Our class section didn’t have too much time with the exercise where we had to project photographs onto different objects. I have some family archive photographs of my great-grandmother and grandmother. I would have liked to try and project their face onto my own face. How would the surface of my face, the colour of my skin look with the photographs on it? If I moved my face, how would the images change? How does the context of my face change the meaning of the images? It would create a sense of trying to connect, of physically trying to connect to the past, to my ancestors with my own body. It would also look at familial resemblance within our facial features. It would certainly play with time, space and reality. These photographs taken generations and generations ago would come to life through me. These images would be transformed and so would I. 

A photograph is said to capture and preserve a moment in time, however through these physical projections and the virtual images we have put on the web they become spaceless and timeless, collapsing the normal barriers of past, present and future. Eduardo Kac, in his article Telepresence Art, says that we are in the age of ‘paradoxical logic,’ where images are created in real time, “This new kind of image gives priority to speed over space, to the virtual over the real, and therefore transforms our notion of reality from something given to a construct” (Kac 6). Altering space and time, alters reality.

Documentary, and the ongoing debate about the ‘truth’ within it, has a whole new meaning within new media. Michael Rush in his book New Media in Art, describes the notion of the ‘real,’ “Life as we have known it, including the memories that our lives have formed, will be forever changed as the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ become increasingly indistinguishable. Perhaps memories and dreams will become one” (Rush 239). 

  

my great-grandmother              my grandmother

(both on my mothers side of the family)