Would showing photographs of catastrophes of the near future prepare people in accepting them?
Politicians do not learn from history. We are bound to have a World War III, whatever the weapons/medium/environment may be. We might as well be prepared for it. In 1852, Karl Marx's said in one of his most quoted lines: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce" ("The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte").
Visuals have always been convincing for people, especially photography. In 1917, two teenage girls from Cottingley produced photographs depicting fairies and were able to convince many people that they were real, up until 1981, when they admitted that the photos were faked using cardboard cutouts. Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed enthusiastically, "Photography is distinguished by its immediacy, its authenticity, and the remarkable fact that its eye sees more than the human eye. The camera shows everything.” Qtd. in In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, Ed. William Manchester (New York: American Federation of the Arts in association with WW Norton & Co., 1989) 14.
But with the advent of digital photography and image manipulation software like Adobe’s Photoshop, things started to change. As Susan Bright points out in Art Photography Now, “The digital revolution has impacted in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago, causing some to ask not ‘Is this art?’ but ‘Is this photography?’ ”
This also applies to photography in the news and documentaries. When the Times covered O.J. Simpson’s murder case, their cover picture of Simpson had noticeably darker skin than the same mug shot picture featured on Newsweek. Adam Clayton Powell III wrote, “The editors argued that it was not unethical, because Time covers are art, not news, a possible surprise to unsuspecting readers who thought they were looking at photographic reality.” (Adam Clayton III Powell, “Technology and the Death of Ethics (and the Possible Rise of the New Ethics),” Media Ethics 8 (1996): 1.)
Walid Raad and the Atlas Group use images to play with the real vs. fake boundaries of history. He creates an archive of past events. I propose an archive of the future so that the unknown may be known. We might as well be ready for the catastrophic and accept it; if it doesn't happen, then great, but if it does happen, then society will be in a mindset, in which this has been seen and thought-through with a cool-mind and policies will not be taken in the moment, with irrational thought.
This will hopefully open up conversations about these possibilities. The Onion Newspaper is a pioneer in fake news, using satire to comment on real events. These fake stories have been taken seriously several times, further confusing people about fake vs real news, and what can they do to distinguish between the two. The Yes Men have an incredible track record of making an audience believe their fabricated stories. Their latest piece was on September 21, 2009, one day before a UN summit lead-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009, where over 2000 "special editions" of the New York Post were distributed throughout New York City, with headlines that the city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades.
Another piece from the exhibition is a series of photographic works, Seeing the Elephant, by Robert Longo. It is based upon documentary photographs of re-enactments of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Since the 1960s, this American war, which caused the greatest number of casualties and took place on home ground, is one of the most popular militaria remakes in the USA. Longo’s photographs of the anniversary battles are not merely documentary pictures, he creates a historical paradox in them: because of their graininess, colour, and aesthetic, they actually look like contemporary photographs from the era they depict, but at the same time Longo uses the cinemascope format and framing that is very similar to film stills. With this artistic method, Longo visualises one of the most famous sentences from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle: “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. The aim of Longo’s works is a critical appraisal of America’s world of symbolism as the mirror-image of war rhetoric and nationalist emotionalism (from catalogue of exhibition). 
http://www.hmkv.de/dyn/e_archive_artist/detail.php?nr=2307&rubric=artists&
For this endeavor of mine to work, the project requires random news that is uncontrolled by human thought. I have developed software that mashes up different photos of real catastrophes, news headlines and adjusts them to reflect the future. I will set up several databases for each of these components, and then ask the software to mix and match, creating fake news of the future.
The software grabs a photo of a city and blends it with a photo from one of the categories: wars, natural disasters, and accidents. It then accesses random headlines and matches it to the city. It also attaches a random date from the future. Some design problems:
I would like to compare the photo-montages generated by the software to photo-montages that describe what political analysts forcast as the future. It would be interesting to find out how close or how far randomness plays out in the unknown of the future.
Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.
Edward Steichen, “Ye Fakers”
applet and refresh the page for newly generated photo-montages.note: The war category is the only one completely working now, Natural Disasters and accidents don't have correct headlines.
Attali, Jacques. A brief history of the future : a brave and controversial look at the twenty-first century. Trans. Jeremy Leggatt. New York : Arcade Pub., 2009. Print.
Benjamin, Andrew. Walter Benjamin and history. New York : Continuum, 2005. Print.
Fritsch, Matthias. The promise of memory : history and politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida. Albany : State University of New York Press, 2005. Print.
Hutton, Patrick H. History as an art of memory. UPNE, 1993. Print.
Lowy, Michael. Fire alarm : reading Walter Benjamin's On the concept of history. Trans. Chris Turner. New York : Verso, 2005. Print.
Mali, Joseph. Mythistory : the making of a modern historiography. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Print.
Samuel, Lawrence R. Future : a recent history. Austin : University of Texas Press, 2009. Print.
Staley, David J. History and future : using historical thinking to imagine the future. Lanham, MD : Lexington Books, 2007. Print.
History Will Repeat Itself. Strategies of re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance HMKV AT PHOENIX HALLE DORTMUND: JUNE 9 - SEPTEMBER 23, 2007. <http://www.hmkv.de/dyn/e_program_exhibitions/detail.php?nr=2104&rubric=exhibitions>
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