Response to Ben Fogarty's "Watching an Image Forget Itself"

I just stopped what I was doing, pulled in by this post from

Ben Fogarty presenting his transforming images that speak to the experience of memory. I am moved to speak back.

As a writer, I am also interested in how memory changes. My understanding of the biology behind it is certainly facile, but goes like this:

• A memory is neurons chained together.

• When we recall that memory it destroys the memory and then recreates it.

This idea, that you can’t go back to the original memory as it is destroyed feels written into Ben’s work here.

So much of the systems in our bodies are wiser than our rationality, so I have settled in to consider the worth of it. I think the endless destruction of pixel-perfect memory could be how we put our past in the context of our present. Each destruction and re-creation passes through today’s consciousness.

If the song SHOULD have been about Sally but it was about Wendy, you get a chance to change that. The past is gone anyway, my body owes no allegiance to accuracy to it.

Our commercial and political domains do not like this technique of memory, and it seems that many of us yearn often for perfect memory, like the camera in our pockets and the databases that hold all the iterations of our actions, our statements, our movements.

Watching Ben’s works, I want to let that go and trust the future self that reforms reality for me again.