Die Manschettenknöpfe
In August 2012, Heinz-Christian Strache, head of Austria’s FPÖ party, published a manipulated caricature on his Facebook page. A fat, sweaty, bald “banker”, sitting down at a table with the poor “people” while being generously served by the “administration”. In the manipulation, the banker?wie suddenly? grew a hooked nose and bigger cuff links. The caricature, published (meinst du uploaded?) via Strache’s mobile phone, has been widely criticized for being anti-Semitic; the Austrian Constitutional Court was caught to action. When the caricature was published in August 2012, while causing a heated debate, Mijalkovic made his way to find the truth behind the story, looking for details.
Eight months of work were necessary, using laborious decoding-software and hardware machinery, such as robots and 3D-plotter. Thus, Mijalkovic’s team was able to re-shape the manipulated, dirty caricature and reconstruct the pixelated details vital to the whole debate. Finally, they came back to life! The manipulated cuff links from the caricature have been enlarged 200 times and materialised. Yes, not enough: Thanks to modern technology, they will be growing further constantly.
2012
Copyright: Milan Mijalkovic, 2020