| << Bottoms Up! (or, from micro to macro) | 2002 > September | Ali Akbar Khan @ Villa Montalvo >> |
The malfunctioning camera ::
Saturday morning I had a strange dream. I was taking a series of pictures with my digital camera. After each shot I would look at it on the little LCD screen, and they were each screwed up in the same way. It was as if the shutter had opened several times instead of once, and also stayed open too long each time.
I didn’t remember the dream until that afternoon. First I thought about how the dream was illustrating how strange photography is, that it appears to create a static moment, frozen in time, when actually everything is always moving—like looking at just one frame of a movie. But even a movie is a distortion; it gives the illusion of continuous motion, taking advantage of the fact that our brains process images sufficiently slowly (~50 ms, 1/20th of a second).
This got me thinking about Memento yet again, and how the main character uses photographs to compensate for his inability to form new memories. Is a photograph (even leaving aside the possibility of digital manipulation) a true picture of that moment?
I thought about photographs of my life—many help me recall details of the time and place that aren’t captured in the photograph, but there are some events I can’t seem to remember from any other point of view than the camera’s, so apparently I am remembering having looked at the photograph afterwards more than what I was doing when it was taken.
It seems that memory is like the camera, zeroing in on one perspective, one arbitrary slicing of time and space, depending on how I’m choosing to recall the event. There’s a danger of thinking that because I was there and have a mental “photograph,” that it is an objective representation. But how well was the camera functioning? Was it like the one in the dream?
| << Bottoms Up! (or, from micro to macro) | 2002 > September | Ali Akbar Khan @ Villa Montalvo >> |