On 2/22/07, Doyle Saylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Doyle;
Too juicy not to riff on. Stories and narratives represent a lot to
writers, but to a guy like me who makes pictures, a picture mostly is
not a story. The general linearity of stories as opposed to the
holistic picture is a big chasm. What I see in common between people
like us is the production of information. I think socialism has a
wholism in it that is not storical. It has a lot to do with a vague
notion of what connects millions of people. I don't see tv with it's
emphasis on story entertainment of all sorts as a good model of how to
'know' the working class. As you write elegantly it is a Naked City
with all happening at once.
I think the massive expansion of making pictures leads to a shift in
the paradigm of stories. I think re-use of pictures, a very fast way
to exchange pictures, and a culture of wholism production will not look
or feel storical. Stories are short little vignettes of something or
other. When we have tons of pictures, videos, and audio files sitting
in the archive, putting all that together (Googles one big library for
all) suggests strongly a different work process. Perhaps connection
with all at once? So I'm not much of a narrative kind of guy.
Doyle
The problem I see with that is that you can -- and arguably must --
narrate your dissent from the narrative hegemony, as you have done
here. Meanwhile the re-use and exchange of pictures relies on a coded
sequence of zeroes and ones. In other words, for you to engage the
story with a picture you have to first deprive it of precisely that
which distinguishes it from the story -- it's "aura", so to speak --
and transform it into a "story about a picture," Balzac's Sarrazine
(as analyzed by Barthes) or Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey.
--
Sandwichman
