X ​Execution in effigie means destroying, disgracing, mutilating, hanging or burning images of convicts. Executions on paintings were performed when people for various reasons were absent (they escaped or died before the punishment was imposed). Public deprivation of social status and dignity was extremely severe and shameful. In the sixteenth century we had to deal with a full-fledged making judgments on the images called in effigy. The network is one ecosystem to which we are moving, using mostly images (words are of secondary importance). It is thanks to them that we move there and it is up to them that everything depends.

In the second half of the twentieth century, it was noticed that our approach to death, seniors and sick people have changed. Natural death, death of a loved ones as a social event disappeared from our consciousness. It has ceased to be a part of life and has become its contradiction. In most cases, we are now dying in hospitals, among medical personnel, treated as a "medical unit". Death very often, is accompanied by loneliness, both in the case of a dying person and its relatives. At the same time, we are submitting to the ubiquitous process of commercialization, politicization and unreflective shocking by corpses in public space.​ ​We have been attacked with hundreds of images of death, both real ones coming from reportages, everyday news, and the fake ones that spill out of the cinema screens. Somewhere on the borderline of fear of dying in the physical world, and life beyond the passing time in the new virtual ecosystem, appears a phenomenon that I call non-mortality. Ultra-modern, virtual images that we create and share daily in social media, do not get old. We also have full control over time, as we can edit events from the past at any given moment. Our history can be constantly improved and updated. From the moment of registration each day, at any moment we can (or maybe we are obliged to) build our alternative life, which sooner or later becomes our monument.
| Copyright © Urszula Kluz-Knopek ula@adija.pl​​ |