So my iMac has an option for the screen saver to display my photos as pixelated images -- you know the kind where a photo is graded by its dominant color and then those colors are used to pixelate another image, in this case other photos. They cycle around, and pixelation resolving into a single image, then that image shrinking and becoming a pixel in another image, on and on. Every time I load new photos onto my computer they enter into the rota.
It's fascinating and a bit freaky. I could sit and watch it for hours. The picture I took of a department store window in Honolulu last month becomes part of a Santa hat. The purple eggplants at the Farmer's market fuse into the Easter flowers at Tesco in Leicester two years ago. The blue Pacific becomes the blue of Jeffrey's shirt when he was little. Sometimes I forget it's there, and I am surprised to look up and see Greg smiling from his 60th birthday party, or Cauchy napping next to the Christmas creche, or students from my old afternoon class. The randomness seems to parallel the randomness of my memories ambushing me -- provoking sudden giggles or tears.
I'm planning to do a major scanning of old photos (when I get a scanner that works and figure out how to use it) and I wonder what it will be like to have all those images from before the digital age enter into the pattern: Black and whites and old polaroids and some of those really old sepia tones.
It's my life, pixelated: all the little bits focusing and unfocusing, blending to make a pattern; the meaning is all in my head.
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