I can't account for this post entirely

Because we have faith in photographs as verification of reality, our understanding and appreciation of other events changes to the point that we require more photographs. Pictures, and stability through a lens on paper (or screen) provides irrefutable evidence for many people of an event’s reality. Photos become the means and currency of verifying events between people. Truth acquires a sense of stability and referentiality – we can come back to the picture, it won’t change, it still tells the same story we wish it to, over and over again. Reality becomes transfixed by its own gaze. At the same time, the lives led outside the camera move, strangely, much quicker than photographs themselves. We don’t believe in the reality of an event until our understanding of that event operates in the same terms as the photograph – stable, unchanging, perhaps rewind-able and manipulate-able. Generally, people wish to believe their lives happened, and so the cycle restarts with the desire to verify with photographs. Pictures take the place of memory, not in the sense that we don’t remember, but rather organic memory is insufficient to verify anything about experience. And so, we become ever more record-prone – transference prone.

Perhaps this is because we relate to the world with a series of medals and achievements that construct us as beings. An image culture sets up a situation in which we see ourselves as being seen by others. We share ourselves in brief tangential relationships in which people move in different direction quickly. The currency of relationships lies in being able to paint yourself with ever more grandiose terms. The lack of any specific cultural background, or perhaps shared backgrounds of placelessness between people, creates a situation where identity comes from communication of shared events between people. Conversations between people proceed with questions of doing: coming back from spring break, people have consistently asked me what I did over the week, the assumption being I should judge my life in terms of the nature of the events it includes. We have to be entertained by our lives. The events people ask about are provocations and moments of excitement: we look for some heightened state of emotional intensity for its own sake, because it validates the time we spend and makes sure we know we are doing something; just like news organizations look for blood because blood makes an event creating news. People as agents create meaning on an otherwise blank world (a blank that in reality contains the things that just don’t happen to change between units of time: eating, sleeping). Event-ness requires an exception to something foregrounded as un-doing. Maybe we should reconfigure the whole thing. Living breathing sleeping shitting is something DONE on the world because they verify and constitute your existence in the world – they are space occupying events, they make up you. Loving killing jumping traveling photographing are now considered LIVING (that is to say inevitable, indistinguishable events) because they have no intrinsic content except to occupy what we see as empty space in our lives and form the preconditions for understanding ourselves.

Duncan