Old media surrounds me like old memories. What is less (more) fallible? The video tape or the memory? The cassette tape or the memory? The recordable CD or the memory?
Like scuff marks on an old CD my memory too seems damaged. Like the tracking lines on an old VHS tape. Like the Siberian Hell Screams of warped cassette tape.
An old digital photo has a fuzziness and a blur about it that we did not notice at the time. Now the AI wants us to upscale it, to fill in the fuzzy pixels with clarity. Are these false-pixel memories still an accurate photographic record?
Is a photograph an accurate photographic record?
Too much light spills into the frame and a picture becomes like a memory, all hazy and glowing and difficult to focus on. Not enough light and we see dreamscapes; a well-lit street becomes a place of horror.
And in our eyes the sun and shadow still plays tricks. At night we live by the light of the moon. By the light of artificial plastic globes at the end of bent metal sticks that drizzle everything in amber.
What we see is defined as much by what we do not see. And what we capture in a photograph is the merest fragment of what exists beyond the frame. A 3D panorama attempts to capture a room full of people, but maybe Uncle or Grandma was moving at the time and so their face becomes a blur, a smear, like a slippery memory.
Is a memory an accurate photographic record? Is a photograph an accurate memographic record? Is memographic even a word? Yes, because if you’ve read this far you comprehended it.
The gostak distims the doshes.
Michael Scott Hand 