Oliver Laric deals with issues of image reproduction and re-interpretation by capturing images floating adrift on the web. In 2008, a press agency of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards distributed all over the world a photograph of four missiles firing and exploding. With just a glimpse of the photograph, anyone could doubt its originality; it looked like a copied image of a ventilating flame or a cloud of dust. It soon did turn out to be a manipulated image and the press immediately removed it from the web. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards again released another photograph that looked as if it were taken in the same place, at the same time, but without the third missile. The second photograph proved to be original; however, this only confirmed that they attempted to hide the partial failure of their missile launching. Later on, netizens of the world parodied and ridiculed this farce by posting images of missiles flying in circles or plummeting to the ground, and one with 40 missiles. In Versions (Missile Variations), Oliver Laric re-presents ten photo works made using press photographs and other parody images, which elicits a self-replicating situation where replicas continue to bring about other replicas.
