Digital traces

Anyone that knew me while I was studying my MA would know that documentation is a hot topic for me. I think it's because, personally, it extends beyond performance; documentation of live art represents the same debates that we have around documenting our own lives. We take photos, we write diaries (or blogs), we film things - all in a bid to capture the traces of life that we will never re-live or experience again. In many ways, I think documentation reminds us of how precious and fragile the passing of time is, and also how we frame these documents in order to remember the past times and to echo some kind of rememberance in the face of our mortality.

I have to say that I am a terrible documenter. And I think sometimes this is through choice. The reason being that occasionally I think life is meant to be lived in this manner, with only memories left at the end rather than bits and pieces of paper and film and photo. However, some nights I panic. I panic and I think about ll the ordinary, average days that I can't remember and have faded into oblivion and I want to reclaim all of them. I want to be able to recall any given date at any given time and yet my memory fails me. I just have flashes of things that seemed so poignant and alive at the time. I am saddened by the limited capacity of the brain and wonder what happens to all those lost days.

Recently, I went to the end of my sent e-mails and they started in 2002. I re-read a few choice ones and I laughed - remembering that day I thought I had forgotten, but was stored somewhere in my cranium. And then suddenly I thought about all the tweets I'd ever made, or comments on Facebook, or on threads on internet forums and I thought about all of our digital traces embedded in the internet. It's like we all have an ethereal digital soul floating around in the binary world and yet, if technology keeps up to date with the ability to archive this, it seems a bit more concrete and solid than the memories that pass us by.

Whether we like it or not, we're all scattering our digital traces through the world every day and, by default, it seems a more consistent way of documenting one's life than any other.