Giampaolo Proni

Peirce, piercing e bamboo leaves

Photography is reproduction of reality. This was the common belief when photography was invented and for many years since then. Still now, we look at the pictures on magazines and newspapers and we believe they report what was happening before the camera.
Yet, today it is possible to produce digital images that look like photographs but are completely invented. Let's look at these pictures:

They show Kyoko, also known as DK-96, the first virtual idol singer ("aidoru kashu")  who was created in Japan in 1996 by Hori Productions Inc.
In the next years it will be possible to see virtual characters, like Kyoko, appear on television  side by side with human actors, and it will be difficult to tell which one is 'real' and which is 'virtual'.

Thus, I take for granted that there are no internal differences that may allow us to distinguish a 'photograph' (that is, an image taken from real world) from a synthetic image.

For example, the next image might be "true", or retouched, or synthetic. How can we know?
 
 
 

These considerations put an end to the old "problem of realism". For many years in several fields, but particularly in cinema and visual arts, there was a great controversy on the question whether some process of text-production was capable of reproducing reality. Of course, cinema and photography were the natural candidates for this position. In the sixties Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian writer and film director, stated that cinema reproduced 'real objects'.
Today it is clear that no kind of text-production process is able to ensure in itself a 'true relation' to reality.
Thus, it is not enough to see a picture which looks 'realistic' to be sure that it corresponds to a real event.
How, then do we react to some images as they were true, and with regard to others we do not  pose the question?

To prove what I am saying, please look at the images in the next page: