| It is well-known that the brilliant but troubled "father" of French psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, owned the scandalous painting by Courbet, L’origine du monde. The fact that he kept the painting at his country home, hidden behind another, led to the 1998 website, “X vues sur l’origine”. Comissioned for an artistic exhibition, no art afficionados have officially seen the site. Indexed on popular search engines using misogynistic explitives, each page hit onto the site regenerated the image using Lacan “functions” of the psyche. Using the “objet a” algorithm, each view took a single pixel out of the image; “Aphanasis” faded it; and the “-phi” (castration) grew or shrunk the image into oblivion. |
