Living in the Memory of our Future Selves

Conceptual text supporting exhibition by MadeScapes^.

They will stop doing things, instead preferring to watch themselves doing things. They will film themselves, they will record their thoughts in text messages and group chats, and they will take countless photographs. Imagery will pass from the physical to the digital, and the potential to archive will no longer be reliant on spatial restriction.

They have already heard of one guy that has given up physical contact with other people, for fear of it bringing him into the moment.

Data will carry the same emotional weight as was once given to second-hand, sat-on-a-shelf-by-the-fire-for-thirty-years, hardback books. The emphasis on storing for posterity will become everything – yet none of the old stuff will ever be revisited – it will be enough that it is just there.

There will be a need to experience things as they are in the now and as they were in the then, simultaneously, so they will already have experienced them as memories the first time they live them.

They will spend most of their time watching other people’s lives being lived out as pasts.

This is not reverie, this is not living the memory as the moment: this is living the moment as a memory.

In the real moment, as close as we could approximate its occurring, we always did the things that our instincts told us that we would one day want to have done. They finally realised, or admitted, that experience is better enjoyed on reflection and so everyday events were skewed towards memorialisation.

Everything for posterity. Everything for the memory.

Everything is better in its absence.