Inside the mountain, there are cows, pigs, jaguar, ocelot, peccary, falcons, parrots, chickens, frogs, mythical multicolored anacondas and an entire nation of spirit people, all of whom live in a massive golden palace. In the Amazon, the realm of images belongs to the ayahuasquero, or shaman, who taps into the mountain to see these amazing sights.
In the electronic jungle, everyone has access to stunning images – you just need to know where to access them.
A visit to personal development guru Steve Pavlina’s website promises a smiling image of Pavlina to greet the visitor. Pavlina is clean-cut, well-dressed, and smiling brightly – his image convinces me he is worth reading as much as his reputation. But I would not look to Pavlina for, say, more metaphysical concerns. I am one to dissolve the ego, and I look for role models, like the Talking Heads’ David Byrne. His “journal” also features an image of its author, but Byrne faces away from his internet audience, instead choosing to engage his journal with a thoughtful gaze. While Pavlina focuses on developing the individual, Byrne is focused on de-centering him: his posts flit from topics as diverse as his personal travels, art, music, culture, as well as a personal narrative of his day. Of course Byrne’s content is more conducive to images, but compared to many blogs, he is rather sparse, relying on his diary-style entries and subjective commentary to convey his experience more thoroughly.
Take these two examples in contrast to, say, Space Collective. Space Collective is “a cross-media information and entertainment channel for post-ideological, non-partisan, forward thinking terrestrials.” Basically, it consists of amazing series of sci-fi images farmed from the artistic, scientific, architectural, and literary realms, complete with user-submitted stories. Just who or what is at the center here? There are no human faces at first glance on the main page; only at the bottom do we encounter a face. The images that made this site popular share the space with the faces who happened to collect and post them. Not close, but perhaps this could function as our own (chemical-free) “inside of the mountain”.
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