Images of NYC create a series of forever looping GIFs — their flickering construction assign a visual value to the process of thinking—to a moving object designed and built from multiple images in an effort to generate a contemplative sensation.
In parallel with the omnipresent cacophony of New York City, horns, construction, trains, and traffic—visual noise also assaults the senses. Each image of visual noise is a factual piece of the city representing a fragment of truth. Hannah Arendt argues in her essay Truth and Politics that “truth is neither given to nor disclosed to but produced by the human mind.” Each photograph portraying a close-up of New York City signage and storefront text within each GIF functions as a fragment of Arendt’s factual truth. A new reality is then produced with the images through a process of layering the multiple factual truth fragments into another object, another form of Arendt’s truth, one she describes as rational truth.
The different thought fragments are seamed together to create a moving phenomenon that feels like the activity of thinking, thoughts forever pulsing. The looping nature of the GIFs’ animation reflects the moving, looping nature of the mind exploring Arendt’s truth, lies, truth, lies. Each image overlaying the next image is relational to the next image and so on. Through movement, each GIF visually alters the factual truth in each single photographic fragment.
The movement also generates an active object of contemplation in the form of the GIF. By its nature of constant shape shifting and constant being, the digital file actually becomes in Hannah Arendt’s words—the “populated solitude” of a new reality. The GIF is a circle, a dot, a period in an ellipsis, a moving visual space built from factual truths where a viewer can endlessly be seduced into thinking their own rational truths.
NYC Street Series #02: Digital GIFs: 2.4 mb, 21 collected images, New York City signage and storefront text, 2019.
Viewing_02: Digital GIF: 2.6 mb, 5 images, New York City, MET, MOMA, 2019.
WORKS CITED:
Arendt, Hannah. "Truth in Politics." The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by Peter Baehr, Penguin Classics, 2003, pp. 545-575.
---. "The Public and the Private Realm." The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by Peter Baehr, Penguin Classics, 2003, pp. 182-230.