Clarification Note: All images in the post were crafted by Midjourney AI that followed my prompts.
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[ Russian version ]
During the COVID pandemic, I found myself confined to my home studio. Determined to make the most of the situation, I embarked on a creative endeavor that resulted in a series of photographs featuring Venice carnival Jester masks. The traditional Jester mask (the Joker mask depicts a male character, the Jolly - being the female equivalent) portrays a court Jester of the Middle Ages wearing a hat known as the fool's hat. It has three points or "punte" with the bells on the end that represent the tail and ears of a donkey. Another type of the Jester mask has multiple points spread evenly all around its face. As I delved deeper into the history of these masks, I stumbled upon images of the Etruscan artifacts, which looked in some way reminiscent of the Venetian Jester masks.
Etruscan goddess Uni, clay antefix, from the city of Satricum, in Latium, dating to the V century B.C., now in the Altes Museum (Staatliche Museen), Berlin, Germany.
This similarity led me to hypothesize that the history of Joker masks extends beyond the medieval period and possibly indicates a connection to ancient cargo cults. These cults emerged when members of primitive communities encountered representatives of more technologically advanced civilizations and imitated their practices, rituals, and symbols in the hope of achieving the same level of development. To verify this hypothesis, I conducted an online search for images of artifacts from ancient civilizations resembling Joker masks. My goal was to discover similarities between these masks and their potential ancient prototypes in order to uncover the evolution and sources of the captured images within the masks, whose meaning and significance have likely been long forgotten. I embarked on this search with a sober understanding that attempting to trace the evolution of these ancient images would likely be unsuccessful.
To my astonishment, I came across enough artifacts suggesting that Joker masks could be remnants of a series of cargo cults originating from mysterious ancient times. The first part of the blog post was published in February 2022.
Inspired by these findings, I eagerly began writing the second part of the post. I prepared a series of artifact images illustrating the evolution of mask prototypes and started working on the layout in February. However, a tragic global event occurred - on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. This brought the world to the brink of catastrophe and dampened my enthusiasm to complete the second part of the post.
Now, after nearly 500 days, I feel ready to return to this project. During the forced hiatus, there has been a revolutionary leap in image processing technologies - the emergence of accessible artificial intelligence systems that have opened up new possibilities for preparing illustrations for the post. Therefore, I have decided to rework the material of the post and include images generated using the AI generative program Midjourney.
I will publish the second part of this blog post as soon as it is complete. In the meantime, I believe the image I have created holds independent value within the context of my new ‘mjb and mj’ series. Here is a sneak peek of one of the images generated by AI, offering a glimpse into the upcoming second part of my blog post:
Superior Being
Stay tuned as we embark on a captivating exploration of the ancient origins of Jester masks, uncovering a tapestry of history, culture, and artistic expression spanning millennia.
