The scene can only be described as shambolic. All around, what used to be temples have been systematically harvested for their raw materials, reliefs of the king systematically defaced. His name, once immortalized in stone, has been chiseled away. Damnatio memoriae – damnation of memory – someone wanted him removed from our collective memory. Yet peek beneath the destruction, figures with curvaceous lines set in intimate family portraits persist, enticing us to imagine how the full image might have once looked under its creators’ vision.
The city is the defunct Amarna in Egypt; the king was Pharaoh Akhenaten. His brief seventeen-year reign was one of utter tumult in ancient Egypt, owing to his attempt to remake the polytheistic religious establishment in his monotheistic vision. In artifact, it is a vision that immortalized Akhenaten and his family with soft, voluptuous lines, distinct from the hard geometric shapes customary of the rest of ancient Egypt.
In these ancient temples, statues of pharaohs and gods were not art objects; they were believed to house the divine. Priests washed them, clothed them, and offered them food in an effort to sustain eternal presence, beyond momentary divine representation. These were potent images, and those vying for power understood that. Akhenaten’s monotheistic assault on the establishment sought to reform society through reengineered image systems, because he understood that those who controlled images controlled culture; those who controlled culture controlled social change. When the Amarna experiment ended, his images were smashed, and his name was erased from monuments – a casualty of the politics of ancient spirituality.
Across history, humans have invented images and deployed them as tools to orient identity, authority, and belief. In the Christian Middle Ages, religious icons were not merely admired for aesthetic values – they were venerated. The Iconoclast Controversy in 8th–9th century Byzantium – during which religious icons were banned, then restored, then banned, then restored – was not a debate about aesthetic choices; it was a conflict over whether images mediate divine presence or distract from it. Does the existence of divine imagery enlighten the faithful to connect with the untouchable, or do the physical objects of representation negate the connection to the divine? Islamic aniconism prohibits religious imagery because it reflects a different calculus about where power resides: in text, in recitation, in unseen transcendence, rather than in visible, viewable icons.
Today, our world is utterly inundated with images, yet its ubiquity has not changed the basic human drive to externalize meaning and materialize significance through image-making. Rather, what is new are the scale, speed, and infrastructure of image manufacturing and circulation. We live in the age of screens everywhere – on wrists, walls, storefronts, in pockets, elevators, restrooms – where images function as magnets for attention, and attention, in turn, becomes the scarce resource. To understand that landscape, and to think about art’s role within it as an endeavor concerned with the manifestation of visual media, we need a framework that sees images not as mere pictures but as technological agents in human life.
Image, as a word, is far-reaching – it could mean a visual artifact, a representation, a symbol, an appearance, natural or artificial. Image here is used specifically and deliberately, the interpretation of which will gain clarity as the sections unfold. The essence, though, is that It does not merely refer to visual representations, but to manufactured symbolic artifacts that are deployed to externalize and sustain shared meaning. Paintings and photographs are images, but so too are flags, icons, monuments, logos, personas, products, and other visual forms through which communities organize belief, identity, and memory.
Meaning, in this sense, is not semantic meaning, as in the concepts denoted by words or objects; rather, it is lived meaning, as in the significance, value, and orientation that people invest in artifacts, places, ideas, or even other people.
This is the terrain that Muse Mfg. explores: not simply what images are, but what they are for, and how they are formed. It argues that images are among humanity’s oldest technologies for making internal realities and significance visible, durable, and collectively inhabitable. To see how this technology has changed over time – from sacred idols to celebrity culture, from ritual objects to spectacle – we must first follow the long journey of image-making itself.