Memories rather than recordings

We’re living in an era of hyper reality, where every day we are bombarded with images as the primary currency of our social media age. Firstly, they are a slow experience with delayed gratification and not in a format that is easily and instantly shareable — there is a gap between taking images and putting them online that makes them feel more personal. Secondly, they are less prolific and more considered — they exist in ones or twos and never, like on everyone’s phone camera reels, in batches of 15 near identical takes. And thirdly, perhaps most importantly, the aesthetic stands out in our hyper-real world. They are hazy, confusing, unclear, cluttered, poorly framed, they are fallible and lack perfection, they have our fingers poking into frame, not everyone looks great, or are even in the picture. In many ways, they feel like life; memories rather than recordings, the opposite of the ubiquitous and prolific smartphone that lacks the spontaneity and feeling of lived experience. All of these examples are an attempt to invest meaning into a moment, to spend time dedicated to something, to concentrate on life and that which deserves your attention rather than, as Bo Burnham would put it, spending it on ‘everything all of the time‘. The rise in the use of analogue media amongst younger people tells us that there is an appetite for a deeper engagement with life, particularly social life, as people seek out storied objects and images that represent their experience in a more tangible way than the hyper-real images that disconnect us.