Ghost Stories — Futures Exchange — Medium
The photographs we take of ourselves, or have taken of us, are the visual record of our existence in the world. However, we are finding that occasionally they will go on to live lives without us, in darker, or more abstracted places than we ever imagined. Our images become involuntary nomads, displaced across the internet to places we don’t predict, permit, or have knowledge of.
I remember last year the proposed change to Instagram’s terms and services, where the images that you took would automatically become the company’s property, apparently allowing them to sell them on to third-parties for use in advertising. The public backlash was enormous, with many leaving the service to rival image-sharing websites, justifiably upset at this alleged abuse of their images. The main fear, aside from the breach of intellectual property rights, was that our faces, our friends, our memories, would be associated with something that we hadn’t consented to. They would be displaced from our own, mediated context, into another world with its own environment, all out of our control.
We don’t really know where our images are going when we take them, often we don’t think that far. We don’t see the extent to which our image can be abstracted until we find them in the wrong place. When we take photographs of ourselves, or allow for a photograph of ourselves to be taken, we don’t imagine it will be transferred into a place it doesn’t belong, seen by those we never imagined to see it. If we live online, and openly so, then this is where the others live — the replicated ghosts of ourselves, with new meanings, new territories, and new troubles.
origamiaround
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
janainaart
