The Eternal Playback
Pain, like time, is overwhelmingly present in the now, but fades-blessedly- into nothingness. What if pain did not vanish and we could capture it for eternal playback? Four-dimensional storage would be a diabolical and infernal place of Dasein! Irreversibility is both wonderful and hideous.
The Marvelous Clouds
John Durham Peters
Throughout Chapter 6 of The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters describes media in a way that he relates to the human way of seeing, through our own experiences and feelings. He also makes many references towards the roles of space and time as elements within its relationship with media, which he refers to as "The Interconvertibility of Space and Time." He is fascinated with this concept of media unleashing the opportunity to save and reproduce a moment in time, along with the costs that come with that ability. Within this specific passage, he makes the comparison between pain and its relationship with time, to this ability to remain forever thanks to the power that media has granted us. He is commenting on both the beauties and dangers of this power of freezing time, and wonders what will come of it.
Within the same section of this chapter, he inserts a diagram from Winkler that synthesizes the relationship between time and space in transmission and storage from media:
| Overcomes | Consumes | |
|---|---|---|
| Transmission | Space | Time |
| Storage | Time | Space |
This chart explains how transmission allows real-time experiences that overcome physical space but last for just a moment, while storage preserves memories, overcoming the passage of time but potentially trapping us in an endless cycle of past experiences. It allows us to have an understanding of the way we process pain and memory. While transmission connects the moment, the desire to store experiences permanently can lead to a burden that obscures the natural flow of time and healing. The connection between momentary pain and the weight of eternal memory conceptualizes the tension between the joy of living and the potential danger of suffering forever.
John Durham Peters is seemingly worried about the nature of being able to freeze time because of his choice to relate this power to something as impactful as pain as an example. While I agree with his concern, I also believe that this aspect of media can and has been used in ways that capture pain in a way that is inspiring and beautiful. Capturing and prolonging something that induces pain can also be a way to connect with others and understand shared experiences. This thought brought me back to Documentary Research, a course I took a couple of years ago. In this course, we learned about how documentaries are the closest thing we have to capturing true reality. This form of media is the perfect example of capturing pain and reproducing it so that it may live forever. Documentaries have the ability to reproduce pain in a way that is influenced by the documentarian themselves. Their influence, otherwise known as location, contributes to the way we view the pain that is reproduced through their own intentions of the audience’s vision. In this way, I believe that the concept of capturing the eternal playback of pain can be used in a way that enriches society, rather than it being a danger. John Durham Peters, I believe, would also see this to be true, however he would think of it more in terms of physical elements of pain which can be skewed to seem like more of a danger.