I feel that this need to buy the newest camera is symptomatic of a sickness in our society. It's a sickness that encompasses far more than cameras, and is an intimate binding between technology and consumerism, driven by aggressive capitalism.
It's a subject I explored in my
Digital Archaeology project.
Here's the short essay that accompanied the project:
Digital Archaeology
This project came about from a recent experience: my video player broke so I asked a friend if I could use hers. She laughed: didn’t I know that VHS video was long dead!? She had thrown hers out years ago. I was taken aback: I consider myself a bit of a technology geek, yet I had not noticed the demise of the video cassette – which once, not so long ago, had a place in every home. This incident made me think about our relationship with consumer electronics.
Tool-making defines our species, but the pace of technological change today is unprecedented. This revolution is exemplified by the mobile phone – no other technology in the entire history of our species has spread so widely, or so fast: at the start of the 1990s, less than 0.25% of the world’s population owned a mobile phone, but today this figure has risen to a staggering 75% (five billion handsets).
However, consumer electronics quickly become obsolete. Two iconic products dramatically illustrate this short lifespan: there have been 13 generations of Canon’s flagship compact camera, the PowerShot G, since its release in 2000 – each model becoming obsolete after only about a year; and the first iPad, released just three years ago in 2010, has been superseded by four newer generations.
This fast turnover of technologies and electronics has created serious problems for society, three highly visible ones being the ever-increasing volume of electronic waste; diminishing natural resources; and the widening gap between those who cannot or do not use current technology – the "digital divide".
We are simultaneously in awe of and intimidated by today’s advanced devices: we want to possess them, but fear being possessed by them; we are schizophrenics, both technophiles and technophobes.
The photographs in Digital Archaeology depict iconic consumer electronics paradoxically of archaeological age. Despite their very recent manufacture, these devices appear seemingly decades old, perhaps centuries. Electronics as archaeology is a contradiction: how can 21st-century technology be as ancient as the photographs suggest? This dichotomy is heightened by the intended presentation of the images: displayed on light boxes, there is an allusion to the marketing of these highly desirable products. The project aims to provoke questions about time, technology and obsolescence and the consumer – and on the role of the increasingly visible LCD screen in our culture.
