a condition of being outside of oneself
of not fully coinciding with oneself
or being reducible to one’s current properties.
"Images are mediations between man and world. Man "ek-sists," which means that he has no immediate access to the world. Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man. But, even as they do so, they interpose themselves between man and the world. They are meant to be maps, and they become screens. Instead of presenting the world to man, they re-present it, putting themselves in place of the world to the extent that man lives as a function of the images he has produced. He no longer deciphers them, but projects them back into the world "out there" without having deciphered them. The world becomes image-like, a context of scenes and situations. This reversal of the function of images may be called "idolatry," and we can currently see how this comes about: omnipresent technical images have begun magically to restructure "reality" into an image-like scenario. What is involved here is a kind of oblivion. Man forgets that he produces images in order to find his way in the world; he now tries to find his way in images. He no longer deciphers his own images, but lives in their function. Imagination has become hallucination."
Vilem Flusser / Towards a Philosophy of Photography / 1984
"In order to give a more accurate portrayal of the phenomenal structure of the world as it shows itself in everyday dealings, it must be noted that what matters in these dealings with the world is not so much anyone's own particular world but that right in our natural dealings with the world we are moving in a common environmental whole."
Martin Heidegger / History of the Concept of Time / 1925
All images of this project are rendered through Google Street View and are publicly accessible.
This non-commercial online project documents a journey through Google Street View. Ek-sistance refers to a constant association between one and one's world to understand the status of being-in-the-world.
In memory of Mohammad Moradi