This is Murfreesboro NC, The Beach, A Town Fair

(Video, 10.5 Min)

DESCRIPTION

This video was originally captured on Super 8 cartridge film. The cartridges are included in their entirety.

STATEMENT

In 1926 Rene Magritte completed one of his more famous, or at least most referenced, paintings “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). Nearly fifty years later, the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, examined the painting in a short book by the same name. With analysis, Foucault’s primary conclusion was that people are falsely positioned within an established system of seeing that links reality with visual representation. Foucault posits that the painting of the “pipe” is in fact a simulacrum, a condition that is “arrived at when the distinction between representation and reality – between signs and what they refer to in the real world – breaks down.” The images included in this film are like that of the “pipe” in Magritte’s painting, they are not meant to be representations of reality but rather simulations of other simulations, whether they tangibly exist or are constructed mental concepts (What is the real difference between the simulations Disney World and Murfreesboro, North Carolina?)