere, as the word adheres to the mouth, to any numerical surface.In much the same way that the reproduction implicitly carried with it contemporaneity, the two concepts could have engendered an intuition of the present ubiquity of the image. The gift of ubiquity was posited on reproduction, the first step toward the abandoning of the material. The image, intangible, liberated from its support, completed the long journey from its spatial loosening to occupy and confound reality on a plane that was now very far from being sacred.

The durability of their supports in relation to the ephemeral span of human life had allowed images to represent the gods and, in this same gesture, they themselves as symbol of a ubiquitous and unchanging god were sacralized. The print reproduction of an image of St. Rita preserved all the attributes of the original image, which in itself preserved all the attributes, all the authority, invested in the saint. Along this road the image took on the ubiquity once reserved for the sacred beings it represented. In every gain there is a loss, and vice versa. In the conquest of ubiquity the image ended up losing that other gift of the sacred, durability, and we thus expelled from our already unstable set of values that of permanency.

We have travelled from contemporaneity (time) to ubiquity (space) in a single change of century. If the 20th century was a ubiquitous time for time itself, where the present in the form of fact was stretched out and inflated to the extent that it occluded our fields of vision backward and forward, the 21st century has started off with the ubiquity of space as space, difficult though that may be to understand: the multiple personality of space has its consequences in our own dis-location. And the lengthy trajectory of the image will have something to do with that.

On behalf of SCAN, a brand new photographic event, promoted by the Department of Culture and Communications Media of the Generalitat de Catalunya, we invite you to reflect on the ubiquity of the image and its social, artistic, psychological and other implications and to engage in dialogue on the basis of this starting point within the framework of SCAN zero.

Our thanks to KRTU for their immediate enthusiasm for the project and for their organization of it, and to VilaWeb for enabling us to make a dialogue on ubiquity ubiquitous.

To Christian Caujolle, Joan Fontcuberta and Radu Stern, our sincere hope that they enjoy the whole process and in so doing enrich all our lives.