The Gothic Sentiment within Industrial Archaeology
by Jose Manuel Rojo

“If it can be imagined, then it can be made.” This sentence, exultant and brilliant like an oracle or watchword, does not really celebrate the triumph of the imagination, but instead its overwhelming defeat: it is the slogan of a well-known TV commercial that confuses the imagined desire with an object of consumption. Another recent advertisement insisted on asking what is the limit of our desire (“Can’t you imagine something better?”) to find it incarnated in the form of... an automobile. What surprises us here is not so much the manipulation of the imagination and of desire, but the reaffirmation of the promises of advertising and the world of the consumer as the only imaginary things possible. No longer can anyone doubt that the television screen shows us only the socially-acceptable formulations of all desires...http://tinyurl.com/b5mmj
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