Kim Jong Il x 3

Simulating Kim Jong Il

Kim Jong Il x 3

Will the real Kim Jong Il please stand up?

There is a reality inside North Korea, and there is another outside. Which is the most stable?

For the past half decade an excess of images, simulations and caricatures of the North Korean leader have bombarded us. The idea of Kim Jong Il has become commodity. Our media of excess has repeated the mantra of simulation in bold headlines, in news-print and digital text : “Is Kim Jong Il really dead?”

Would we wish it so?

But our mistrust of the image keeps us deluded. Without a modern mythos through which to (un)interpret the iconographics of mass-media we allow excess to determine our narratives. Out trickle accusations of copies, clones, misidentities. Did Clinton meet a doppleganger?

The authority of the image is broken.

The digital transfiguration of the photograph has long since shifted the locus of the human body from ‘real’, fleshy space onto the shallow glare of the billboard, centre-spread and computer screen. The pixel becoming the absolute limit at which reality breaks down.

How will the next image of Kim Jong Il appear to us? And how will we overcome our mistrust? Where does the pixel end and reality begin?

  • I recently discovered that Kim Jong Il and I have the same dreams just about every night of the week. I would never had known had I not dialed that long distance wrong number, and he picked up, and we got to talking about these very same things.
    He says there is a seamless gap – i.e., no discernable gap at all…just a logical one – between the pixel and reality.

  • I recently discovered that Kim Jong Il and I have the same dreams just about every night of the week. I would never had known had I not dialed that long distance wrong number, and he picked up, and we got to talking about these very same things.
    He says there is a seamless gap – i.e., no discernable gap at all…just a logical one – between the pixel and reality.