At the end of the 1970s, we watched ‘Micro Macro’ on Belgian television every day. In this game show, a number of candidates were shown an extreme close-up of an object. While the image zoomed out very slowly, they had to guess which item it was. Whoever recognized it first won the corresponding object. Usually, it was a trivial thing like an ashtray, a padlock, a bucket or a mixer.

The program was mostly watched in black and white because color televisions were few and far between. This made the close-ups even more abstract and mysterious. The prolonged viewing of an object by the candidates and the TV viewers, with the tension increased by the excruciatingly slow zooming out of the image, made the game very popular, but at the same time gave it an enormous sadness. Winning a worthless bucket, lighter or candlestick gave a feeling of joy and euphoria for a very short moment. This was soon followed by an indefinable feeling of sadness and depression because the prize had no value whatsoever. However, its presence on prime-time television gave the won object a soul. It became an animistic fetish and took on a life of its own.