In Barry Levinson’s film Wag the Dog (1997), a sex affaire by the American president just before being re-elected is made invisible by a fictitious war staged on television. Because television shows reality, this war, which only exists on television monitors, becomes real. The film also shows how the images of the apparently reality of a pictured war were made in the television studio through the composition of different scenic, image and sound elements. In the end, there are no more pictures, but only the view on a (supposed) reality transmitted by television. This process, for which the term ›alternative realities‹ is being used, is based on the indestructible belief that (photographic, even digital) images directly represent reality. The tricks of traditional cinema to let alternative realities emerge in the camera have been expanded in the image-addicted digital age to the everyday practice of the so-called ›social media‹ with images. On any smartphone, the current camera image can be ›expanded‹ by images from the Internet to compose a new, seemingly immediately experi-enced reality (›augmented reality‹). Or images of the media (for example TV series) are staged in reality for their depiction in smartphones, where they are realized as true experiences. The warning of the images is the one of a pictured reality, which is actually only the reality of its images.

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