Analogue
Hearts: Leica Q2
“It's been a tough century for modesty, craftsmanship and tenderness.”
(David Bayles)
My technology leaves me searching for the simple, tactile sensation of physical things.
I really enjoy and appreciate my digital devices; I feel connected, I’m able to work, make friends and acquaintances, and speak with my family even though they may be far away. But as I feel into my stir-craziness, the mediation of life, work, relationships and conversations through a screen is slowly dislocating me.
In the click of a button or a tap on the glass, I can span the globe, travel timezones and geographies. My mind travels yet my body stays motionless, tethered to digital imagery.
It’s a prescription for madness.
The technology of our age has become our new faith; few understand the arcane mechanisms that underpin our digital existence yet we trust it with our lives. But instead of relying on the digital micro-voltages of zero and one, and the thin sliver of electrical light that has become my abstracted window on the world, I yearn for something more constant, substantial and solid. So I’ve started to print my photographs again. It isn’t the same as sloshing chemicals and paper in a darkroom but the print still magically appears before me and I have something to touch and hold.
As I touch the printed image, my engagement shifts, from a relationship with a digital cipher to something more of my world. Instead of an abstracted, critical engagement with processed, computer generated pixels, I experience the physical prints as part of me and who I am. Landscapes, flowers, earth and soft grasses gather texture and sound, people speak and move, country backroads make a new invitation, elusive moments recover their magic and follow me as I recover my embodied presence in the world. I recall once more the physical touch and wonder of discovering the crafted, hand-made hearts in this image.
I long to touch my world, to return to my senses as I wander on my bicycle feeling the wind push against me, or walk all day among trees, feeling the forest floor crackle under my feet.
In a digital world, I can transcend time and location as I offer instant comment or expertise. Yet am I the only one wondering if there is a ‘post-digital,’ analogue alternative or whether a less ambitious but richer, sensual, crafted world would attract us?
As our technologies continually strive for faster, better, efficient, more intelligent, might we find ways to differently, more humanely ‘get in touch’ with ourselves, each other and our world?
As we renegotiate our lives, I’m beginning to think that the tenderness of touch is radical.
Notes:
My opening quotation is from ‘Art and Fear’ by David Bayles and Ted Orlando. Another favourite quote from the book relates to the academic world, a 7 year old daughter asks her father what he does at work; “I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?””
I’d like to acknowledge Paul King of The Beyond Partnership for kindly seeding the notion of ‘tenderness’ in my thinking during a recent conversation.
For a deeper dive into the phenomenology of perception, you might enjoy this dazzling article by David Abram, where he notes that coming to our senses ‘functions here as a kind of glue, binding one’s individual nervous system into the larger ecosystem.’ Alternatively, his book ‘Becoming Animal’ will guide you in an magical exploration of ‘the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing earth.’
