A Moment, An Image, A Tool, and A Loss.

This is the road home for me every day when I come home from work. Because I am currently capturing my life in a picture - a - day - blog I am always thinking that I should be collecting anything that is remotely beautiful OR meaningful.  And then I sometimes think that if a moment is particularly NORMAL and doesn't seem in any way beautiful or meaningful, then I should probably capture THAT moment, too.  Which is what happened when I snapped this photograph of Northbound Market Avenue. 

Then I thought WAIT! I could ALSO take a reverse angle.

So I did.  And then I was thinking that by doing so, I had interpolated a subject space for you, dear reader.

You had BECOME my steering wheel.

Rather, what I mean to say, is that IF you have a 3D printer, and if you print both of these pictures together and let the machine do the interpolating, you will automatically BE in the position of the steering wheel.  In this moment (a moment that has long since passed for me.  I've since then, cooked and eaten pork chops and couscous, entertained friends on the patio, taken a two mile walk and funded and promoted a kickstarter project), you will be suspended there between me and what I see (or saw).

I wonder even if you'll be able to escape?  I hadn't really thought things through BEFORE I took the pictures, or maybe I wouldn't have tinkered so carelessly with time/space continuua.  

The other day my friend Emily who is not, generally, a selfie-picture-taking kind of person...(Not that there's anything wrong with it.)...took a "Selfie" in honor of the last day of her twenties.  I'm not sure if she plans on NOT having any photographs documenting her thirties or forties and so on?  Or if she just felt like (and justifiably so) youth and vitality are generally lost once one hits their thirtieth birthday. 

But it made me think about what it means to live in The Age of the Selfies.  What dangers lurk around the documentary urge and aesthetic ambitions that now seize most of our hearts several (or more) times a day?  Will the weight of documentation at some point outweigh the value of living?  Will people choose to not live because the evidence of who they are, how they are, is so overwhelming? 

The elevation of every moment (through the endless flow of pictures) threatens the possibility that ANY moment could offer us a precipice or a vantage point.  The flood of images threatens the likelihood that we will be able to see anything at all with fresh eyes.  

THANKFULLY, 3D printing (and technological devices in general) will surely save us from so banal a fate.  Happily, we'll find modes of escape and instruction as we discover and adapt the tools that come to us, faster than we can consider their implications.  I'm sure we're heading for a happy ending.  (After all, it's in all the movies.)