Cabbages, Raspberries and Videos Thin Brightness.       I shall say here that the video image is one of intensification - it makes the world more than it is, more colourful, more defined - which at the same time robs things of their substance. A painting could, in Heidegger's terms, treat either as an essay in substance and essence, or the recognition of the one as a return to the other. It would be in the substantiality of painting that the essence of the object would be reconvened as manipulated substance. This would not be true, it seems to me, of the video image. The screen is hard, the image ephemeral, substance subsumed into transmission. It is in substituting transmission for substance - as opposed to painting's use of one substance to interpret another - that video announces, or institutes, its identity as an other, as belonging to a world of meaning (communicated intent) whose terms derive from, and lead, elsewhere than painting's can, and Heidegger thought they should. What it offers painting is another surface to which to refer, in this case, one which is brighter than any that preceded it, unimaginably thin - describable only as an exterior when viewed as an object, a surface without depth- and continuous by definition. Everything that painting is not: an uninterrupted surface born of pure reason. What (provided one is not Heidegger) could be more seductive. This is the sense in which I want to think of the history of technology as the history of surfaces and colours. If technology's history is one of the extension of human capacities towards the posthuman-conquering physical space, not to mention the people who have the (mis)fortune to live in it, that sort of thing, with the retrospectively implicit goal of achieving a condition in which people are in theory if not practice ultimately to become redundant-Lyotard's brain in a time capsule, surviving the end of the universe; Baudrillard's capitalist machine run by little white mice once it has found a solution to the need for human consumers-then it is in that constantly inventing artificial bodies, originally produced as simulations of those that already exist. The surface and colour to which video appeals, in which it lives, is plastic. Barthes compared plastic, the culminatory techno-surface, to skin in that both are continuous, which is to say that objects made out of that material simulate the condition of the body in its original, pre-technological, condition. There had been a plastic surface before, the surface of painting, but that had been a plasticity made out of openings, interruption, and conjuncture. A plasticity of morsellation, made out of adding up and layering and even reconsidering. Plastic's most obvious point of comparison to painting is its status as the first continuous surface which, in not being an accumulation or combination - not built or woven or otherwise assembled - is a thing, rather than an image, with the properties of the photograph. One adds to that the evenness and clarity of plastic, properties generally found desirable in flesh, and it may be possible to say that it is in plastic that one first sees the emergence of the brightness associated above with video.   “Painting in The Age of Artificial Intelligence” essay by Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe