On Direct & Indirect Experience: Memory

I. Photographs Lost

I am still formulating my thoughts on the promised Walter Benjamin installment of "On Direct & Indirect Experience." Rereading Benjamin is both challenging and stimulating; his theories on the effect of mechanical reproduction on the work of art are not as black-and-white as some readers are tempted to make them out to be. Here is a taste of my contributions to come. We the viewers of art now wield in our hands the technology—the digital cameras, the camera phones, even video phones—that can reproduce art. What is the effect on the work of art when we ourselves are the reproducer? What are the new politics and values birthed thusly?

There is much to be said. But, in the meantime, I would like to share the rather unhappy logical extension of my discussion on experience and memory in Scotland.

To review briefly, I carved up my trip to Scotland into two parts. The first comprises so-called direct experiences, which includes time I did not spend behind the lens of a camera and the unmediated memories I can evoke as such. The second comprises so-called indirect experiences, which constitutes time I did spend behind a digital camera and memories I recall through the actual photographs I took. 

Now, let's suppose I lost these photographs and their negatives—to a fire, to a flood, during a move, or what have you. What have I, as the photographer, lost? At their best, I conceive of these photographs as portals or triggers: seeing them can transport me back to the site and sight. At their worst, I can conceive of those photographs as archives or time capsules: seeing them can remind me of I place I found worthy of a photograph but that I do not remember experiencing directly. My idea here is, "I know I was at this place, but I have no memory of being at this place." 

A vigilant gargoyle perched on pyramidal stones somewhere in Scotland. I do not remember where, but I do remember taking the photograph.

In the first case,  if I lose the photographs, I lose a means to return potentially to a direct experience through a document or artifact of indirect experience. In the second case—and this I find haunting—I may forget all knowledge of ever having been at a certain somewhere or having seen a certain something. In a sense, perhaps stronger than I want to admit, it would be as if I never had actually been at X or seen X at all.  

What, then, am I left with? I am left with a means without an end. I am left with the memory of taking photographs. I am left with the memory of using technology. A pen without ink and paper with no words on it. 

A castle window overlooks a gardened courtyard somewhere in Scotland. I do not remember where, but I do remember taking the photograph.

Before I move on to a more general discussion of memory, here's a short experiment I would like to conduct or that, perchance, has already been conducted. The subject is I) a person who went on a major vacation/trip (parameters need more definition) at least one year ago; and II) the person primarily responsible for photographically documenting that vacation/trip. The experimenter first conducts an interview, asking the subject to recall and describe significant episodes, places, and experiences from the trip. The experimenter next presents the subject with all the photographs the subject captured while on that vacation/trip. A second interview follows. The experimenter thereafter compares the quality and quantity of what the subject remembered during the first, without-photograph interview and the second, with-photograph interview.  

II. Memories Lost

These considerations compel me to ask the questions: what is memory and what is it for? Clearly we need to account for evolutionary neurology. Simplistically, in terms of prehistory, memory prevents us from making the same mistake twice: "This fruit made me ill; don't eat it again." Memory aids us in the location and re-location of nutrition and shelter: "Past this ridge is a cave by a watering hole." Memory enables us to learn and apply critical skills: "Strike the flint like so." Memory helps us identify kin or enemy: "I am related to this person; that person is competing with my resources." Memory thus serves the purpose of our navigation through life and our fulfillment of essential needs. We can abundantly adapt these scenarios for modern analogs: skill acquisition, education, professional development, trial and error; object, location, and person identification; and so on. All build towards effective socialization, shelter, provisions, income, general welfare.

But what about non-survivalistic memory? What are my direct and indirect experiences in, say, Scotland for? Or why do I remember so vividly, as I do, a tattered, rain-soaked, dirt-smudged copy of P.D. Eastman's children's classic Are You My Mother? lying in the middle of row-housed street of a once-factory-thriving section of Cincinnati?

And what about the nature of memory itself? Oftentimes we think of memory as a kind of discrete databank. Cached somewhere among the labyrinthine file folders and file pathways are memories, like objects, retrievable with a click of the neurological mouse. It is easy, it is tempting to see the brain as a magnificent supercomputer. But what are the ramifications of our understanding of memory if we view it more phenomenologically? Maybe memory is kind of sedimentation—whether or not we can conjure up a specific image or sensation, whether or not we can conjure up a specific name or word, all of our experiences, direct and indirect, all the lessons and facts we have learned, stick to us, become indelibly embedded into us, absorbed by us, taken in, sometimes transmuted in a way where memory alters truth and thereby becomes the truth, the reality, the actuality.    

Lastly, how has memory changed during the digital, information age? When we upload digital photographs onto our computers, is the machine doing the work of memory for us? When a quick Google search—and the inevitable query result of Wikipedia—can tell us how to tie a necktie, provide us a list of all the US state capitals, or break down the events of World War II, is the machine doing the work of memory for us? In some sense, I do think this is the case. Perhaps out of necessity, as I believe the modern person faces an overwhelming amount of and access to "fact." But it seems to me that these memories—personal, historic, collective, utilitarian, emotional—are fundamentally different if the machine does the work. They are preserved in a level of unimaginable detail, yes. Yet, they are, perhaps, no longer ours. They are "outside" of us; we do not carry them within us. It is as if we have surmounted a level of biological necessity, have evolved a kind of post-memory. For we no longer need to remember the specifics if the machine remembers for us. No, we simply need to remember how to use the machine: to transfer memory to the machine, access memory on the machine, navigate its menus, exploit its functionalities. Is this any different than the storage and preservation of memory—knowledge, history in all their forms—in books? I am not sure, but I want to say yes.

Memory is a portal. Someone spray-painted an apt memento mori somewhere in Scotland. I do not remember where, but I remember taking the photograph.

I opened this discussion of memory with the question: "What do I lose if I lose photographs?" I will end with this one: "What would we lose if we lose computers?"

On Direct & Indirect Experience: The Informal Overture

Earlier this month during a trip to Chicago, I, along with a few close friends, made a point to spend several hours touring the recently debuted new home of the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing. The impressively designed and sized edifice exhibits a breathtaking and comprehensive collection of modern and contemporary art. Indeed, these well-spent few hours did neither the building nor its collection due justice.

I stand before Salvador Dalí's Invention of the Monsters (1937; oil canvas) beside an equally captivated viewer. To our right is Joan Miró's spectacular Personages with Star (1933; oil on canvas). Photo by Matt Bauman.

At the museum, I was struck by the pervasiveness of a certain phenomenon which I know you have witnessed and which I am most certain we have all engaged in ourselves: snapping photographs of art on digital cameras and camera phones. Now, what most struck me was not just such photography itself; rather, it was the behavior of most of the photographers. I did not observe many of what I will dub the "phone-photographers"—in order to distinguish them from professional photographers, though I am aware that there exists legitimate cellphone photography—stopping to consider and contemplate the artwork. Instead, I observed them quickly pointing-and-shooting artwork before moving on to point-and-shoot another work.  

I admit that such behavior is to be expected in a digital age, visual culture, and perpetually plugged-in period. Further, I believe the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones in our lives is of colossal value, as it enables us to document our lives and experiences in ways, both creative and ordinary, heretofore unimagined. Thus, I urge you to know that I seek to judge neither the phone-photographer nor the technology itself. No, my intention is only to tease out and reflect on the ramifications of such technological usage, as many before me have done, most noticeably, though in a different capacity, by Walter Benjamin in his groundbreaking "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." I will return to this important essay in the next installment.

My initial reaction was one of annoyed distraction. I have a difficult enough time viewing art in the first place. I don't want to spend too much time reading plaques, but I need the information to digest a work of art historically, which need often compels me to believe I am missing much of the point of the art itself. The result is that I feel my eyes moving over the words without really absorbing them and feel my mind working too deliberately to allow the work to speak to me viscerally. I move on to the next painting or sculpture uncertain about what I just beheld or what I was being asked, solicited to behold. At this new work, I then hear the voice: "I am here before X. Take it in, remember it. Remember that you saw it." This directive immediately obliterates any direct experience with the art I hope to have. And then there is the whole issue of what to do with my hands. Fold them behind my back? Cross them on my chest? Place them contemplatively under my chin? Anyhow, the intervening layers of concept, context, and social code eventually do weaken, and the artwork does receive me and I it—prepredicatively. This most frequently and memorably occurs when I stand before works by Mark Rothko. His fields of color are to me sublime, hypnotic; the boundaries draw me into a space beyond their horizons, as did this painting in the Art Institute...

Mark Rothko's Untitled (Purple, White, and Red) (1953; oil on canvas).

...until there materialized before me the arms of a man lifting a camera armed with a flash. He snapped his photograph and moved on. The aura, the trance was lost.

My second reaction was more reflective and self-critical. I recalled a vacation to Scotland I took with my father and eldest brother a few years back. I spent most of the trip documenting the trip behind a digital camera. This, to me, is not entirely different than the phone-photographers I observed at the Art Institute, as most of them, like me, were tourists who wished to document their vacations. (In the next installments, I will be discussing more specifically, however, the ramifications of photographing art, as I think it warrants more attention.) I'm glad that I did so in Scotland, as such a major and splendid trip as that deserved a chronicling, but, in many ways, I'm sad that I did. For, when I think back to those travels and experiences, I summon two distinct sets of images and memories. The first is the memory of directly being there. In these images, in these memories, I wield no camera. In these, for example, I am in a bar having robust local ales over hearty local fare in the company of my father and brother, all of us stumbling happily into the afternoon sun back down the cobblestone hills. These images and memories are of what I will now refer throughout as "direct experience." The second set of images and memories are themselves twofold and are what I call "indirect experience." The first fold comprises images and memories as framed by the digital camera's eyepiece, as framed by the digital camera's display of what I captured, as framed by me framing the sites of Scotland. (Perhaps as opposed to Scotland framing my experience.) The second fold comprises all the developed photographs I took. Yes, I took some great ones, but I find it very surreal that my images and memories of the significant monuments, architecture, landscapes, castles, etc. are constituted by the very photographs of those sites, objects, places, things. In other words, I remember the Edinburgh Castle, for example, indirectly through my photographs of it more than I remember my directly being there.   

Through these two reactions to the phone-photographers, I arrive at my principal concern. We live in a "hyper-now" where we can document our lives, chronicle ourselves and others, and record our world so directly, immediately, so rapidly, and so diversely in such forms as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, especially through the photography of our digital cameras and camera phones. Yet, now more than ever, we are, it appears to me, farther away from our lives, ourselves, others and our world because our experience of them is indirect. Our existences are preoccupied with our documentation of them. 

Await the next installment where I explore direct and indirect experience in greater depth, including a discussion of Walter Benjamin and photographing art.