Museum of the Stealing of Souls
Today the passage from "intellectual" to "imaginary" property is challenging traditional notions of ownership and personhood. It is the theft of the soul which in both, analog and digital modes, turns images into property or vice versa: property into imageness. The formula could go like this: the soul that is stolen in the image that is taken is the difference that is repeated.
Museum of the Stealing of Souls
Submitted by florian schneider on Sat, 09/27/2008 - 13:56
The Museum of the Stealing of Souls has opened on July 19th 2008, hosted by manifesta7 in Trento, Italy. It is devoted to histories of the invention, appropriation and reconfiguration of the subject by photography.
The museum holds a fast growing collection organized in seven departments. The exhibits on show are reflecting alleged histories of soul-theft and surveillance, soullessness and alienation, immaterial production and precariousness -- loosely based on the question: Where can a soul live its life instead of saving it?
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A Matter of Theft
Submitted by florian schneider on Sat, 07/12/2008 - 15:591. There is a well-known myth according to which indigenous people believe that when a camera takes a picture of them, it captures a part of them, if not stealing their soul. This has been repeated often enough, by the pioneers of ethnographic photography as well as in online forums by today’s amateur photographers; so-called natives have been credited with this belief in every part of the world and across time. Like many other popular assumptions from the field of ethnography, the idea of the theft of a soul by image has become a commonplace, free from critical reflection and questioning.
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The perils of the soul
The symposium Imaginary Property, introducing the research project by the same name, explores new potentials for design practices across various registers at the intersections of design-theory and image-production. What challenges emerge from the paradoxes that research into ‘imaginary property’ has given rise to? How could these potentially generate new rules of production, bearing in mind that property relations are constantly exchanging meaning? Do we have to rethink and re-evaluate the notion of ‘design’ against this background?
