my iphone can take a perfect picture and record perfect audio. it is so perfect and so effortless that it becomes invisible, because the pictures show as clear as my eyes and the audio comes in as crisp as my ears. it is just another seamless way of sensing.
This consumption of the world happens so quickly that i don’t even realise there’s a distortion or transformation taking place, i start believe that the lens through which i see the world is the world.
A recreation can only be a cheap copy; information is lost but nothing new is gained. It is only diminishing.
It is more interesting to create something that doesn’t recreate the world, but responds to it.
I go on instagram and see someone in Lululemon leggings working out and I think “if I dress like that, act like that, carry myself like that, I will become my idea of what that is. I’ll be confident, I’ll walk through the world lighter, falling back on the knowledge that I can’t be too wrong because somebody has already tested and vouched for this reality, this way of being.” To exist without that blueprint is to live alone, to venture into the dark with no knowledge of how you will unfold.
But the “aesthetic” of your life, the little visual and sensory details that place you in time and space, should be a byproduct of how you are living. Something that is expelled like waste from a cell, that builds up like moss in a forest over hundreds of years. It should not be staged, planted, and perfectly lit like an open house or a demo car in the middle of a mall.
When I try to wear the lululemon leggings and become a “gym girlie” or adopt any other pre-decided aesthetic way of life, it’s like when an AI tries to create a human face; it’s hollow and uncertain, some godly detail missing, and it creeps into the uncanny valley. Real details cannot be willed or engineered. If you base your whole life off of something you’ve already seen, nothing beautiful or incredible or exciting will ever happen; Its existence is by definition already in the realm of your understanding.
it’s easy to believe you could become any ‘type of girl’ on a tiktok trend, because there’s a feeling that your body is entirely digital, that it can be dragged and dropped and edited and deleted with almost no effort, with no weight or burden or stake in physical space. that it doesn’t take time to grow like a tree or a potato or anything so archaic. i think i have taught my mind to abandon my body entirely, that i don’t need it, that it is an empty house we are squatting in. i can be anything at a moment’s notice because i am nothing, i weigh nothing, it costs nothing to change me. (that’s sillytown! that’s crazyville!)
i think this disorientation that occurs when the line between our bodies and our phones blurs is part of the reason we’ve started to love old media. it makes the dimension, the medium, physical again. when i watch old VHS footage, or listen to a record, or look at an old film photo, not only am i hearing the sound you are showing me, but i am hearing the fuzziness of the thing it was recorded on. not only am i seeing the image you are showing me, but i am seeing the the warbles and scratches on the lens you’re using. i’m seeing the thing i’m looking at, and also seeing that i’m looking at it. if i can’t ground myself in my physical reality (the temperature of the real room i’m sitting in, feeling my feet on the floor, feeling my breath come in and out) - if it’s too late to feel that, at least i can ground myself in a physical world in the digital world.
my high school biology teacher told us one time that if we wanted to study more effectively we should hand-write our notes instead of typing them. when you're typing on a keyboard every letter feels the same, but when you're writing with a pen, each letter requires a different physical movement. those unique physical differences stick with you better than a homogenous stream of data; if it lives in your body, it stays.
i’ve decided the only way to keep myself sane is to visit my body every once in awhile, the same way you go see your grandma. even if i’m going to go back to a world she doesn’t understand, i can at least say hi and make sure she’s not alone.