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Rachel Feldman- Temporality Exercise

Page history last edited by rachelfeldman@... 9 years, 4 months ago

 

In 2011, Snapchat was developed, an application that claimed to restore the social aspect back to social media through its intense ephemerality, and a focus on the transmission of the image itself, rather than the extraneous textual and pictorial dialogue surrounding the original image (as seen in the "comment" form of Facebook and Instagram for example). When using Snapchat, the image is both the starting point and the commentary, a visual exercise whose ephemeral nature seems to imitate "real life" conversation, allowing for a sense of privacy and leniency in its supposed lack of concreteness, lack of reference, and lack of the possibility of past-ness, or creation of a past. Indeed, a major draw for social media users to Snapchat lies in the in-ability to archive and recall by visual reference. This lack of an archive, a lack of past-ness, serves as a sort of freeing from the constraints of conventional social media, where every moment feels like a “for your eyes only” moment, free from the stranger's gaze. 

 

Even the notion of the "Timer" effectively places another layer of supposed control of privacy through time in the hands of the user. Time becomes a weapon, the ticking bomb, and the user the only one able to determine the temporality of the moment before the silent sequence of termination is complete, never to be undone. 

 

 

 

Time and control in Snapchat is constant and pervasive. Everything is modeled to mimic, and to even replace, quotidian conversation, with the exchange of "image for image" compared to the exchange of "idea for idea" in real time, a sort of digital visual conversation via quick relay of photograph/short video. Thus, Snapchat begs the question of whether the service it provides is one of documentation or one of lived experience, and how to classify the snapchat photo-object itself: as an art object? or as a shared visual experience? 

 

According to Nathan Jurgenson via Snapchat's blog: 

 

     “The way to understand photography as it happens on social platforms is not to compare it to traditional photography, which is about creating an art object, but instead as a      communicating of experience itself.  It’s less making media and more sharing eyes; your view, your experience in the now. The atomizing of the ephemeral flow of lived reality      into transmittable objects is the ends of the traditional photograph, but merely the means of the social snap. As photos have become almost comically easy to make, their      existence alone as objects isn’t special or interesting, rather, they exist more fluidly as communication; a visual discourse more linguistic than formally artistic. As such, social      photography should be understood not as a remove from the moment or conversation but a deeply social immersion." (emphasis original) 

 

Jurgenson's mediation on the idea of communication through photos, not around them, with the photo as the means of communication and self-expression and conversation speaks to a deeply intimate social setting, where the digital media exists to serve the social aspect as a tool. Indeed, he claims it is not about media, that the ephemeral nature speaks straight to the social and human experience.In Jurgenson's mind, there is no frame, borders or boundaries: "An image becomes a photograph, in part, by having borders. The frame makes the photo. Tellingly, a Snapchat usually exists unframed, full-screen, more moment than an art object." Yet there is a frame, a frame that exists from the inception of usage, that in fact facilities the very use of the application: the smart phone device itself. To claim an the the ability to see an image on a "full screen" is to engage in a mode of communication without borders ignores the literally palpable (aren't you holding the border in your hand....?)

 

Indeed, the very act of self-portraiture, while freeing the self from the gaze of the cameraman, does not free the self from the gaze of the disembodied camera. Even the selfie taker is always self-consciously aware of being "on film", and therefore will always transmit their message through an image that is a product of their own invention, their own aesthetic of that moment in time. One is reminded of Doctor Morel, in Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel, who knowingly reduces others into objects. For the pleasure of fulfilling his dream he transforms into the aesthete of a murderer: an artist of murder whose only concern lies in the awareness of form and not of content. He reduces his friends to “living transmitters”, characterized by way of the senses of the viewer. In this way Morel exhibits the role of media and film in supplementing the joys of reality with the image of reality found on a screen. He insists that ‘life’ is what lies latent at the heart of technology, giving the example of the musician waiting patiently within the phonograph. Morel thus insists that man is nothing until he is brought into being by a greater power, such as God. He says that “there is a parallelism between the destinies of men and images” and that therefore images must also possess souls. 

 

Is Snapchat the Invention of Morel, that deadly machine? Is it a question of genre, where the snapchat photo-object is merely a new manifestation of a sort of photography existing outside of the genre, that through its ephemerality it allows for innovation and a connection to what filmmaker David Cronenberg calls the "relationship to primordial things....the nitty gritty"? Or are we really left confronting the idea of the hyperreal, of simulacra, and of distinctions between a human encounter vis à vis, in real time, and what substitutes as a sign for such an encounter? (Reference: Jean Baudrillard’s The Precession of Simulacra).

 

The hyper-reality of social media ("in real time") usurps the real’s feeling of authenticity, leaving mankind saturated by a culture of copy in which the search for originality, truth, and transcendence forces man to look towards his own creation of technology of simulation. Enter Snapchat. This gradual movement towards such an application seems fated by the very technological nature of man, in which the strive for accessibility eradicates other hopes of living out a true "lived" human experience, as exemplified in the shift from portraiture to film, from warm to cold, aesthetic mediums. Humanity is left to ponder if a way exists for man to break free from the dehumanizing effects of technology using the medium itself. Can we flee from our loneliness by self-replicating and sharing via such platforms as Snapchat?

 

It is hard to say. At the end of the day, though, one can only agree that it is naive to think we have left the culture of copy. 

 

 

 

 

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