Ron Diorio
SMS
Her body is in midtown Manhattan. She’s engaged in a conversation with somebody…where? Prague? Milwaukee? Mogadishu? Maybe behind the door of the building against which she squats. A question that’s more intriguing than the location of the person to whom she’s talking is this: where is the conversation taking place?
It began, really, with the telegraph. A telegraph operator in Chicago could, with a series of dots and dashes, have a conversation with an operator a thousand miles away in Denver. But that conversation wasn’t taking place in Chicago or in Denver; it was taking place in the same location as this young woman’s conversation. It was taking place in a transient, abstract ‘space’ that has no physical existence. It’s taking place in a shared electronic hallucination.
This ‘space’ has become so common, so ubiquitous, that we no longer even consider the fact that it doesn’t exist in any form other than the conversation itself. That conversation may be between people or between machines, it may consist of digitally encoded and decoded sound waves, or a series of dots and dashes, or a microsecond spurt of 0s and 1s. It’s a conversation that has gone on almost without pause for the last century and a half. And you, wherever you are, as you look at this digitally transmitted image…you too are part of the same ongoing conversation.
Can you hear me now?
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
