If you couldn’t tell by now, a big part of this newsletter is about wrestling with identity through our technological progress. Individual interaction with objects, the reflection of ourselves, our interactions with others mediated through different mediums…
It is evolution in real time
This tweet from a few days ago, reminded me of one of my favorite movies. The One I Love.
Without any spoilers, The One I Love is about a couple going through a rough patch and seeking therapy. Their therapist sends them to a weekend getaway, where they discover themselves. And through these interactions, we watch more and more dynamics of their relationship come to light.
That’s the weird thing. I’m with you. It’s you. But it’s like a memory of you. Does that make sense?
— Sophie
That’s a rough quote, from my memory, of something Sophie says when talking to her husband.
This is the primary interaction space we deal in. Non-linear memory space, where our past thoughts reach present friends that have the ability to reach backwards and pull the surroundings of that space back into focus of our future.
During this entanglement we all have experienced new life and thought that can extend the original meaning of what we left on the timeline, reassess the context we were streaming through our inputs, or maybe simply snapping us back to that same frame we were in before. Persistent nostalgia… constant ghosts of ourselves swirling about, ready to be pinged. (Now I’m thinking about Ghost Story, another great film)
The One I Love really wrestles with the effect of a dissociative view of one’s self, and the idealized view that someone else has of you. What happens when these collide in real time. Which becomes more attractive, what becomes more real?
How true this is anywhere we posit pieces of ourselves to be consumed on another’s “my time”.
We participate in both constructing ourselves + consuming our peers during my time, revealing that we constantly crowd out solitary time. We swirl in metamorphosis.
Ad when we get to our time, we find so much of it being regurgitation…
There’s probably a whole piece to be written about what happens to togetherness when we constantly are consuming each other while separated… so I’ll leave that for another time.
I want to get back to the original thought this disassociate nature of onlineness.
I’ve been obsessed with our cameras lately. Rear, selfie, in-game, screen-shots, Spectacles, the people that still carry a DSLR…
At the core, camera’s are an embodied extension of our eyes. Tying to our mind that which exists. We point these devices to capture and prove at a later point, this was here and I (the operator) captured this subject.
By the nature of the photograph, and the initiating act by the operator… we carry now with us an object. The act of the operator is to turn subject into object. But with the proliferation of social photography what is constantly being turned to object is the self.
There was a time where we would go to parties with our small digital cameras. Where this act was cherished and silo’d. The pose was not always around the corner.
There was a time where Instagram photos were about what we, the operators, were experiencing. And shifted towards placing ourselves in front of the very experience. The pose was something we inflicted on ourselves.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the screen-shot. And if psychologically, our awareness of this camera lingering around all of our actions mediated by our phones… keep us constantly posing…
What I’ve been enjoying with my Spectacles is the realignment between not becoming subject myself, nor immediately watching the transition into object. Instead I am aware of my role as operator while not destroying the scene, forcing my subjects to pose. Their relaxed nature while being aware of the lens is… new. Perhaps this is the new space to explore.
Today was our first Labs day at Eternal. My project was creating a site around some of Spectacles footage. Check it out https://reggieeyes.com/
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
Much love.