High Culture

This is The Rape of the Sabine Women by Peter Paul Rubens. It is a digital arrangment of pixels, no more than the ordered execution of discrete instructions compiled and run by an electronic counting machine connected to other electronic counting machines, passing such information invisibly over conductive filaments or even through the very air. It is a physical thing of oil and canvas recreated in the most modern of visual media; an experiential abstraction divorced from its physical self, but no less ingestible .

The painting itself is a depiction of a birth-of-Rome-era legendary event that, whether it actually occurred or not, has no visual evidence to support any kind of conceptualization or recreation. The picture then is a work of pure imagination, building on themes interesting to the painter or his patron, replete with wholly invented details and rife with willfull anachronism, conveyed in a medium if invented, almost never used at the time of the event and certainly in a Baroque style that would never have occurred to contemporaries of the event to employ, either by fashion or skill.

Beyond an abstraction, then, it's an abstraction of an abstraction. A digital reprodcution of the painting of a scene that cannot possibly have happened. A thought exercise.

Scroll up and look at the picture again.

You are looking at nothing.

I am home with the flu and whacked out on DayQuil.