ABSTRACT
Audience was destabilized by the mediations of montage-entourage. This can be seen in the inability to determine whether these images constitute critical projects or fantasy spectacles. As all images of reality experienced through our digitally mediated interfaces are a species of assembled montage, and given the possibilities for concealing the artifice of these assemblages, the relationship between the aesthetics and the politics of montage is as charged as it has ever been. There are a handful of artists that have been exploring digital image montage as speculations through the aesthetics of realism. For architectural images, the seams that receive the greatest attention often concern the entourage, in other words, the seams between architecture and everything considered not-architecture. In Groys' terms, this can be understood as a cultural-economic exchange that shifts value from the ornamental articulation of a building into the social scenarios performed within the fiction of the image.
