After the pictures of others: pornography of death and cultural production in the digital context

Abstract

This paper will analyze some aspects of the digital and Internet distribution and its later re-appropriation of, so called, “dramatic images”. Of all characteristics and concepts related to the web net and its possibilities, it will focus in three: simulacrum, access and democratization and re-appropriation and control. These characteristics of digital images will be analyzed in the frame of a topic: the pornography of death (of terror, war and violence). The study cases are some of the images resulting of the so-called “war on terror”- after 9/11 terrorist attacks. A first example is the film Fitna by Dutch politician Gert Wilders and the second one is the publication of images of tortures to Iraqi prisoners by USA soldiers in Abu Ghraib and their further appropriations for different purposes. Starting from these examples special attention will paid to the processes of becoming “cultural and artistic object” nowadays, analyzing the oppositions between “cultural subject and cultural object”, “private and public”, “we and they”, “life and death”, “art and spectacle” are (un)resolved in our cultural context, mainly after Internet.