And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine

In the beginning was the ‘camera obscura’: this simple device contained a hole that let light through, thus creating an image projected onto a surface, through a process that was easily reproduced at home... Then in 1828, Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in printing this image onto a plate and in doing so, invented photography. Since then, the world has been animated by a frantic quest to create images, and currently numbers 45 billion cameras. Axel Danielson & Maximilien Van Aertryck take us on a fast-paced journey through this revolution, offering an amusing, concise and intelligent history spanning the creation of the first images to today’s production of content: from the first photograph to images of the Earth from the Moon, from propaganda images to beauty-filter selfies, from game shows to cat videos, humanity seems to have recorded everything by constantly developing technologies that modify our experience of reality. And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine is a dizzying dive into the heart of humanity and its world of images, from a critical and existentialist point of view. So, is this machine still fantastic?

Aurélien Marsais