January 5ths

1/5/2005

On the news they showed Kofi Annan touring the tsunami-ravaged areas. "Where are the people..."

1/5/2011

Watched film: Countdown to Zero. How depressing but the reality of it all is refreshing in a strange way. If you see life as essentially ephemera, all you have to worry about is what you'll feel and think when it ends, or as it is ending.

Interesting: Cameras used to watch everything you do. This is a new vanguard of an increasingly dystopian world....People will attempt to evade the system by adopting different alternate personas. It will be a big and lucrative business to create and sell identities.

[1/5/2025: Yesterday I revisited the Black Mirror series which came out in 2011. This was the world it depicted. But in 2011 it was still mostly a fiction. Now it’s the reality. Cinema and TV have warped our minds more than novels would ever do]. 

1/5/2048

(Anthony Townes Diary) 

Eben brought the Sony Mavica. It looked so precious and fragile like a delicate piece of crystal with tons of secondary meaning. Otherwise someone would see it as an old junked car. But it’s essentially the generator of the material with which the work is made. When everyone knows it was from 50 years ago, it’s “Hey, my Dad had one of those!” 

Poe: What was the fascination with old cameras in 2048?

The fascination with old cameras in 2048 was driven by the art exhibit "Equality of Vision" at Gallery Moire, which featured the work of photographist Nic Eben. Eben's latest work consisted of "pixel-by-pixel re-creations of digital images captured with late 20th century camera relics like the Sony Mavica, then re-photographed with multi-layer pixel matrix technologies" [4].

This exhibit highlighted a growing interest in the aesthetic qualities of outdated photographic technologies, even as newer digital imaging techniques became more advanced. The act of carefully reconstructing images from obsolete cameras spoke to a desire to preserve and celebrate the visual qualities of the past, even as technology rapidly evolved [4].

This artistic exploration of older camera formats was part of a broader cultural trend in the mid-21st century, where people were seeking meaningful connections to the past amidst the rapid pace of technological change [doc_3, doc_6]. The exhibit at Gallery Moire tapped into this nostalgia and fascination with analog photography, reflecting the ways in which established artistic forms were being reinterpreted through new digital lenses.