Le immagini e il sogno delle copie

The contemporary age is realizing what Plato would be the worst nightmare because the worst deception: the power of the copy seems to threaten to be even higher than its model. If for a moment we attribute to the high definition technologies a daydream, we could imagine their desire for absolute identity between the copy and the model, to the extent that copying, becoming itself the model, it takes its place thanks to its increased power. A kind of Pygmalion effect, whose legend tells of a statue that does not imitate a living being, but which itself becomes alive. The development of high-definition technologies seems to be a crucial point in one of the problems that have plagued the Western culture from the Greek tradition and the Jewish one, which has plagued the Christian and Islamic thought, which has found a decisive answer in modernity. This is the question of reproducibility of the images and their role as substitutes.