Memory. How we amass and compile what equates to an archival collection of footage which constitutes an identity, a life … in private screening rooms, we view ourselves, scenes, episodes, and settle ourselves into what comprises identity. Yet there is a persistent illusion at play, a dogged insistence that what we’re seeing reflected back to ourselves is solid and dependable as a narrative, is fixed. This is not true.

   Consider: You have access to the content, to the archives. Images and stories cinematically reflecting parts of your life back to you no longer appear on the screen. The scenes are void of content. You sit and stare and grow terribly anxious waiting for something to appear which will serve as orientation. It doesn’t come. Or it comes irregularly, sporadically. Or the pictures cut out intermittently, offering a fragmented viewing experience. Or the screens do fill up with images, but none of them are recognizable: glyphs coded through cataracts.

   This is when identity is threatened, when red alert mode sets in—You are not who you think you are. Who you thought you were. No compass, no orientation. People, in real life, who are meant to serve and fulfill as points of orientation, as figures that can stabilize your identity, no longer enact those roles. They are just people. Everything had been connected by the tenuous threads of story, by fragile cinema. If those are gone, you are rudderless and adrift in your own life. And can you even call it your own life anymore? Isn’t it just life, life itself as it courses through you, a conduit, a conductor, an avatar void of signature?

   Who are we when the stories and cinema disappear, fade, when they are no longer accessible? Who were we to begin with? Existential dress-up comes to a close. Claims are severed. Relations become background  noise, a white din or remote humming. In our lives, we are dreamwalkers punctuated by reveries and line-breaks.