Photographs must have seemed astonishing when they first arrived on the scene. The idea that you could continue to see exactly what someone looked like, even after they were dead, must have felt quite radical.
Sure, you could look at a painting, but it’s not the same. A painting is someone’s interpretation of someone else’s physical likeness, not the likeness itself.
When I think back through history, I see parallels with other technologies. Take writing for example. Before the written word, you could learn of the thoughts of a person even after they were dead, through oral tales that had been handed down through the generations.
But, like a painting, these were necessarily filtered through others. The story that you heard was merely an interpretation by somebody else of that person’s thoughts and beliefs, and you had no way to know what had been altered in the transmission.
So there is this idea of any new recording technology as a kind of “transcription of presence”. Suppose we project this idea into the future. Where will it eventually lead us?
More tomorrow.