Is your short attention span a moral failing?
On weekends, when I feel like staying in out of Fear and not self-preservation, I try to remind myself that the purpose of living is to live. In The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, he says that you should live the type of life where art is “inevitable.”
There is a man who I talk to on the sidewalk sometimes. He told me about early filmmaking processes and how you used to physically cut the film or how they used to rotate the entire setup while filming to keep the light. I told him how much I love the Library of Congress Thomas Edison film archives. He told me that when they started stringing more reels of film together, they used to be worried that people’s attention spans wouldn’t be long enough to sit for 20 minutes.
I looked up what the first Edison film was. It was a 3-5 second clip of a man sneezing.
The first Edison films were all of people doing things that already occurred in the real world. There was no plot, no fictionalizing. That came later when people weren’t interested in this realistic films called ACTUALITIES.
So now, I tell you that the first films were essentially lifestyle TikToks. 3-5 seconds of staged realism.
So be more graceful with yourself. The doomsday narrative around tech is, I would argue, self-determining.
You can watch a man sneezing, but you also must sneeze. We can watch one another living, but we also must live.
So, when you have the choice to watch or to live…
OTHER THINGS ON MY MIND
‘One things today of Speculative Realism and it various protagonists’ arguments that a loss of depth in the human subject is necessary in philosophy and beyond questioning the authenticity of authorship that preoccupied artists and curators in Endgame — that human beings are no more profound than anything else in the world. Moreover, the argument that we may produce our own “new reality” conjures not only recent dialogues in art championing “celebration” as an alternative for critique, but also widespread fears in media that we live in a “post-truth” world. In fact, Post Human’s very mapping of an idea onto this group of artistic practices—offering a narrative derived not from the works’ internal structures but instead from the surrounding culture—seems a corollary of its very proposition that people no longer act with any sense of interiority and that, as Deitch would say, “self-identity… is dependent on how one is perceived by others, as opposed to a deeply rooted sense of inner direction.”’
- pg 68, from “GAMING REALITY” by Tim Griffin
OTHER THINGS ON MY MIND
Tonight, paid Literatis on our Substack will be sent a reflection on my relationship with Crime and Punishment and my own attention span with a couple of prompts to engage. This is for our pre-game for the next book club book, The Idiot!
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