On January 30th, 2009, the 77th issue of HTV De Ijsberg was launched at a session of Killer TV at the De Waag, Center for old and new media
in Amsterdam. The entire magazine is devoted to questions of "Imaginary
property". It has been edited and compiled by the researchers of the
"imaginary property" research group at Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht
in close collaboration with the editorial team of HTV. The magazine as
well as additional material can be visited and downloaded at: http://www.htvdeijsberg.nl
The content of the entire issue is designed in the form of
"imaginary" advertisements. We consider this as an experiment in order
to explore and eventually undermine the borders between text and
image, between private property and public space. The goal is to
(ironically) deconstruct some of the basic conventions of a magazine
and to investigate new fields of image-production beyond the hard-coded
notions of the commercial versus the editorial.
-What kind of image is the ad?
Even though the advertisement space is mainly one of grids, the adspace
in the htv issue has given us the opportunity to break with existing
borders around images and texts. The advertisement is both, neither an
image nor text. One could think of it as ‘productive imagination’. The
advertisement as an operative structure; value-producing human
attention.
In the htv the ad is a place where information is turned into
‘something to look at’. The ad is part of a productive cycle of events.
Looking at, or reading the HTV ads should lead to a continuous
processing of information. People continue to read on the web, browse,
comment and so on.
-The image as advertisement
Another issue raised by this htv issue is; How much are digital images
ads themselves, advertising for their creator, its software, the
machine, their network protocols? Images as products of certain imaging
techniques such as mobile phone and web applications, advertise for
their own use.
Stock photography is a good example in this context. For HTV, Kevin
Bewersdorf writes about how the subjects portrayed on stock photographs
are aware of being potential advertisements for stock photo’s?
Another example is digital camera’s that come with Youtube stickers as
add ons. Is it the quality or brand of the camera that makes you buy it
or is it the image as value producer that makes you buy a camera? The
digital image can no longer be discussed as an image separate from its
productive context.
-The ad in relation to the real and the imaginary
The ad used to be about owning that which is displayed in the image,
through imagination, now it is all about owning the image itself.
Imaginary Property starts from the idea that the notion of the real is
changing. A change that has a lot to do with the current status of the
image. Thousands of images are created everyday to capture different
accounts of reality. The image is constantly being copied and
manipulated. The relation between image and reality is inverted. We
live images, to control our reality.
