Interface Realities

A superstorm hits Brisbane, Australia

The interface between reality and human perception has shifted from our eyes to eyes/screens/events/experiences/screens.

I am not sure where memories fit into this process/flow, but whereas in the past, reality was mediated by language and on occasion images, we now need screens to visualize not only what we are doing, but what we have done. This is a vast and expanding process of human annotation and visualization which now defines experiences according to the strength with which they have been recorded. Iphoneographers and Androidographers collate all these images into albums, folders and files. The management of all of this data requires more and more time and all of this time is spent within screenworlds. It is not that reality disappears, just that experiences become so layered that we become archeologists, constantly searching for meaning amidst all of the detritus left over from the many thousands of images we take over the course of a few months. 

Comment and response from Felix de Mendelssohn

Dear Ron,

I came back in September from a conference in Sendai, Japan about working with survivor families from Fukushima and the tsunami-affected region. Here the reverse had been true - only privileged people and foreigners had at the time been able see what was happening on CNN etc. The Japanese TV for the local population brought no news, no pictures, no-one knew what was going on. Then Hurricane Sandy hit the East coast of USA and I heard later from locals that at the time they knew nothing, they had only the unfathomable reality, but because the power was down there was no radio, no TV, no phone and no gas to get to somewhere to find out what was going on. So there is perhaps a flip side to your comment - when we lose the images and their interpretations we can be plunged into the terrifying Real.