Screen Memories — Real Life

With so much of our socializing, organizing, and life administration routed through screens and networks, we face the contradictory risks of things disappearing or things staying findable forever. Nothing on our computers stays the same for very long. Software updates, websites disappear, and newspapers edit their copy and hope to get away with it.... See more

Even bad images have something to say. So many of the memes that float around message boards and social media feeds are a complete mess, edges fuzzy and pixels popping out all over the place. But the poor quality becomes part of the point: It’s a marker of virality, a signal that the image has been shared and stolen by multiple viewer-artists who l... See more

When I take a screenshot, it feels like a tiny rejection of the logic of the contemporary corporate internet. Instead of offering up fragments of my photographic life to the computer gods, the screenshot feels like I’m stealing something back from the computational world for my own uses, removing it from the networked flow (sure, some of these snip... See more

I’ve come to think of the networks and infrastructures connected to the phone as active parties in the photographic process. I take pictures of the non-computational world and I give them to the phone so it can understand my world better. The phone’s understanding is extractive, not empathic, but it’s the tradeoff I accept in order to store and sha... See more

This screen-centric visual experience has a lot going on: photographs and videos and vector graphics and overlapping chat windows pressed up together with spreadsheets and reminders that updates are ready to install if only I’d let them. It’s the everything-screen! And so I feel called to frame and claim and digest it all. I have limited control ov... See more

Daily life becomes photographable, and photography becomes a practice of everyday life: a moment, a breath, a social event, a marking of time. To photograph is to digest the world.

Compared with other kinds of digital output, a screenshot feels “homemade” — a piece of digital DIY confirming that screen spaces contain as much mundaneness as the “analog” or “offline” world. In a time when so much communication and production is mediated by a set of increasingly powerful corporate platforms and absorbed into the internet’s big c... See more