Ai Weiwei is compelling.
I am fascinated by sea turtles. They have a one in one thousand chance of surviving to adulthood and if they survive long enough they voyage back to the same beach where they were born to lay their eggs. Imagine the hundreds of eggs just sitting there in a pit covered by sand, hidden. When the baby turtles emerge all odds are against them, nothing there to protect them. When we are born we have a whole team of people in a sterile room waiting to protect us, keep us warm, welcome us and many of us rarely go back to the place we were born for any reason let alone to have babies.
My virtual internet reality is freaking me out. My phone goes on the internet too, it’s always in my pocket, at my bedside, the internet is everywhere with me. I have all the information, but yet I know nothing and am essentially completely stupid. There are very few things I know and I fear I’m starting to forget those things because after all, why remember? I can just look it up. It is as if I do not exist without the internet. I have a profile and pictures, and my name appears in various places and that makes me this virtual thing. If something is not on the internet it feels like it does not exist but yet there are entire people made of flesh, blood, hairs, wrinkles, pimples, problems, laughter that really do exist. I can see them, touch them, talk to them, they are real. Where are they? They are in the world, are they more real than the internet? What about those people I used to know? Or that girl I saw a few times? Are they real in the memories I have of them or are they real in their default profile picture? Who are all of you? I have “681 facebook friends” but we are mostly unacquainted. The only memory I have of you is your printed name on my screen, something clever you might have written. I see my “681 facebook friends” much more than I see my living breathing friends because they’re always in my pocket updating their status and sharing photos and information. What is real? The people I wish I could talk to are not on these screens, they’re not the people looking back at me in that photo. Where IS everybody?
I found this the other day. The bookseller told me it was part of a rare series of pamphlets published about different topics. It immediately peaked my interest and I felt a burning hope that I’d go home, google “great bear pamphlet series” and nothing would come up, maybe just some pictures of bears, and that I would hold in my hand something great and real and clever that exists in the world and not on the internet. But alas, I typed in “great bear pa-” and there it was in the f*ing predictive search function, “great bear pamphlet series” - pictures and all, I felt so violated and sad and kind of hopeless. They even show the cover of the one I bought, “The Art of Noise” and the coolest picture from the inside of the pamphlet - “Luigi Russolo in 1913 with his mechanical orchestra.”
i don’t know, i don’t know.
