RE:Mediated Experiences

I like the Guangdong Museum of Art but I don’t like the people who generally go there.

This past Sunday when I was there to see a contemporary Japanese art exhibit, flashes were going off everywhere, people were walking right up past barriers to take shots, or posing in front of work. One guy, pictured above, even stood and recorded an entire ten minute video.

It’s part of my general dislike of the pathological need people have to photograph and record every mundane aspect of their lives, every place they go, every poster they see they could stand in front of. I am honestly baffled by people who take hundred if not thousands of snapshots of anything and everything, usually with someone in the photo, rendering everything else mere background. I wonder if they ever look at these photos again. I wonder about their computers, cluttered to the rafters with digital bric-a-brac, a million self-portraits and pictures of insignificant events piled in to remind them of events they never really saw for the first time.

Visual art is about seeing and experiencing, but this doesn’t prevent people from only perceiving the art through the subtly shifting screens of their digital cameras. There is no now in the mediated experience; there is only a manufactured and pixellated then stripped of relevance. We have forgotten the art of memory and the wondrous dissolution of events into shadowy fringes, mixed with emotions.

Worse are the people who pose in front of the art stating that they are more important, turning something into background filler, visual muzak. I wonder if they do this with David or the Mona Lisa, as if getting their picture with something somehow makes the experience real, as if their memory of the event is not enough. But the focus on those pictures is the person, not the art which becomes a prop.

I love photography for its mendacity, despite the fact that some of my favourite stuff is documentary like that of James Nachtwey (see War Photographer if you can, it’s amazing). I love it because it lies, because it pretends towards an objective reality. That’s where a lot of its power lies. It may be clearer in these days of Photoshop, but that kind of manipulation has always existed. I like it just as I like the strange games that documentary films play, or reality TV (which I generally don’t watch except for Project Runway. Reality TV is less real than fictional TV because it’s dishonest).

I wonder what they do with all the photos of past lovers and friends. Do they reprogram phones, call lists, screen savers and erase all the traces as if all that the relationship was was contained in the blips and bleeps?

So what of memory and experience? I share it here at times, other times I definitely try to record some kind of impression of it, but I trust my memory over the ephemera though I know it will fade. It’s meant to. It gets entwined with everything else that produces us. What you get, if you are lucky, is In Search of Lost Time. If you are unlucky, you just have terrabytes of birthday parties, karaoke nights, walks through airports, and endless repetitions of days.