The ideas that inspired Darwin and Daguerre had been simmering in the cultural soup for at least a century waiting to be formulated. Just as Darwin's materialist theory of evolution by natural selection undermined metaphysics, photography and other recording technologies demolished the mystique of representation. Media culture is what those images are that flicker past our eyes on the TV screen.
Media culture is always present, always now.
It is as though the TV screen was a kind of reading glass passing over an infinite field of events completely devoid of narrative sequence or time. Since Edison marketed his recording machine we have been haunted by the voices of the dead. But Seurat's superb art was itself never more than a representation of fragmentation and dematerialization. Using Duchamp's principle, the soup-can logos became, in Andy's studio, both their corporate selves and a Warhol artwork in a flickering confusion of identity. Most of the money from the sale of the paintings and other products of Warhol and his factory went to support what I call the Warhol Project.