I don't recall having asked for it, but Google now sends me an e-mail every month to tell me where I have been roaming, I am getting a monthly review of my whereabouts plus a total of hours spent in the car, how many kilometers I have walked, etc.
It always surprises me to „learn“ about the places I have visited, because sometimes, I have no recall of that place and I start to wonder if that could be a mistake. But then it comes back, oh yes, I have been to a concert in that town, but actually, I do not remember anything aside from the concert. In my memory, I haven’t been at that town, I have been at that specific concert. So, there has to be a huge difference in what is „digital“ memory and what is „human“ memory. It all has to do with images. Today, tourists are those who, by taking pictures, keep vivid memories of places where they do not stay for long and where they might never return. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) said, “Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. All photographs are memento mori.” The way Sontag uses the phrase memento mori (remember you must die) highlights the profound difference of old-school, analogue photography and the new digital kind of memory that suggests rather the opposite: remember that you don’t have to die. What Sontag means is, of course that when we die, our memory dies with us. Digital Memory will never die. Everything will be stored, forever. It doesn’t matter if we die, or if we are unable to recall certain events - the evidence is there. A photograph preserves faces, places and cultures in pictures before they disappear from the real world. Ethnographic Photography is a famous example for that. The kind of perception that Google tries to match with my own, individual memory finds its equivalent in the view of those who suddenly rediscover the images of their own culture in museums and archives. That what was deemed familiar appears all of a sudden strange and in need of interpretation, in the same ways, as did the images of other cultures before. Our brain has the natural skill of transforming places and things that fade away in time, into images and these images, once captured, are stored in memory and activated by memory. But this „activation“ of memory, sometimes triggered by the strangest synaesthetic cues, like smells or the famous taste of a „petite madeleine“, are thoroughly transcendental, there is no physical support mechanism for these memories, and that’s precisely why they are so precious. The law of time turns all images into images of the past. Our own memory's historical authority gives us permission to participate in a community of the living and the dead. Our memory itself is an endogenous, neural system of now fictitious places of remembrance. Our cognitive agency builds up a network of places where we can only see those images that make up the fabric of our own memory. The physical experience of places that our bodies have made in the real world, informs the design of places that our brains have saved. You know what I mean, the thousands of digital photographs (they are not exactly photographs any longer, but I will talk about that in another post) that we take every day, we don’t even bother to look at them anymore, they are of no value, they are not precious, they are like the information Google sends me about my trip to that small town. My memories of the concert there in that town, on the contrary, are very dear to me, I remember every single minute of that concert, yet I haven't taken a single picture of it.
1 Comment
6/24/2023 11:17:51 am
Great post! Please continue sharing informative content. If you're in need of professional services, make sure to check out
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorThomas Behrens Visual Communication is not only taking part in the digital transformation - actively and passively - he will also reflect on it. Hence the blog. Archives
January 2021
Categories |