With the increased ease of making and distributing short videos, and with the ubiquity of the Mac's camera mounted atop its screen, it's no surprise that many ordinary folks are organizing diary-like images of themselves across time - sped-up stills, one per day, of the human face, changing and unchanging. Go to YouTube and search under "photo himself (or herself) every day (or daily)". In the best of these personal/ordinary hypermontages, the expression remains the same--to me, the more the same, the better. The very best is Noah, who took a photo of himself in virtually the same position and context every day for six years. His mouth remains precisely the same while his eyes darken and his hair flows upward and downward like a tide between haircuts.
Monday, December 14, 2009
hypermontage diary
With the increased ease of making and distributing short videos, and with the ubiquity of the Mac's camera mounted atop its screen, it's no surprise that many ordinary folks are organizing diary-like images of themselves across time - sped-up stills, one per day, of the human face, changing and unchanging. Go to YouTube and search under "photo himself (or herself) every day (or daily)". In the best of these personal/ordinary hypermontages, the expression remains the same--to me, the more the same, the better. The very best is Noah, who took a photo of himself in virtually the same position and context every day for six years. His mouth remains precisely the same while his eyes darken and his hair flows upward and downward like a tide between haircuts.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
