We as modern hominids are addicted to screens. My friend perry didnt have a phone for the first week he was in Taiwan. I had my new iPhone and was looking at it 24 7 and I find him constantly staring over my shoulder. I told him to stop peaking at my private convo. he said he wasnt, and that he just wanted to look at a screen. Even upon entering a new city like Bangkok (where this picture was taken) I find myself perceiving not the roads, the people, the shops, but I gravitates towards whatever screen I happen to come across while riding inside a taxi. I read a theory about us being attracted to screens because we are visual animals - that the pronounced movements, colors, and shapes inside screens are analogous to glittering snake skins and sprinting prey, and that we are evolved to gravitate intentionality towards these things. Maybe. Who knows. Maybe its true from a biological stand point. But phenomenologically, screens are not just the representation of the portal to another world, mind, time and space, but it is the representation of the virtual aka modern digital civilization. The closer you are to the heart of modernity (NYC for instance) the more screens you can bare witness. The further away (when you move towards the ghettos of NYC, African Safari) the less screens there are. Its almost as if the virtuals pile up on top of each other, becoming denser and more real until eventually, with virtual reality becoming full blown, and we enter it completely. But keep in mind that the African Safari, (or anywhere else thats perceived by anyone with or without an actual screen) nevertheless has a screen - the screen of the mind that gives rise to reality as perceived. In other words, the mind itself is a screen - the movie player inside your head that plays anything you imagine or sees is the most fundamental screen in your reality. If you look around, people are all very eager to enter into their iPod, iPhone, computer, TV, movie screens. They are glued to their screens as if they are waiting in line to enter virtual reality. This is a strange phenomenon because we are now at a strange point in history where we are in the in-between state: half way in between the real and the virtual. Once we enter the virtual completely, there will again be no more screens. We will be back to square one - into a new primitive future world where no physical screens exists simply because we no longer need them. We would come full circle to a singularity of One Absolute Screen/MInd/Reality. instagram/being_frank_yang
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 07:51:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015