Pandemic Zoom Self Portraits With You

Unless you are an incredibly lucky person, there is a chance that the last year and a half has hit you hard. Many of us have worked from home, and that was indeed what we (as Tea & Water) had predicted many years ago. But what we should have also thought of is that while working from anywhere (WFA) is more efficient and better for the environment, the need to still meet and see each other is strong with this species. And to stare, observe, monitor or suffer in a corporate context seems to be deeply ingrained in many kinds of business on this planet.

How many Zoom calls have you been on this week alone? (Or Microsoft Team calls for some of us.) How many Zoom calls have you been on in the last 15 months? And how well did you and your brain deal with the slight out-of-synch nature of everything you experienced on those back to back top back sessions? How was it to have rows of people stare at you and themselves as if you were all trapped in a perpetual opening sequence for the Muppet Show? (I am that old). How on earth did you handle all that?

To make sense of it, I took pictures. Of course I did. I have been taking and making pictures a lot as long as I can remember. And so naturally I had to record this crazy, exhausting experience, to survive it. If you happened to speak with me over zoom in the last year or so, then I might have taken a picture of us together. It was to remember this very moment, but also to somehow create the fertile ground for something I could possibly control better than the hair on my head. I had to create.

I am approaching about 1000 shots from various Zoom calls in what is a so called "input file". That is a series of images that are used to feed a machine learning algorithm. I then ask the AI to make sense of the images for me, a little bit the way we have all tried to make sense of the life and work we experienced on our screens. And because AI is not human, and does not care about us being human and because I didn’t want it to care about the individual faces in this particular instance, the images that we have developed together feel just the way the last year and a half have felt. It is a visual world that somehow moves between the abstract Gerhard Richter Rakelbilder and some of the Francis Bacon portraits before they were finished.

They are melted, mysterious and it is a bit of traps for the human brain. You think you can recognize fellow humans? Souls? Emotions? Wait, but it is all a bit of an illusion. A bit like trying to message someone on Linkedin in the hopes that a good positive response. Is it a hello, is it a sales pitch? What do we see? It’s ghosts mostly. Most in our own heads.

We will scroll past this moment in history soon. I can already see my feed flare up again with the familiar toxic-candy-colored humble brags about achievements and fantastical awards. Reaching for new heights in world that is literally on fire.

Photography is by definition a nostalgic medium. It is like an angel flying backwards. Quite good at observing what has passed, but not so good at picturing the future. A bit like data. They seem to be good friends. The know-it-alls so many want to hang out with. Well, data have been the much more popular kids recently. (Yes, it’s plural.) Everyone loves data. Photography has been treated much worse. Look, we all have cameras and it’s the cameras making the pictures, right? (Why aren’t data coming to the rescue? Perhaps they aren’t friends after all?)

But looking at these images I can somehow see a tiny bit where this is all heading. They are photographs and data and also good old human determination and suffering. Just as the first glimpses of Mars were blurry little pixelated squirts of information, so are these photographs just the beginning of the observations of a place that deserves more of our concious focus. Not screens.

I am thinking of our inner conscious selves. The way we look at ourselves and see ourselves. The way how our imagination has the ability to connect to a much larger consciousness, to see and feel and be.

So maybe these ghosts and the ones of Linkedin are related. Send me a message. I would like to find out what you were thinking.

And, since this is Linkedin: I am humbled by the creation in your head. We did it! Now select a preprogrammed reaction, or operate a keyboard to compose your "own".