As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us.
- Bataille, L’Art, exercise de la cruauté

The image above was created by Martin Klimas, who describes the process in the following way:
The shooting environment must be controlled and kept consistent. The lighting is clear and direct, head on. My background is neutral, but bright enough so that the shattering object completely stands out. I drop the figurine from the same height in complete darkness while the lens of the camera is open. When the figurine hits the ground, the sound triggers the lights to go off for a fraction of a second. I do this procedure many times or until I find the one frame that is just right. I keep just one such picture for every figurine.
- Interview with Rosecrans Baldwin, The Morning News.
So here we are again; at the double-paralysis, the uncanny encounter with technology.
¶ One
Klimas, self-decribed as “in [one] sense a sculptor, but [with] only a 5000th of a second to build my sculpture,” is in fact the curator of the camera’s monuments.

One could not capture these images; the precision required is too great. One needs an array of prostheses: audio-sensors, custom camera circuitry and photodiodes, an onboard computer … At this rate of speed, our hands are dumb, paralyzed.
The photograph is too fast for us: It is the time equivalent of the incessant scientific photographs of DNA or the Milky Way.
¶ Two
One initially inclines to read these photographs as monuments to the destruction of porcelain, cassette tapes, cellular phones, flowers. As one looks, however, this inclination itself self-destructs - the images memorialize something that we all know we must have missed.
Now (but from a “now” that is clearly too precise) the uncanny surfaces: More and more, one cannot help but see instead monuments rendered to the unfazed, precise and complicated computer-controlled camera that captures moment after moment of the fall.
Everything is wrong, one realizes. These images are perverse, fetishistic…
But the trap is not reducible to the bait. It supposes not only the hand that places it but the end pursued. What happens to someone who takes the bait? What are, for the individual who gives into fascination, the consequences of his weakness?
- Bataille, Ibid.