Parvine Curie (*1936) - Babel, 1990

[T]he increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities. Because advertisements link identity with the need to purchase products, the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with late capitalism. […]

Put differently, capitalism needs schizophrenia, but it also needs egos. The contradiction is resolved through the acceleration of the temporal rhythm of late capitalist visual culture. This type of acceleration encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily…The “Ideal-I"s that the capitalist media offer are perhaps even less complex than the infantile imago of the child’s own reflection. Needless to say, such an ego wears out fast, inspiring the consumer to shop around for another one.

— Jonah Peretti, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution

The Tesla World Light (2017) dir. Matthew Rankin

Rocco and His Brothers, 1960 (dir. Luchino Visconti)

Gotthard Graubner, Unnoscriptd, 1964, Oil, diluted, on cardboard 41.5 x 32 cm

Berenice Abbott. Think Magazine, February 1962

We are, in our Promethean excesses, the only culture to have invented the perspective of ideal growth, of total performance, up to the supreme stage of reality. But we can no longer measure ourselves against this vertiginous dimension. Modernity (the West) can no longer respond to its own values of unlimited progress and growth. Programming has transformed progress, which was an idea, a great historical idea, into a technolog­ical operation of the world in real time. And infinity, once an ideal abstraction, is materialized as well in infinite growth, the immediate vertigo of profusion. And we are now prisoners of this irreversible dimension – unable to reinvent a finite universe.

— Jean Baudrillard, Where Good Grows