The advent of digital technologies of representation does not call the arrival of a new pictorial age, but rather it presents the fulfillment of the initial promise of photography, hindered by technical inadequacies that digital has over come. It is not that the camera preserves the passing moment to endow the future with a sense of history, but rather it is a reaffirmation of presence. The document is the ironic detritus of the photographic process, it is incidental to it, not integral. The possibility of instant viewership, of instant broadcast affirms the subject’s undergoing of experience, or rather makes experience possible as it represents it within the spatial and temporal coordinates of the event in its duration. As such history is reduced to instant past and makes the fantasy of novelty possible. No one remembers the casualties of last month’s war. It is in the absence of history that politics can maintain a pretence of a reductive outline of difference that only can be comprehended outside of historical context. In the absence of the possibility for exchange of experience that followed the decline of the art of storytelling, the digital livestream of life represents the sharing of experience immediately rendered obsolete post-live-broadcast.
FNA Presence Documents 