(3:30)

     Jonathan Crary: “During the late 1820‘s the Belgium scientist Joseph Plateau also conducted a wide range of experiments with afterimages, some of which cost him his eyesight due to staring directly into the sun for extended periods.  By 1828 he had worked with a Newton color wheel, demonstrating that the duration and quality of retinal afterimages varied with the intensity, color, time, and direction of stimulus.  He also made a calculation of the average time that such sensations lasted -- about a third of a second.  What is more, his research seemed to confirm the earlier speculations of Goethe and others that retinal afterimages do not simply dissipate uniformly, but go through a number of positive and negative states before vanishing.  He made one of the most influential formulations of theory of ‘persistence of vision’:

          ‘If several objects which differ sequentially in terms of 

           form and position are presented one after the other to

           the eye in very brief intervals and sufficiently close

           together, the impressions they produce on the retina

           will blend together without confusion and one will

           believe that a single object is gradually changing form

           and position.’ “

      from:  Jonathan Crary   Techniques of the Observer  1996   p:107-109

... and I posit:

     “Whenever forms of visual media are presented to the eye for extended periods of time, regardless of interval sequencing, impressions in the body and brain will blend these into reality without confusion, and one will believe them to change form and position.”

       In short, an essential process of contemporary language is digital-visual production.  And through this unreflexive ineptitude we are killing our ‘selves’ with our own production.

     The young woman in this video is willfully re-mediating herself into afterimage form...into thingness.  Alone in her darkened room, she speaks directly to her flesh-and-pixel composite-self.  She does not do this abstractly to some un-present, un-knowable receiver, but directly to a sequential on-screen image of her ‘self’.  Transformation is now complete.  Her ‘impression’ is now fully dis-indexed, flattened, manipulated and dispersed for consumption, equalizing it in value to any other appearance. 

                            Likeness = Nothingness.

     By doing so, both young women transgress into ever deeper realms of afterimage, well beyond any collateral loss of language.  Indeed, we are witnessing a willful killing of subjectivity.  (I guess that makes this a snuff film.)

     With this violent act, both content and consequence are equally voided.  We may now do with her as we do with ‘things’ --as she does with her ‘self’-- eventually blending her likeness with all other seeable images, which sequentially changes her form and position through technological persistence.  All it takes is about a third of a second.  It is why we treat humans exactly as we do our images...like shit.  We are blinded by looking directly into the sun. 

     Indeed, we are all now floating in the liminality of afterimage, simply going through a number of positive and negative states before vanishing.