ABSTRACT
Helmut Herbst, a German professor and filmmaker, developed a theory about what he called the decomposition of images that began with Robertson's Phantasmagoriae, his ghostly magic lantern projections in the nineteenth century, and reached its final stage with the internet. To put such images into a general store with drawers or transform it into a box office at the entrance of a cinema is like nailing a pudding to the wall. The technology of the age of virtualization mediates a little of that feeling of omnipotence that Stanley Kubrick described showing a star child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the cyber age, the magic word to open sesame is no more analogue, no more cinema or TV, but crossmedia, Internet Protocol Television, mobile phones, iPads, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line TV, and so on. Everything and everybody is subject to a global network.
