Debris 0006 is from the Misremember Me Correctly series.
This project emerged from accident and entropy. Entropy, the eternal law of nature, is suspended in the photograph, freezing time and interrupting decay. But the imperfect medium of the digital image is always at risk of degrading, introducing glitches and errors, as though interrogating the perfection we have tried to preserve.
On a decade-old MacBook Pro, I had stored videos of myself that I recorded to test lighting conditions, composition, and poses before taking my self-portraits. I would open each video and move the progress bar frame by frame, looking for the perfect shot. Recently, while going through my archives, I rewatched these videos on my old, failing laptop and found that glitches kept appearing, making me look deformed—melting my face, distorting my body, adding extra arms and nipples and eyes, as though mocking me.
I decided to capture some of these degraded and distorted images. I couldn't help reflecting on the fact that while I was looking for perfection in those videos, the way I wanted to present myself to the world, the way I wanted to be remembered, the very medium I had chosen was undermining my desire. Through technology, itself subject to decay, I felt that entropy was taking its revenge on me, trying to kill my image, ruining the visual depiction I had of myself. The ghostly past selves I had stored up and sent into the world were not as I remembered them, not as I wished them to be.
In the end, perhaps the most that I can hope for is to be misremembered.
