THE DEATH OF THE NON-TOURIST GAZE?/OLD MAN IN A HAT DAY

There came a time in my thinking about SF0 when I thought to myself (and surely this must happen to plenty of people): is self-referentiality a trait I want my SF0 character to have?

Like, when I go about writing a praxis, do I want to present my actions as pure and untouched by the rest of my life? Does this in fact reinforce the alienated labor I have to undergo everyday by pretending to be its opposite?

While celebrating Old Man in a Hat Day with some non-player friends, I noticed the application of what must be a normal observation by now: the act of shared picture taking almost supersedes the event itself.

That is to say, while the event existed (insofar as my friends and I were physically nearby) we hadn't done anything of note until we had taken the pictures and then put them on the internet. All that's left of the world around me is what I have on my camera's flash drive. And man, did we have plenty of pictures.

The result of this constant photography is a series of photographs where me and the other group photographer have overlapped. So this praxis evolved out of everyday interaction, what we've come to call real life. In the manufacturing of our lives we gave ourselves away.

Does this fact of perpetual identity creation mean that we, say, didn't have any fun together? I don't think so. I had fun. We do what we can from the context we have. And I don't have any reference points that I can call real from anywhere in my memory. Besides, if we all collectively imagine ourselves to be living, is it real?

From these questions I could develop a critique of praxis itself but that's for another day.

The pictures that follow are a documentation of documented documents, with the occasional strict documentation of documents for reference.