In a world inundated with images produced daily as archives of personal fictions and bodily perceptions, one wonders if there is incongruence occurring between the kinds of memoirs we chose to memorialise and the authenticity of those depictions.
And as a filmmaker, I often encounter people who want to “look proper” before they
are filmed, which always erodes the authenticity of their persona and leans towards orchestration of reality for purposes of consumption not by the self.
This orchestration of “how they are perceived” has become an art of fictionalising selves,
bodies and events for the spectacle of exposure and algorithmic monetisation.
And it is somewhat understandable, because as post-colonial bodies, many people
of colour tend feel exiled from their true identities and currently constructed realities,
whether imagined or concocted. We inexplicably feel excluded from histories
happening at our expense, as we often see with how western media thrives on
poverty porn for mass appeal and monetisation.
Therefore, these “exiled” and vicarious histories have to invent ways and activities
of thriving, while also considering the unfolding present, where blackness and its
past are a mere footnote for reflection on the scars of colonialism.
Hand-held devices have thus provided new modes of producing personal archives
(self-reflections) that can be said to laugh while society is in its suicidal throws,
where individual insecurities and inferiority complexes are concealed and kept at
bay.
Selfies have become a reflection of the toxic properties of todays tools of recording
self into “hyper-selves” and everyday events into “spectacles”.
And by exploring these reimagined realities spliced together by traumatised psyches, one can begin to dissect the allure of exhibitionism and its ability to influence individual and collective consciousness, and the mechanism that question the responsibility of both the producers of images and the viewers.
These technologically edited experiences become reduced to haunted memories
(images posted online), produced as versions of truth by persons daunted by their
“real selves” and willing to project falsified and photo-shopped versions of their
memory data.
In an age of consumption, “content creation” simply means fabrication of material
for distortion of facts, and in order to denounce this current visual overload we are
required to question the urge to falsify the self within a surveilled digital and public
space.
In this scenario viewers are often left in a space of neutrality, confronting or
overlooking omissions of the many worlds within themselves; because in the act of looking and seeing they are connecting themselves to the image and its producer’s
self-invention imbued with complex issues of western standards of beauty and
body fetishism.
The premise therefore, is a desire to think of image-based content as archival legacies from concocted pasts that affect and shape how the present is fictitiously perceived, viewing time as a serial link of how we perceive said persistences, within a web of change spanning timelines and lifespans.
But we are now living in a time when impending disasters, and crucial social events elude recording due to cognitive distractions fueled by sedative media and creative
content that normalise catastrophe.
Questions of validity and perspective of the eye that captured events arises, and the
unstable circumstances that drove them to capture those moments and the intervals between the visible and invisible, those instances, form the crux of what I call the aesthetic destruction of testimony.
This destruction of testimony, through alterations and falsifications and editions of
image-based content that are tools for recollection will become rampant with the
rise super-intelligent computational technologies, and memory beyond any cloud
will be deemed flawed and drifting away from affinities of normal life.
Digital culture and its fandom, and the changing forms of image-making within
mediated technological spaces, has ushered in a dissolution of boundaries between the body and its environment, the shattering of intimate worlds of family, partners and friends into mere symbols of decadence and espoused affluence, caricatured into morsels of true reflections, clad in made-up and air-brushed abstractions.
Although seeming peculiarly gratifying, the urge to self-aggrandise through doctored exposures of the body is a growing trend that is affecting youth worldwide.
And getting the young generation to be self-obsessed, creators of their cherished
versions of self through avatar and game characters, society is faced with young
people who disdain their “real selves” and the realities within which they are immersed beyond the frame of screens and other projection spaces.
Today’s social media is s space for re-enactments of being, where the urge to imbue
our living experiences onto images takes precedence in the quest for immortality,
but the performed reality seldom summons real lived experiences leaving only vague familiarities and semblances of these events and persons.
While digital images can transform perception of a place or a person (bodies), the unrepeatable immediacy of those captured moments ceaselessly is altering and
distorting our perspectives of the real, as well our viewpoints in the moments of experience.
And standing without intentional legacy creation, these images become footprints of
a digital retelling of personal narratives before each persona is replaced by avatars of their willing extraction.
With the corpse of time captured in frames in a relentless effort of creating future memories, we have succumbed to a photographic practice that is not biographical, but a form of heightened presence that empowers yet compromises reality, where the participatory act of viewing these images and being ecstatic beyond the material falsities depicted, becomes a source of mild amusement although conferring legitimacy to the person or event depicted.
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