September 17th, October 1st, 2nd, and 4th, 2022
At this point, I was using my Sony Mavica as much if not more than my professional Sony a7iii. The converging trend of liminal space art with my increasingly blunt, candid photography seemed destined to be a parallax slowly closing in onto one fixed point. Much like the Vaporwave genre, the liminal space movement articulated an unspoken reality that always existed in the ideas surrounding my art. As was the case before I discovered this genre, I dreamed of the same surreal, vacant architecture, same lonely classrooms and endless meadows, but now I had an insatiable desire to photograph within the dream space, more specifically with my floppy disk camera. In the waking world, I had such a bad habit of neglecting to bring a camera with me when opportunities arose that this frustration carried over into these dreams. I would find myself witnessing amazing vistas with no way to photograph. I had to reinforce the habit of bringing a camera around when I was awake so that I could train my sleeping self to do the same. Even so, my frustration could be just as bitter. I might become aware of my dream and feel upset knowing that no amount of shooting would bring these photographs into the real world. I'd sometimes shoot regardless, hoping through some dream logic that by sheer exertion, I might will these photographs into reality. Drunk off the nectar of sleep, I often covet these deluded hopes of transmuting sleep matter into wake matter.
Apart from the standard empty corridors and closed playgrounds, I found the Mavica was great to bring to parties and concerts where the overwhelming strobe lights in the damp, seedy atmosphere lent itself to these messy candids. It was also such an absurd camera that it often caught the attention of the artistically-inclined (that or I would forcibly bring it up). I suppose I could say it was a good icebreaker if I had any skill in carrying a conversation to begin with.
The photographs in this album are held together in a single floppy disk at around 1.45MB. For context, I would not be able to fit a single JPG from my smartphone onto its memory. The limitations of old computer hardware is amazing to think about in relation to our massive file sizes today. Even more strange is to stumble across neglected files on used disks that date back as far as 1995. As someone who is old enough to have aged alongside the internet, but too young to remember a time before it existed, it's strange to witness digital objects older than myself. The Digital with a capital "D" feels too suspended in time to be perceived as a relic. A digital relic pre-dating oneself may perhaps be comprehensible to a younger generation, but I suppose I'm not quite young enough to have that perspective.