Jake Platt
Entropy is a question of homogeneity and heterogeneity, ultimately leading toward the former but along the way creating a world of variations of assorted subtlety. Photographs are such a case: ubiquitous and numerous, they constitute an entire world even as they vainly attempt to depict another one. A photographs proper occupation is to produce an experience of difference before it yields to equivalence. It is not a refutation or an exception to the mass of data and attendant noise that is constantly present to us, but an attempt to live in it, acknowledge it, make use of it. “An object that gives in is actually stronger than one which resists, for which reason it also permits the opportunity to be oneself in a new way.”
Through photographs I am able to have information regarding things geographically, temporally, spatially distant. Whole worlds can be created from the inaccuracies and abstractions of images. This cartography is a simulacrum even as it differs from Borges map. It does not become such after having represented the world so accurately that no discernment can be made, as the technological exactitude of the lens might lead us to believe, but because it represents the world poorly or not at all. This map is full of universals and generalizations and a precarious lack of particulars, these having been beaten and blunted or carried along under streams of consciousness, becoming smooth and old like so many pebbles.