Incident Reports
1. Image: Starting line of the race
At the starting line Deleuze and Guattari offer me a picture of psychoanalysis. Never mind a cure, it’s all about agility. It’s not about improvement, it’s about being able to keep moving. You’re a piano player and your tone is not perfect, your timing comes and goes but you manage to stumble through it, you find a way to keep the music alive. It’s like entering a race not hoping to win, you’re just looking for a way to take the next step. How can I show up at the starting line? How can I keep the music alive?
2. Image: dance party
3. Image: watchers in mall
Last month while I was riding my bike back from the market I was hit by a car. Or that’s what the report said, I don’t really remember. It’s part of the life I can’t really remember anymore. Nobody here can. We like to get together at the mall where our picture is projected to other groups in Tokyo or Madrid, where people have also lost their memory. The doctor encouraged me to come to the mall and learn how to see again. No one learns how to see by themselves, she said, you need company.
4. Image: Christi-an and Rose on balcony
The hospital gave me a camera and said I should try to make at least one picture every day, one minute per shot. They said it was part of my rehab, like wearing a cast or going to therapy. But no matter how many buttons I push the camera frame is always a rectangle. It’s a format that’s good for sunsets and hockey games, but if we lived in a real democracy the frame would be square, every side would be perfectly equal.
5. Image: Lana puts on a beard
My friend Lara says she’s already tired of being a man. Always running the show, holding the weight, writing all the books, ruling every country in the world, making all the important art…
She loves the fact I don’t expect her to pledge allegiance to her old gender, she wants me to give forgetting workshops to her friends, so they can be her friends again.
6. Image: magnolia tree and cameras
My secret, my secret life, is all in my hands, I can’t let you photograph that. Every picture of me is about the way I can’t let you make a picture of these secret hands.
7. Image: kite on beach
I think she’s showing me that the kite is our personality, it’s the self blown around by the winds of government and science. The only reason it doesn’t fly away is because it’s held down by the image, the act of making pictures.
8. Image: Two Canada geese
I didn’t mean to flirt with this Canada goose. I try to be careful around couples, they can be so sensitive, but as soon as she does that thing with her leg I know she’s showing off for me. And even though I try to fight the impulse, even though I know that it’s just wrong, I’m raising my leg up too. When her companion finally looks over in my direction she looks like she’s seen it all before. I guess they have an understanding.
9. Image: house demolition
There are two kinds of artists, maybe they’re attached to the two kinds of pleasure. The first artist likes to make things, they put things together, they add colour and line. The second artist likes to take things apart. When I look at the end of that crane I can’t help feeling that I want to be touched like that, with that kind of sensitivity, that delicacy, that openness. I want to be a house and have every brick lovingly removed in a striptease built for two. And please take your time, we’ve got all day.
10. Image: Niagara Custom lab, repair
When I tell my doctor that I prefer not remembering a thing from my former life she starts rolling up her sleeves as if to say: we’ve got work to do. She wants me to make a series of pictures that will become the building blocks of my new personality. They should be flexible enough to function in many different kinds of situations. They should allow me to survive the end of expectations or to fall in love with someone that isn’t a tree or a dog Think of them as the basement of my new house, she told me. The memories I’ll want to share on a first date. The final glimmer before all the lights go out.
11. Image: CN Tower and Jesus
My doctor told me that seeing is about taking away everything from the visual field that doesn’t hold your interest. It seems there’s always too much information, so seeing always means seeing less than what is in front of you. Or at least, it’s about making choices, sitting in the judge’s chair and deciding: you’re the star witness and you’re invisible.
12. Image: raccoon in tree
I’m in a slightly overcrowded café right now with three people that assure me we’ve met many times in my old life, but what they don’t know is that sometimes I don’t see with my eyes anymore, only with the camera. I can only see what my camera sees. While they are busy covering up our time together with conversation, my eyes are taking in the whole neighbourhood. I guess I’m still worried about what my doctor told me, that only erasing makes seeing possible. Every time I look I can’t help wondering: what am I erasing now? Who am I leaving out, who doesn’t matter, who is being left behind?
13. Image: night film shoot
14. Image: technicians set up much music stage at night
The city without memory is a city of screens. I used to have a face, now I have a place where you can project your happiest moments. When I bring her this shot my doctor asks: where are you in this picture, and then a memory returns to me, my first kiss.
15. Image: naked bike ride prep
It was such a shock discovering my fantasies on porn websites. It made me feel helpless somehow, like the most important part of me had left my body. I think it means that my fantasies had been realized and even recorded long before I got here. My private life is a crowd scene.
16. Image: roller blade girls
My doctor tells me: try to point your camera towards groups, see how they behave, look at the way their movements are part of a choreography, a dance. The way they move together tells you something about: how do we get along? How do we fill the space with each other?
17. Image: Black Creek Pioneer Village reconstruction
After the reassurance of murder the actors offer us the miracle of resurrection. Isn’t memory just another form of resurrection? And how to escape the feeling that memory is also a kind of playacting? In order to reappear, the past needs to get dressed up in someone else’s clothes.
And these public memories require money because the past is just another frontier of capital.
18. Image: Lana in subway stop
19. Image: Taravat on the phone
Taravat tells me that in Iran the buses and streetcars are segregated, men and women are kept separate, though if women want to, they can ride in the men’s car. She did it only once and every passenger stared at her like a zoo animal. She said: it was like being eaten by their eyes. What does it mean to organize a culture around this kind of eating? She assures me it happens here too, but in a quieter way, people eat pictures with their eyes, but the catch is, the more you eat, the hungrier you get.
20. Image: Marina photographs at Chinese gate
Here is the entrance to the city’s second Chinatown, an archway that says thank you to the 17,000 workers who built the transnational railway. They did the most difficult and dangerous jobs, worked longer hours for less pay than the white comrades. But as soon as the railway was finished the Canadian government put a hundred dollar tax on each Chinese worker so they wouldn’t stay. When I see the gate today I can’t help wondering: is it a reminder or a cover up? Where is this doorway leading us?
21. Falun Gong woman meditation
Instead of filling the streets with marchers and banners, the quiet meditators of Falun Gong sit on the sidewalk, their eyes closed so that they can imagine a place where the state cannot find them. What kinds of privilege come together to create pictures like this one, and how can I make them visible, how could I put them inside the frame where they belong?
22. Image: dead pigeon on bridge
When I brought this picture in to show my doctor, she wasn’t encouraged, though professional training required her to ask: what do you see here? There were four billion passenger pigeons in North America, their flocks so thick they would blacken the sky when they flew by. But in just a couple of decades hunters wiped out every single bird, and they became extinct. It’s the story I like to tell about myself and my city, the story behind my stories. Now you see it, now you don’t. Every hour three species become extinct.
23. Image: dog and car
24. Image: car wash
After the accident, it’s time to wash off all the traces, to start again clean. Behind the windshield I can see everything, in other words, this is a preparation for the computer, the self-surveillance machine we use to track every thought and movement. As the gap between rich and poor grows deeper so does the urgency to monitor the unexpected or unpredictable. My computer windshield shows me that voting for corporate power has already become the source of a new and terrifying kind of beauty.
25. Image: Layla eats bone
When I look at this standard poodle overcome with ordinary happiness I can’t help wondering: where is my bone? Where did my bone go? My daydream, my body, my beautiful animal life.
26. Image: Beescreen
27. Image: runners and train
I can feel the urge to jump onto the street and start running. I want to sign up and sing along, I want to join the team, the merger, the movement, but irony holds me back. When I look at all the shadowy joggers, I can’t help remembering a film in which the director runs in the very last hour of the day, as if time was running out, and then a title appears across his chest. It reads: This is a film about you. Not about its maker.
28. Image: train
29. Image: native dance
After I found this shot, I started looking for a camera that could say yes, the way we are saying yes here. Is there a camera that could make frames that would include everything, or is the whole point of the frame to cut between what can be seen and shared, and the other place, the invisible world, the world that can’t be shown.
30. Image: aquarium, shark tank, people crawl in tunnel
I can’t help wondering: are the sharks posing? Are the fish striking a pose?
There are two kinds of prisons here: the temporary funhouse and the other one that never ends.
Why does the one that goes on for the rest of your life feel so attractive, so necessary?
31. Image: aquarium, escalator, fish pass overhead
The difference between an artist and a tourist is that a tourist photographs everything they see, while an artist makes a record of the tourist photographing everything they see. The transparent walls and bright lights means that everything is on display and camera ready, before you take a picture, everything here is already a picture. The message is: the world is visible and transparent, available to the eye, and the pictures we make are part of the project of the surveillance state. Everything needs to be recorded, and everyone has to play their part.
32. Image: kids at aquarium
Is it possible to be a tourist of childhood, a tourist of your own memory? I want these kids to show me how to raise my arms in wonder, I want to copy every gesture they make, but I don’t do it until I get home, where I use these pictures as a kind of blueprint of the past. A skeleton key to the lives I might have had.
33. Image: rain on balcony
I wonder if I’m starting to fall in love with my doctor. It’s sort of cliché I know, but I can feel myself getting pulled in by cliché gravity. I’ve started feeling that I’m making these pictures only so that she can see them. After the accident I could walk into a café and hear everyone’s thoughts, but when it rains I can only hear her thoughts.
34. Image: rooftop swimming pool
Every shot lasts a minute, and sometimes a minute can last a long time. I’m hoping my doctor will say yes to me, to notice me even, but instead she keeps right on looking as if she’s the one in the waiting room. I want to ask her: What are you waiting for? but instead I put up the next picture. The movies I make for her are a way of telling her what I can’t say out loud. They’re about something that’s missing, something that can’t even be shown.
35. Image: clouds and sky
36. Image: Steve on roof with camera
I don’t know about you but I never get enough. I see one picture, and my appetite smiles for a moment, but then I want another one right away. I’m not sure how it works, but there’s a hunger called capitalism. The more I eat, the hungrier I get. The more pictures I make, the more I need to make. I understand only too well where all the holes in my body came from, what I don’t get at all, is how come everybody else feels the same way.
37. Image: mall shoppers overhead
And then the woman with the telephone appears. No, it’s not that one, she pauses a long time, or at least, long enough to bring back the number that’s going to change everything. And because it’s a private moment, because she is undergoing a shift that will cut her life into two parts: the one before the call, and the one after, she steps away from the frame, so that she can be by herself.
38. Image: silver Elvis
On the weekends I like to spray paint my clothes silver so I can be a reflection of every dream that passes me by. I’m the lone ranger, I’m the last man standing, I hold the silver ball of justice in my hand so you can see for yourself. Some people say I look like Elvis but it’s only because they can’t stop seeing him everywhere they go.
39. Image: ball in broken wood in water
40. Image: airplane turns around at magic hour
My doctor announces she has to take a trip and then waits for the reaction shot. When I don’t respond she says actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Can’t you say something? I confess to her for the first time that I’ve fallen in love with her and she seems pleased, though she never says so. She sits back as if she’s eaten a particularly satisfying breakfast. We might have looked at each for a minute or two before she glanced at her watch and nodded. Our session was over.
41. Image: Book City storefront closed
After my doctor leaves, six bookstores close in the city in as many weeks, mostly because it’s hard to compete with Amazon’s plantations. I had forgotten how to miss her until I came to this storefront.
Amazon workers pick up an order every 33 seconds and walk eleven miles per shift. Voting for Amazon means voting for a modern form of slavery. But it’s hard to resist when you can save three dollars on a book you really want.
42. Image: Chapters bookstore
Only blocks away from Book City another downtown store closes its doors for the last time. Reading is a way of drawing a line around the self, books are the border guards of a new territory. They remake the reader in their own image, now readers have a cover, and a dark interior life, a secret. The book invents privacy in a new way, along with the author, the unique work of art, originality, even the dream of psychology. What does it mean that these old forms are passing away, that the city can no longer support this picture of what a person is?
43. Image: Sally writing
This is my new friend Sally, we’re in the same program, only instead of making pictures she has to describe the scene that’s in front of her with words. She can hardly get them down fast enough. She’s decided to write about all the people that will see this picture later on. I can’t help asking her, but how do you know what they’ll be like? I can tell she doesn’t see me anymore though, her eyes are already fixed on her future audience, and then she starts writing down what they look like, as fast as she can.
44. Image: Kyo writing
Her name is Kyo and she assures me that if she stopped writing she would disappear. Only she doesn’t say it like that, she says, “As soon as we learn how to talk, we are spoken by language.” “Are you writing down what we’re saying to each now?” I can’t help asking her, because she doesn’t even pause when we meet, she just keeps right on scribbling away.
“No,” she answers, “I’m writing down the words we’re about to say.”
45. Image: Helen writes in coffee shop
When I met Helen in this hipster coffee shop I knew it was no coincidence, I didn’t even have to ask her who her doctor was. She told me she was writing about the invisible colour of whiteness that covers the entire culture so completely you can’t see it. I must have looked puzzled because she told me this joke. Two young fish are chatting away when an older fish drifts by. “How’s the water?” he asks, and one of the younger fish says, “Fine, just fine.” When the older fish is out of sight, the younger fish who hadn’t spoken was still pulled up into a question mark. “What is water?”
46. Chapters store closing
One minimum wage employee makes boxes to pack up the books they couldn’t sell. The rest of the staff are paralyzed behind the front desk and I’m sorry to say that I’m to blame. Because they work in a bookstore, they’ve never seen a camera before, I guess the world of books and the world of media are further apart than I thought. They’re on a mini-strike, no more work until the boss comes out and tells me to leave. How dare I make pictures of this dying literary culture, the notion of an interior self disappearing. We’re going to erase every step. We’re going to pack away the books so that no one will ever remember that a book ever existed. From now on it’s just ice cream and movies.
47. Image: sign smoke
When my doctor gets back from the conference I can’t help wondering if she’ll look at me like this, as a remnant from a lost culture, a barely visible sign that used to be so central to everyone’s life that no one saw it, until it was no longer readable. Can a word get lonely if no one says it out loud? Can a sentence die of shame? When a language dies, does it take with it certain ways of loving?
48. Image: water tower
49. Image: Regent Park tear down
When my doctor finally gave me the address I made her double check it, triple check it even. Are you sure? When I show up at the corner where I used to live it doesn’t give me the warm nostalgic glow we were both hoping for. I stand in front of the scene waiting for it all to come back to me, to feel those childhood memories rushing back in, but I feel more blocked than ever. Perhaps she’s right, that I’m simply repressing encounters that are too difficult to face, or that I’m too scared to admit. What happened here? What part did I play?
50. Image: Amy reads a letter in the greenhouse.
I write a love letter to my doctor, but because I don’t know how she’ll react, I start looking for a test audience. I ran into Amy at the botanical gardens and she kindly said yes. I study her face as if it was my doctor’s face and realize again how interchangeable we are.
51. Image: Steve under glass
This is the face of an artist, and as the philosophers in Led Zeppelin liked to say, it makes me wonder. My doctor says that before the accident, I was also an artist, I made motion pictures like this guy here. His name is Steve. When I ask him why he makes movies Steve tells me that he doesn’t have the strength to do nothing. The way he looks at me when he says it, like he swallowed an x-ray machine. It makes me wonder.
52. Image: Chase
How much testosterone do you need to make yourself a man? One injection per day, more or less. Chase lives in the place between genders, between his first life as a woman and his second as a man. Here he shows me how changes in the larger economic system are rooted in changes of gender, identity and pleasure, how the frontiers of these new bodies need to be created and managed. Science plants its flag inside the body, transforming depression into Prozac, erections into Viagra, fertility into the pill, women into men. Welcome to my body machine, my gender hack, my performance arena.
53: Image: Kerri reads Testo Junkie by Beatriz Preciado
What if I performed my private actions in public? Like my gender, my sexual preferences, even my reading. My friend Kerri is in touch with people around the world who have read the same book. They understand that the body is a book that is always being read by the state, it’s an archive of culture and politics. She tells me: you can always tell a book by its cover.
54. Image: John Price on phone behind optical printer
Before the computer, there was a machine that allowed you to make copies of pictures, not a Xerox machine, but a camera that could re-photograph movies one frame at a time. I am the ghost in your machine. In order to resist, I’m going to use your pictures against you. Let’s call it: audio visual judo.
55. Image: Mike at Charles Street adjusts microphone
My doctor sent me into the studio to record some new voice-overs to my old movies. She’s convinced that I’m going to say the same words, or something like the old words, only this time they’ll sound new and fresh. I love you, don’t ever let me go, please don’t leave me. She’s certain that when I start to speak, the oldest words will reappear again, and then I can stop trying to return to the body I used to have, the person I used to be, and meet her face to face.
56. Catherine reads Now Magazine, cover reads: The End of Gender
My doctor invites me over to her house, and when I ask her if that isn’t, you know, against the rules, she just smiles. It turns out that she’s not exactly a woman and not exactly a man. Can I call you they? When we get to her place, the doctor keeps arranging the two of us as if we were in a movie, and slowly I remember that I’ve been here before. I’ve sat at this table, I’ve read this newspaper, I’ve looked into that face. Everything feels familiar except my hands, though even they want to fall in love.
57. Image: DNA Theatre’s Boy Ballet
My doctor and I visit Hillar’s boy ballet because he says it will help me understand how men are made and not born. Every man is a construction site, built from the bricks of tribe pressures and family roles, chemical stews that are part of an ongoing performance. The more testosterone I take, the more of a man I become. It turns out that the body is the show that never ends.
58. Image: wrestling
My doctor and I hold hands while the man machines wrestle which feels strange because my hands aren’t my hands. My doctor says losing your memory means you only live twice. It’s deja voodoo. And then a whisper in my ear: I’m not your doctor.
59. Image: contact improv park group
How can I know myself if I can’t know you? How can I experience the weather, even the emotional weather, if you aren’t there too, watching the storm clouds roll in? This tired and broken body needs to be touched most of all. I need your hands, your torso, your cells to say yes whenever I get close enough to fail. Can you let me get close enough to fail? Can we practice falling together so that we can get back up and start over, as if we were the whole city, the whole province, learning how to walk again.
60. Image: street dance
61. Image: fishing
My doctor who it turns out isn’t my doctor likes to take me out here. She says that it’s almost time to stop making these pictures, they won’t be necessary much longer, perhaps I’ll need three or four more and then I’ll have all the new memories I’ll ever need to start my new life. We rub our synthetic parts together and mix chemistries. We make a stew out of the bacteria that survived each of the planet’s five extinctions. Moments of the past come back, like when we used to go out fishing, but only in places where there weren’t any fish. Hours would drift by, days of close attention and unexpected pleasures.
62. naked bike ride
We are every rider on every bike but you have to know this first of all: nudity is not naked. We haven’t come here to show you anything, we’ve arrived so that we can turn into each other. The city square, the agora, the place where strangers can tune up each other’s language and each other’s bodies. My doctor and I are also here, no longer separate, parts of the same body, the same multitude. During the day we’re karma chameleons and at night we turn into music.
63. choir choir choir sings karma chameleon 1
64. choir choir choir sings karma chameleon 2
Credits: Nobu Adilman, Marina Black, Catherine Bush, Sylvan Chaussee, Choir Choir Choir, Mike Hoolboom, Chase Joynt, Taravat Khalili, Niagara Custom Lab, Layla, Helen Lee, Sally Lee, Hillar Liitoja, Lana Lontos, Amy Manusow, Kyo Maclear, Lorne Marin, John Price, Rose Riccio, Kerri Sakamoto, Steve Sanguedolce, Christi-an Slomka, Scott Tuma, Vesper Zhang
At the starting line Deleuze and Guattari offer me a picture of psychoanalysis. Never mind a cure, it’s all about agility. It’s not about improvement, it’s about being able to keep moving. You’re a piano player and your tone is not perfect, your timing comes and goes but you manage to stumble through it, you find a way to keep the music alive. It’s like entering a race not hoping to win, you’re just looking for a way to take the next step. How can I show up at the starting line? How can I keep the music alive?
Last month while I was riding my bike back from the market I was hit by a car. Or that’s what the report said, I don’t really remember. It’s part of the life I can’t really remember anymore. Nobody here can. We like to get together at the mall where our picture is projected to other groups in Tokyo or Madrid, where people have also lost their memory. It’s almost like having a family, except no one sticks around long enough to get into a fight. The doctor encouraged me to come to the mall and learn how to see again. No one learns how to see by themselves, she said, you need company.
The hospital gave me a camera and said I should try to make at least one picture every day, one minute per shot. They said it was part of my rehab, like wearing a cast or going to therapy. No matter how many buttons I push the camera frame is always a rectangle. It’s a format that’s good for sunsets and football games, but if we lived in a real democracy the frame would be square, every side would be perfectly equal.
My friend Lara says she’s already tired of being a man. Always running the show, holding the weight, writing all the books, ruling every country in the world, making all the important art… She loves the fact I don’t expect her to pledge allegiance to her old gender, she wants me to give forgetting workshops to her friends, so they can be her friends again.
My secret, my secret life, is all in my hands, I can’t let you photograph that. Every picture of me is about the way I can’t let you make a picture of these secret hands.
I think she’s showing me that the kite is our personality, it’s the self blown around by the winds of government and science. The only reason it doesn’t fly away is because it’s held down by the image, the act of making pictures.
I didn’t mean to flirt with this Canada goose. I try to be careful around couples, they can be so sensitive, but as soon as she does that thing with her leg I know she’s showing off for me. And even though I try to fight the impulse, even though I know that it’s just wrong, I’m raising my leg up too. When her companion finally looks over in my direction she looks like she’s seen it all before. I guess they have an understanding.
There are two kinds of artists, maybe they’re attached to the two kinds of pleasure. The first artist likes to make things, they put things together, they add colour and line. The second artist likes to take things apart. When I look at the end of that crane I can’t help feeling that I want to be touched like that, with that kind of sensitivity, that delicacy, that openness. I want to be a house and have every brick lovingly removed in a striptease built for two. And please take your time, we’ve got all day.
When I tell my doctor that I prefer not remembering a thing from my former life she starts rolling up her sleeves as if to say: we’ve got work to do. She wants me to make a series of pictures that will become the building blocks of my new personality. They should be flexible enough to function in many different kinds of situations. They should allow me to survive the end of expectations or to fall in love with someone that isn’t a tree or a dog Think of them as the basement of my new house, she told me. The memories I’ll want to share on a first date. The final glimmer before all the lights go out.
My doctor told me that seeing is about taking away everything from the visual field that doesn’t hold your interest. It seems there’s always too much information, so seeing always means seeing less than what is in front of you. Or at least, it’s about making choices, sitting in the judge’s chair and deciding: you’re the star witness and you’re invisible.
I’m in a slightly overcrowded café right now with three people that assure me we’ve met many times in my old life, but what they don’t know is that sometimes I don’t see with my eyes anymore, only with the camera. I can only see what my camera sees. While they are busy covering up our time together with conversation, my eyes are taking in the whole neighbourhood. I guess I’m still worried about what my doctor told me, that only erasing makes seeing possible. Every time I look I can’t help wondering: what am I erasing now? Who am I leaving out, who doesn’t matter, who is being left behind?
I want to show you what the film crew are looking at, but I can’t get far enough away to fit them all into the picture. When I ask her about it later, my doctor says it’s the kind of lens I have. The lens is a piece of camera glass that bends the light, making a wide view or a narrow one. Apparently, with this lens I can either show how a picture is being made, or I can show what they’re making a picture about.
The city without memory is a city of screens. I used to have a face, now I have a place where you can project your happiest moments. When I bring her this shot my doctor asks: where are you in this picture, and then a memory returns to me, my first kiss.
It was such a shock discovering my fantasies on porn websites. It made me feel helpless somehow, like the most important part of me had left my body. I think it means that my fantasies had been realized and even recorded long before I got here. My private life is a crowd scene.
My doctor tells me: try to point your camera towards groups, see how they behave, look at the way their movements are part of a choreography, a dance. The way they move together tells you something about: how do we get along? How do we fill the space with each other?
After the reassurance of murder the actors offer us the miracle of resurrection. Isn’t memory just another form of resurrection? And how to escape the feeling that memory is also a kind of playacting? In order to reappear, the past needs to get dressed up in someone else’s clothes.
Taravat tells me that in Iran the buses and streetcars are segregated, men and women are kept separate, though if women want to, they can ride in the men’s car. She did it only once and every passenger stared at her like a zoo animal. She said: it was like being eaten by their eyes. What does it mean to organize a culture around this kind of eating? She assures me it happens here too, but in a quieter way, people eat pictures with their eyes, but the catch is, the more you eat, the hungrier you get.
Here is the entrance to the city’s second Chinatown, an archway that says thank you to the 17,000 workers who built the transnational railway. They did the most difficult and dangerous jobs, worked longer hours for less pay than the white comrades. But as soon as the railway was finished the Canadian government put a hundred dollar tax on each Chinese worker so they wouldn’t stay. When I see the gate today I can’t help wondering: is it a reminder or a cover up? Where is this doorway leading us?
Instead of filling the streets with marchers and banners, the quiet meditators of Falun Gong sit on the sidewalk, their eyes closed so that they can imagine a place where the state cannot find them. They have learned not to hit back when attacked, to abandon greed, deception and jealousy. For these beliefs the Chinese government has met them with arrest and torture. What accident of belonging allows me to stand in this place and make a picture without the threat of arrest? What kinds of privilege come together to create pictures like this one, and how can I make them visible, how could I put them inside the frame where they belong?
When I brought this picture in to show my doctor, she wasn’t encouraged, though professional training required her to ask: what do you see here? There were four billion passenger pigeons in North America, their flocks so thick they would blacken the sky when they flew by. But in just a couple of decades hunters wiped out every single bird, and they became extinct. It’s the story I like to tell about myself and my city, the story behind my stories. Now you see it, now you don’t. Every hour three species become extinct.
When I catch up with this dog and his car, I stop and make a picture. They remind me of my face. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know how fast the car was going when it hit that pole, but I can see the dent, the aftermath, the presenting symptom. Sometimes my face feels like the presenting symptom. I go to parties and I’m neutral, I am the Switzerland of faces, but still people walk up to me and ask: are you okay?
After the accident, it’s time to wash off all the traces, to start again clean. Behind the windshield I can see everything, in other words, this is a preparation for the computer, the self-surveillance machine we use to track every thought and movement. As the gap between rich and poor grows deeper so does the urgency to monitor the unexpected or unpredictable. My computer windshield shows me that voting for corporate power has already become the source of a new and terrifying kind of beauty.
When I look at this standard poodle overcome with ordinary happiness I can’t help wondering: where is my bone? Where did my bone go? My daydream, my body, my beautiful animal life.
I can feel the urge to jump onto the street and start running. I want to sign up and sing along, I want to join the team, the merger, the movement, but irony holds me back. When I look at all the shadowy joggers, I can’t help remembering a film in which the director runs in the very last hour of the day, as if time was running out, and then a title appears across his chest. It reads: This is a film about you. Not about its maker.
After I found this shot, I started looking for a camera that could say yes, the way we are saying yes here. Is there a camera that could make frames that would include everything, or is the whole point of the frame to cut between what can be seen and shared, and the other place, the invisible world, the world that can’t be shown.
I can’t help wondering: are the sharks posing? Are the fish striking a pose?
There are two kinds of prisons here: the temporary funhouse and the other one that never ends. Why does the one that goes on for the rest of your life feel so attractive, so necessary?
The difference between an artist and a tourist is that a tourist photographs everything they see, while an artist makes a record of the tourist photographing everything they see. The transparent walls and bright lights means that everything is on display and camera ready, before you take a picture, everything here is already a picture. The message is: the world is visible and transparent, available to the eye, and the pictures we make are part of the project of the surveillance state. Everything needs to be recorded, and everyone has to play their part.
Is it possible to be a tourist of childhood, a tourist of your own memory? I want these kids to show me how to raise my arms in wonder, I want to copy every gesture they make, but I don’t do it until I get home, where I use these pictures as a kind of blueprint of the past. A skeleton key to the lives I might have had.
I wonder if I’m starting to fall in love with my doctor. It’s sort of cliché I know, but I can feel myself getting pulled in by cliché gravity. I’ve started feeling that I’m making these pictures only so that she can see them. After the accident I could walk into a café and hear everyone’s thoughts, but when it rains I can only hear her thoughts.
Every shot lasts a minute, and sometimes a minute can last a long time. I’m hoping my doctor will say yes to me, to notice me even, but instead she keeps right on looking as if she’s the one in the waiting room. I want to ask her: What are you waiting for? But instead I put up the next picture. The movies I make for her are a way of telling her what I can’t say out loud. They’re about something that’s missing, something that can’t even be shown.
I don’t know about you but I never get enough. I see one picture, and my appetite smiles for a moment, but then I want another one right away. I’m not sure how it works, but there’s a hunger called capitalism. The more I eat, the hungrier I get. The more pictures I make, the more I need to make. I understand only too well where all the holes in my body came from, what I don’t get at all, is how come everybody else feels the same way.
And then the woman with the telephone appears. No, it’s not that one, she pauses a long time, or at least, long enough to bring back the number that’s going to change everything. And because it’s a private moment, because she is undergoing a shift that will cut her life into two parts: the one before the call, and the one after, she steps away from the frame, so that she can be by herself.
On the weekends I like to spray paint my clothes silver so I can be a reflection of every dream that passes me by. I’m the lone ranger, I’m the last man standing, I hold the silver ball of justice in my hand so you can see for yourself. Some people say I look like Elvis but it’s only because they can’t stop seeing him everywhere they go.
When I see the silvered mirror ball again it appears floating in the water, anchoring the composition. The entire frame is moving, like the bio-machine of personality, unanchored and adrift. While it is subject to the whims of forces larger than itself, most of the time it will name these tidal waves as “I feel happy” or else: “I don’t feel happy, what about a change in government?” The waves flow through me and I say yes to every one. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I’m just bobbing along, keeping my place in the music.
My doctor announces she has to take a trip and then waits for the reaction shot. When I don’t respond she says actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Can’t you say something? I confess to her for the first time that I’ve fallen in love with her and she seems pleased, though she never says so. She sits back as if she’s eaten a particularly satisfying breakfast. We might have looked at each for a minute or two before she glanced at her watch and nodded. Our session was over.
After my doctor leaves, six bookstores close in the city in as many weeks, mostly because it’s hard to compete with Amazon’s plantations. I had forgotten how to miss her until I came to this storefront.
Amazon workers pick up an order every 33 seconds and walk eleven miles per shift. Voting for Amazon means voting for a modern form of slavery. But it’s hard to resist when you can save three dollars on a book you really want.
Only blocks away from Book City another downtown store closes its doors for the last time. Reading is a way of drawing a line around the self, books are the border guards of a new territory. They remake the reader in their own image, now readers have a cover, and a dark interior life, a secret. The book invents privacy in a new way, along with the author, the unique work of art, originality, even the dream of psychology. What does it mean that these old forms are passing away, that the city can no longer support this picture of what a person is?
This is my new friend Sally, we’re in the same program, only instead of making pictures she has to describe the scene that’s in front of her with words. She can hardly get them down fast enough. She’s decided to write about all the people that will see this picture later on. I can’t help asking her, but how do you know what they’ll be like? I can tell she doesn’t see me anymore though, her eyes are already fixed on her future audience, and then she starts writing down what they look like, as fast as she can.
Her name is Kyo and she assures me that if she stopped writing she would disappear. Only she doesn’t say it like that, she says, “As soon as we learn how to talk, we are spoken by language.” “Are you writing down what we’re saying to each now?” I can’t help asking her, because she doesn’t even pause when we meet, she just keeps right on scribbling away.
“No,” she answers, “I’m writing down the words we’re about to say.”
When I met Helen in this hipster coffee shop I knew it was no coincidence, I didn’t even have to ask her who her doctor was. She told me she was writing about the invisible colour of whiteness that covers the entire culture so completely you can’t see it. I must have looked puzzled because she told me this joke. Two young fish are chatting away when an older fish drifts by. “How’s the water?” he asks, and one of the younger fish says, “Fine, just fine.” When the older fish is out of sight, the younger fish who hadn’t spoken was still pulled up into a question mark. “What is water?”
One minimum wage employee makes boxes to pack up the books they couldn’t sell. The rest of the staff are paralyzed behind the front desk and I’m sorry to say that I’m to blame. Because they work in a bookstore, they’ve never seen a camera before, I guess the world of books and the world of media are further apart than I thought. They’re on a mini-strike, no more work until the boss comes out and tells me to leave. How dare I make pictures of this dying literary culture, this semiotic ghost trail vanishing, the notion of an interior self disappearing. We’re going to erase every step. We’re going to pack away the books so that no one will ever remember that a book ever existed. From now on it’s just ice cream and movies.
When my doctor gets back from the conference I can’t help wondering if she’ll look at me like this, as a remnant from a lost culture, a barely visible sign that used to be so central to everyone’s life that no one saw it, until it was no longer readable. Can a word get lonely if no one says it out loud? Can a sentence die of shame? When a language dies, does it take with it certain ways of loving?
When my doctor finally gave me the address I made her double check it, triple check it even. Are you sure?
When I show up at the corner where I used to live it doesn’t give me the warm nostalgic glow we were both hoping for. I stand in front of the scene waiting for it all to come back to me, to feel those childhood memories rushing back in, but I feel more blocked than ever. Perhaps she’s right, that I’m simply repressing encounters that are too difficult to face, or that I’m too scared to admit. What happened here? What part did I play?
This is the face of an artist, and as the philosophers in Led Zeppelin liked to say, it makes me wonder. My doctor says that before the accident, I was also an artist, I made motion pictures like this guy here. His name is Steve. When I ask him why he makes movies Steve tells me that he doesn’t have the strength to do nothing. The way he looks at me when he says it, like he swallowed an x-ray machine. It makes me wonder.
How much testosterone do you need to make yourself a man? One injection per day, more or less. Chase lives in the place between genders, between his first life as a woman and his second as a man. Here he shows me how changes in the larger economic system are rooted in changes of gender, identity and pleasure, how the frontiers of these new bodies need to be created and managed. Science plants its flag inside the body, transforming depression into Prozac, erections into Viagra, fertility into the pill, women into men. Welcome to my body machine, my gender hack, my performance arena.
What if I performed my private actions in public? Like my gender, my sexual preferences, even my reading. My friend Kerri is in touch with people around the world who have read the same book. They understand that the body is a book that is always being read by the state, it’s an archive of culture and politics. She tells me: you can always tell a book by its cover.
Before the computer, there was a machine that allowed you to make copies of pictures, not a Xerox machine, but a camera that could re-photograph movies one frame at a time. It was like a self-interrogation device, and I guess artists were interested in it so they could relook at those smoother than smooth films, take them apart and show us the spaces between stars, or else reframe shots so we could see what was hardly noticeable at the very edge of the picture. I am the ghost in your machine. In order to resist, I’m going to use your pictures against you. Let’s call it: audio visual judo.
My doctor sent me into the studio to record some new voice-overs to my old movies. She’s convinced that I’m going to say the same words, or something like the old words, only this time they’ll sound new and fresh. I love you, don’t ever let me go, please don’t leave me. She’s certain that when I start to speak, the oldest words will reappear again, and then I can stop trying to return to the body I used to have, the person I used to be, and meet her face to face.
My doctor who it turns out isn’t my doctor likes to take me out here. She says that it’s almost time to stop making these pictures, they won’t be necessary much longer, perhaps I’ll need three or four more and then I’ll have all the new memories I’ll ever need to start my new life. We rub our synthetic parts together and mix chemistries. We make a stew out of the bacteria that survived each of the planet’s five extinctions. Moments of the past come back, like when we used to go out fishing, but only in places where there weren’t any fish. Hours would drift by, days of close attention and unexpected pleasures.
My doctor invites me over to her house, and when I ask her if that isn’t, you know, against the rules, she just smiles. It turns out that she’s not exactly a woman and not exactly a man. Can I call you they? When we get to her place, the doctor keeps arranging the two of us as if we were in a movie, and slowly I remember that I’ve been here before. I’ve sat at this table, I’ve read this newspaper, I’ve looked into that face. Everything feels familiar except my hands, though even they want to fall in love.
My doctor and I visit Hillar’s boy ballet because he says it will help me understand how men are made and not born. Every man is a construction site, built from the bricks of tribe pressures and family roles, chemical stews that are part of an ongoing performance. The more testosterone I take, the more of a man I become. It turns out that the body is the show that never ends.
My doctor and I hold hands while the man machines wrestle which feels strange because my hands aren’t my hands. My doctor says losing your memory means you only live twice. It’s deja voodoo. And then a whisper in my ear: I’m not your doctor.
How can I know myself if I can’t know you? How can I experience the weather, even the emotional weather, if you aren’t there too, watching the storm clouds roll in. This tired and broken body needs to be touched most of all. I need your hands, your torso, your cells to say yes whenever I get close enough to fail. Can you let me get close enough to fail? Can we practice falling together so that we can get back up and start over, as if we were the whole city, the whole province, learning how to walk again.
We are every rider on every bike but you have to know this first of all: nudity is not naked. We haven’t come here to show you anything, we’ve arrived so that we can turn into each other. The city square, the agora, the place where strangers can tune up each other’s language and each other’s bodies. My doctor and I are also here, no longer separate, parts of the same body, the same multitude. During the day we’re karma chameleons and at night we turn into music.
