Photobombing (Campany Instructions 4)

When someone searches something on the internet, sometimes they get some random results that don't have anything to do with each other. That is part of what I want to call the montage-ablity of the internet. The internet automatically puts things together that we otherwise might not have thought to; it allows us to open up new roads for interesting projects. This is where such things as the Google poetry comes from.

Durand talks about a character who "suffers from a powerful mimetic compulsion that makes him crop up willy-nilly in all kinds of periods and situations, in all parts of the globe, like some ... parasite.... it is surely the consequence of never having read Moby Dick ... Not to have read this novel ... is ... to be condemned to floating around without the salutary ballast of a masterpiece ... is to run the risk of not being stabilized by the cohesive power of myth" (154).

I think it's interesting to think about the myth-making process that's involved with something like the internet, a place where objects that are comparable to American classics that are barely read by anyone might be floating. For instance, talk to anyone about Xanga and they might remember it, they might Google it and find it around, but I think a place like Xanga made up the building block of the blog community. To me, Xanga was the predecessor to popular blogging sites like, well, like this one.

Durand also talks about the movie Film Stills which recorded the filmmaker's life. I think this is important with regards to the quote about Moby Dick because it makes one think about the coorelation between having myth as some kind of a masthead that keeps one's life afloat but also anchored. What happens when one documents their lives and connect them to the lives of others: A genomic vs and individual reality (a la Stiegler).

Instruction: Make a video montage that combines four things: photos of your day, photos of your face at least once every day for a month, photos of random image searches of internet mythology or history or canon (perhaps Google maps), and photos of you imposed on these random images (you would essentially be photobombing these images virtually). These images, when placed together in your mini-film, should be randomized. What can you tell about your place in internet mythology? Are you like the character who hadn't read Moby Dick? If so, then so what?