We are used to experiencing life in rectangular format - television, the cinema, books, computer screens, train/taxi/car/bus windows; half of everything we see is through a makeshift frame. For want of a better phrase; let's call this 'the rectangular phenomenon'.
We're used to this but it's not exactly natural. After all, to my knowledge cave men and women didn't peer out of a UPVC window frame as the world passed by, let alone lounge about in front of the television or scour the Internet for the latest animal skin accessories. For us though, the situation is pretty different - many of our everyday experiences are filtered through the rectangular format.
Other than the picture frame itself, and the window - which has been around in some shape or form for hundreds of years; anything frame-like tends to be modern. Only in the last couple of hundred years have television, cinema, cars, and eventually the computer all become popular: and we've had to adapt pretty quickly. During this time we also started to look through one of the biggest contributors to the rectangular phenomenon of all: the camera view finder.
I suppose what this means is that after regularly absorbing messages, communication, and entertainment in a pre-framed manner, we now take naturally to carrying out the framing process ourselves. Sort of like an evolutionary process. It's not unrelated that industries cashing in on the rectangular phenomenon are booming; and younger generations have been reared on their products, which capitalise on simultaneous advances in technology. Photography itself is more user friendly than ever before, which probably adds to the ease with which so many people take to the medium.
The question is... how on earth have we come this far in so little time. How is it so natural to communicate in this way - via the rectangle. How is it that we are preoccupied with framing the goings on around us - so as to document, savour, and reproduce our experiences. And how have we come to deem documentation of the event to be as crucial as actually experiencing it?
0 comments:
Post a Comment