“Many people in our society now go around the streets and in the buses and so forth playing radios with earphones on and they don’t hear the world around them. They hear only what they have chosen to hear. I can’t understand why they cut themselves off from that rich experience which is free. I think this is the beginning of music, and I think that the end of music may very well be in those record collections.” -John Cage, 1984
On Tuesday 13th August I was invited by Sübkültür to give a presentation of my ‘Devices’ series at Forum Phoinix in Bayreuth, Germany. Sübkültür is a weekly clubhouse for literature, art, cultural politics and entertainment:
“We are a team that organizes cultural events of all sorts once a week. Concerts, performances, discussions, screenings etc. One focus is to have a stage for local artists and culture apart from the Wagner cult but we also invite artists, performers and writers from abroad.”
As an aside, my poor German pronunciation skills make Bayreuth very hard to differentiate from Beirut so most people I mentioned it to thought I was going to Lebanon. No, Bay-root, Buy-ruth, Bea-reoy!! Anyway, it’s three and a half hours from Berlin and it’s a pretty German city most famous for Wagner.
The presentation was part of their exhibition ‘Open Faces’ which explores the way artists present and reinterpret the classical motif of the face with new media and technologies.
Anja Zeilinger kindly hosted the evening and discussion around my work. The bulk of the discussion was around questions about the future as we become more and more connected, the role of music in day-to-day life, how we use the devices for emotional reasons rather than the ones they were intended and how the poses documented will change over time as computers advance, become smaller, more wearable or who knows what is next (Google probably).
The images were captured in 2009 and even in that short time things have changed. Many people describe feeling naked if they go out without their phone. We are tethered to them. It’s like they are becoming an additional body-part that gives us instant access to knowledge (or humorous cat videos) and links us to millions of other people, but mostly our own tribe. Pulling out your phone when you’re bored is the new norm. Sit on the train and count how many people are staring into a screen around you, who have earphones in.
Maybe I am naïve, but I believe the issues around this technology are still worth discussing simply because it has become so ubiquitous and taken for granted. Like John Cage, I’m trying to be unfamiliar with the familiar.
Why do we record so much of what we do? As someone who loves music concerts, I loathe the proliferation of phones, cameras and even iPads that concert-goers use to record their favourite musician. We are here to experience the music and these recordings get in the way of that. What is the point of recording things for the future if we’re always looking for the next thing anyway? Or do some people only record things to gain status points amongst friends? Obviously, as a photographer, I’m pro capturing and sharing experiences as a way of connecting but at what point is it too much?
Even a few days ago, at the Russian War Memorial in Berlin, I watched tourists lift their cameras to simultaneously look at the memorial and capture an image of it before immediately turning to the next thing, experiencing the world through the screen of a camera. This fast and shallow consumption fascinates me.
With all this connection I wonder will our social construct over time become more like a hive mind at the expense of individuality and would that be a bad thing?
I still have more questions than answers.
Photos from the evening courtesy of Cristoph Dobbitsch
Gold Coast, Australia, April 2011
June, 2012