free-write on earliest memories with technology. by meghan.

my dad used to film everything- every birthday, every holiday, everything that seemed to be worth filming. and i was a ham! I quickly grew out of my haminess as shyness set in, but around 4 and 5 years old- HAM! the videocamera and subsequent tapes that came out of it are staples in my memory of my childhood. my memory from a specific temporal moment as a child gets mixed up with a newly formed memory of watching myself years later. were those memories just triggered or re-created entirely? i couldn't even have had that memory as a kid because my point of view was totally different. my dad would even sometimes hook up the camera to the television so that we could record what we were doing and be projected onto the tv at the same time!

as an adult, i interact with videocameras much less, interestingly, despite their proliferation and micro-sizing.

but, that being my experience, i am used to the idea of capturing an image and that image then being played back for remembering/ entertainment/ whatever. do i know how that has affected my sense of my won body? not, not entirely. but it has to have had an effect. in that sense- i am a cyborg. i, as myself, have been made through my experiences, and in this example, it's my earliest memories of interacting with what i saw to be a technology.