You are the memory hole
Here is the work of art I think about most.
The work of art I probably think about most often is Alfredo Jaar's Lament of the Images.
It's incredibly simple: a large, movie-sized screen, lit brilliantly white, in a darkened room. The screen is not empty in the way a movie screen after the lights come up might be. It's completely, overwhelmingly full of bright light.
I saw Lament of the Images in 2015 at MoMA in New York, and ever since then it comes up for me every time I see a breaking news story that I think might change everything.
It comes up for me in those moments because for a long time, light was a metaphor for finding the truth. When something was brought to light, or had a light shone on it, it was established as fact. Darkness was uncertainty, and light was truth. But a world filled with screens that glow gives a different meaning to that light.
When we are surrounded by screens, light is the manifestation of distraction, not a medium of truth. Light is the way that the overwhelming amount of information in our lives reaches us.
When you hear the cliche to say that the pace of information has sped up, it just means that we have so many opportunities every day to be interrupted with something new that is important to think about. Stories can arrive through a TV left on cable news, or a news alert on your phone, or an idle scroll through your social channels, or your group chats. The incentives to interrupt your thinking to insert a new thing to think about are high.
Most of those glowing interruptions come with images attached. Every one tells part of a story, but when they come with such frequency, one after another, those stories are very hard to tell. We don't have the capacity to absorb them - to turn them into facts. Before they can be established, they are interrupted again by a new one.
With some work you can think of countless images that felt like urgent clarifications of issues which became lost amongst the flood. Aylan Kurdi face down in the sand of a Greek beach. Eric Garner being murdered via chokehold by a New York City police officer. Police officers walking beside tanks in the streets of Ferguson, looking like members of the army. A young family hiding beneath a dock to escape the heat and smoke of an Australian wildfires. Lower Manhattan in darkness after a superstorm.
And so many more that come every day, each lit up, hoping to capture your attention. What stands out for me, in retrospect about these images is their ephemerality - how much the world continued as it had before they were shared. That's what makes them lamentable.
If you tried to stack all of those pictures on top of each other at once, you would get something like a fully-lit bright blur. When I think about Lament of the Images, I think of it as not showing a single image of a white screen, but instead every image, piled on top of each other at once, until all meaning is wrung out.
The traditional approach to controlling information was censorship. Blacking out words and disappearing people out of photos can still play an important function in the context of government, particularly authoritarian ones. But now, instead of relying on the removal of images from view, institutions can drown us in them. Information control now looks more like Donald Trump's Twitter feed: item after item after item until your ability to track the untruths is swept away.
I do think there are some ways though this storm of images. Establishing and recognizing patterns is particularly important, and a lot of that work can be done through community. The fact that George Floyd echoed Eric Garner's last words during his murder - 'I can't breathe' - gave those words more resonance than either did alone. The pattern gave shape to a more durable story that lent itself to a powerful movement. I also think that people working together have established more durable stories about the treatment of workers by bosses during the pandemic, extreme weather caused by climate change, and so on.
Finding a group of people to remember together, and point out the similarities between images in the flood can provide a platform for making durable stories, and change, together
As I've told anyone who has asked, and some who didn't: I love George Orwell. 1984 is a subtler and more poetic work than you probably remember. His idea of the 'memory hole' entered common English as the metaphor for censorship that uses darkness and disappearance to exercise its power. But that was before we had so many images to lament. Now, the memory hole is not a place where the powerful disappear words and ideas - it's moved within us, under a flood of light, and it's up to us to choose how we keep things out of it.