Darkness and light

Sitting before the computer screen, we gaze at the display of digital photographs, souvenirs of summer. A few of the images appear to have a sequential or serial character. I am trying to make you laugh, so I click, click, click, one image after the next. We throw them up on the screen, viewing them at first simultaneously, then one at a time, but quickly. Your shoulders jerk back and forth; the laughing mouth lights up the image then quickly evaporates as we move forward then backward, forward and backward again, symmetrically, through the series, replacing one image with the next as quickly as possible. It is so awkward, still, we exclaim, ‘Look! It's like a movie!’ Yet, it is not quite like a movie because the movement is too slow, too jerky. Its not true animation, not a continuous sequence of moving images. It remains a set of discrete images, images that influence one another, images that have their effect on us, but not quite like a film whose continuity is made possible by the minutely differentiated, sequential attitudes of the frames that make it up – twenty four immobile frames per second. Moreover, as we click through the photographs, one or another in the array stops us. ‘Ah,’ you exclaim, ‘that one is you.’ The slideshow stops abruptly; you survey the image, a pure contingency – one that does not interest me at all.