Two memento mori

Both seen on twitter; sources unknown.

When Matthias Huss published the earliest known depiction of a print shop in 1499 in Lyons, the print crew were shown transfixed and arrested at their various tasks by the sudden incursion of a group of motley skeletons who obviously wish to drag them off in an inky danse macabre. Thus, at die very outset, this self-reflexive act of envisioning of print production is haunted by the nightmare of its own destruction, whethier through plague and mortality, clerical prosecution or mordant wit. In its early years, printing was mistrusted, a ‘dark art’, and it was clearly important that the traditional danse macabre be seen, however ironically, as the emblem of a supernatural agency capable of breaching the apparently stable borders, the superior speed and durability, of this new visual medium. In our own time, similar threats embodied in new technologies can be seen registered in the films Rinqu (1998) and White Noise (2005).

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